Final Week

The last week has been aboluely ridiculous for this project. Many technical difficulties arose, and many hour of sleep were lost.

Since last Friday, Michael, Ryder, Amir and myself have been working practically nonstop on the game, frantically attempting to meet the deadline of Thursday 3pm - this afternoon.

Michael has spent the time touching up Amir's model for use in the game, since Tran absolutely failed to get us a remotely usable mech in time for the game. In addition, he has also been designing (and hand scripting) the level, and coming up with some extra environmental assets.

Ryder has been working on the particles. At this point, the particle system crashes the game, which I a bug we think we will have sorted before submission time. He is working very hard as I write this trying to make the Particle Universe plugin work properly with our engine.

Amir ha been working endlessly on many, many systems within the game. He had to rewrite the vehicle system YET AGAIN due to Tran's failure to get us what we needed, and in addition been writing building systems, lighting ystems, and a scripting engine. The man is a machine :)

I have been making the physics work. Collisions, sticking to the ground, and bullet collisions. The Havok engine ended up not working correctly with our engine, due to difficulties with the collision listeners, so I have written a basic form of collision detection utilising OGRE's native ray casting system. At this stage, it someetimes freezes, and crashes, but I am confident that it will be ready for presentation.

Major difficulties have come from elsewhere however. Rob spent a single night with us, got very little done, and went home. He has failed to deliver us his level editor in time (which forces us to hand script it), and as a result leaves is only contribution to the game itself the sound system - and that didn't even work until I fixed it. (Note, "his" AI system was actually written by me - he couldn't get that working either).

Tran has failed to deliver us anything usable. He contacted me last night telling me the buildings were nearly finished. That is the day before submision, for a major project! By then we had all the buildings we were going to use. Even if he delivers us the best assets in the world today, we cannot use them. In addition to this we still cannot use his mech (which throws out other people's work too), so the total amount of work we have gotten from his that we can actually use i absolutely zero.

Brenden has been very sick, and he had delivered us all the assets we asked for in time. Quite well done. However, these asets were weapons for the main character mech. We cannot use the mech since Tran failed to deliver it to us in a useable state. As a result, we cannot use Brenden's weaponry in the game, because there are no characters with hands capable of holding a SMG, or a pistol, or a rocket launcher. This is not Brenden's fault, a he actually completed his task on time, and responded quite quickly to feedback and criticism, and updated his work as required.

Rakitha finished his cutcene weeks ago, and was done with the project at that time. However, we cannot use it, for conistency's sake, since we have lost our main character!

The main character we are using at the moment was modelled by Amir, animated and textured by Michael, and coded for by Amir.

At this point, I have just been informed that my collision detection broke again, so I', off to fix that. Hopefully, the game will work in time for submission.

~Natoli