Matrix/Quaternion research

Since there's a possibility that our game doesn't make it through the judging, I didn't think that I should do any work specifically on the Space Fighter game. Instead, I did some research on using Matrices to represent 3D geometric transformations such as translation and rotation. In developing our prototype, this is the one area that caused me the most trouble (because Reimer's tutorials use Quaternions for rotations), so I wanted to understand the concepts and principles behind it a little better.

Explosions and tweaks

I attached explosions to the capital ship so that during the demo when we blew up the ship there was some visual indication of it. I also tweaked the controls and the movement speed a little to make it easier to blow up the ship for the demo. The bounding sphere was too large around the capital ship so I shrunk it down so you could get close enough to hit the ship without running into it.

Pod and updated models

I imported the pod model and got it to rotate around the ship no matter what direction the ship goes. I also got it to launch the pod when you press 'X'. I imported the latest ship model with it's texture map and turned the ship to face the right direction.

The enemy ships were moving based on a predefined flight path, but it was tricky to get them to face the right direction so I changed them to simply fly around randomly. I added a control scheme to better handle joystick input. I added the ability to switch between that control scheme and the control scheme for an XBox controller by pressing the 'Y' button.

Importing custom models and textures

I added particle effects capability to the prototype, but they need still need more work. I also added acceleration and braking. I set it up to use .fbx models instead of .x models since any models we make will have the .fbx extension, and imported a test ship that Charlie made. I created a test cube texture with the direct x texture tool and imported that into the game for the skybox.

Particle effects

My assignment is to get some particle effects into the game by next Tuesday. Yesterday, I started reading up on how to do both 3D and 2D particle effects. I'll be experimenting over the weekend to see which one will be best. I'll put in effects for explosions and engine thrust and possible "space dust" - we'll see.

Building the prototype

Over the weekend, I worked on the prototype. I added collision detection, randomly generated targets, and the ability to shoot those targets. I also attached the skybox to the ship and disabled the depth buffer for the skybox so that it looked to be infinitely far away.

After Felix added XBox controller handling, I tweaked the controls to add a few more maneuvers by using the right joystick as well.

Getting Started

We talked in class about the kinds of things we would like to implement for the space fighter game. Weapons, physics mechanics, ship customization, ship/enemy varieties, campaign etc.

We decided that for the prototype we want to get a fairly decent model of a ship into a basic 3d flight physics engine. For a video, we'll have it chase after another ship as they dodge other objects (asteroids, space debris, etc.) For game play, we'll probably just have the player control the ship and maybe try to fly it around obstacles and shoot. We won't have time to develop the AI, so we won't bother putting an enemy ship in for the game play.

The programmers are going to read through some XNA 3D engine tutorials online and start to implement it for the game. We may need to set up a repository, although that may not be necessary this early on and could probably wait until we get assigned into full groups.