The end is near!

We're about to start on the next and final sprint for the semester. We have 10 days to get our game feature complete, and then next semester we'll clean it up and polish it. We had to cut a few features in order to meet the deadline, but I think it's for the best. We decided to make the game more Arcade like than mission oriented, and I think it's going to really benefit from lightening it up.

Since Tuesday, I've been working on getting the radar to work correctly with no success. I even talked with my linear algebra professor to see if he had any ideas. He told me that I was on the right track, but since he didn't know how the game engine worked, he couldn't tell me how to solve a game engine specific problem.

I can project a point from 3D to a 2D plane just fine, but when the ship turns, the world orientation changes too. For example, if an enemy ship starts off in the -X direction from the player ship, turning the player ship toward it puts it in the -Z direction for the player ship, but in the world coordinates, its still in the -X direction. When the 3D coordinates are transferred to 2D, it still shows up to the left of the player ship on the radar (-X). If I try to transform the coordinates of the enemy ship by the player ship's rotation, this works until the player ship rotates in 2 or 3 directions.

For now, I'm just going to have to leave it as it is and try to figure it out after we get some AI and other important elements of the game working. I saw a radar for another game that works a little differently, and that may be the way to go if we can't get this one working.