Finished redefinment of the map

Finally got the tedious work done, next up moveable objects and forcefields and collision.
Here is a screen shot of how the outside looks textured:

The Level

I basically redesigned my entire map file again, the decision I made to go to 2 vertexes per plane didn't work out sadly. Would have saved a lot of load work, so I am back to my original design. Only this time I don't have to put normals or texture coordinates in the map they will be generated through my face class. I wrote a wrapper for it so that is rotates and translates the map in to place, might still want to add this functionality to face later on, but for now keep it where it is.

Here are some screen shots:
First corridor:

Second corridor:

Textures work continued

I redesigned the how the textures work, in the previous design I just loaded them straight from file to a texture in system. I added a texturemanager that checks if the texture hasn't been already loaded, if it has it doesn't load the file again. The program still has to ask the texturemanager if the file already exists otherwise it will just be loaded. Hmmz that's actually a good point to improve on if i have time later on. Now i need to fix my map file or face creater again because the map isn't loaded correctly. And I think I have a nasty little bug in it, because if CPU usage goes to 45 to 50% on a dual core system it crashes. I mean control will no longer respond although if you hit the cross the program exits without a failure.

Some screen shots follow below. The screen shots include fullscreen textured and wireframe and the windowed versions. The yellow polygons seen in the screen shot is the way the the map should look.

Fridays house party

So i went to my first house party around here, and they are different from back home. Here you have to bring your own beer instead of paying 5 Euro's to get in and drink as much as you can.
The houses here are small so almost all of the visitors were standing outside and messing about. A friend of mine climbed the rain pipe, he is always looking for things to climb. Here are some crazy pictures of the party and some of the T-shirt in a brick I forgot to post em previously.
I seem to be unable to post pictures today something is wrong with the software so I'll post them as soon as I can.
Luke:
Manuele:

Textures Work

It's coming along nicely yesterday i finished my Bounding Boxes so we can start to implement a collision detection algorithm in a few days.
Today I got textures working, it took me a whole day where I was expecting it would only take 30 minutes maximum. OpenGL is where things get really different from DirectX which I am used to0. I like the D3DX function for loading a texture more, at least they build the mipmaps for you. Here if i forget a call to gluBuild2DMipMaps things wont even show a texture.
Here is a screen shot of the state my project is in now.
The next thing to do is let my map file include which textures where to use. Step after that will be add Normals to the map file so the Fixed Function lights will work. So much work to do and so little time to do it in.

The map

Finally got the program to load my map file. It now works as I had expected it to work. Also finished my INI file reader so i can read settings form a file into my game. This also kinda got me back on schedule. with only a week or 7 left it's gonna be a lot of work to go through.

First View of my Level

Yesterday I made the map file for my space simulation game. The object of the game is to fly through some corridors and pass some barriers. After you have done this you will come in a Core room where you need to blow up the reactor.

The map file is read in but there are still some render errors in it that I need to fix. For now I just hard coded the planes of the level. I gave all corridors a different color so you can see how it is laid out. I know one corridor isn't in the correct space and am gonna correct this later one tonight.

Here are the first screens shots of the level.

T-shirt as a brick

Just went to a Microsoft lecture and got a free t-shirt. The T-shirt is packed as a cube that's 5cm x 5cm x 5cm.

In the instruction, which is a piece of paper that's packed with it, they tell you to just add water to a brick and it will give you a T-shirt. They could have made the drawing a bit clearer so that you immediately know it's unpack this cube and add water it's a funny picture though will add one later.

The lecture the gave was kinda boring it was more a way to sell the company to students. I was expecting a bit more of an in depth talk.

St. Patrick's day

I think I made some plans yesterday to be in Ireland on St. Patrick's Day.

Dave (an Irish course mate) invited some of us to come over to Ireland on St. Patrick's Day to get hammered for a week.

Camera

The camera is finally working. It now pitches up and down as specified and rolls and even yaws the correct way.
The only problem I know still need to fix is the movement of the camera. As it now only moves along this axis (0,0,z). It needs to move in the direction we are looking at.

It's good I am writing this blog cause it gives me time to think about my problems and come up with a solution while writing.

For the movement I am going to need a direction vector thats giving me the direction I am traveling in. If we transform this direction vector to the way we rolled, yawed or pitched we are moving in the right direction.

Here is a screen shot of how the scene looks today.

Edit it's been a few days since I posted this and my camera is still not working. If I needed to do this in DirectX it would have worked in an hour. I hate OpenGL for not having a notion like a camera.

Step into

The step into functionality in VS 2005 seems to be not working for me this is really driving me crazy because this halts all my development on my project.

There seems to be no way to resolve this problem, well lets hope someone on the msdn formus knows how to fix this. Sorry for writing this boring post but i needed to vent my frustration.

It's drawing and the game pad works

Finally got something to show for all the work I have been doing the past couple of weeks. I got my program to draw stuff to the screen yesterday. These are the triangles you see in the screen shots.

And today I just got the game pad to work with my application. It's really funny to do this now i am finally getting somewhere with my coursework. Now if the network administrators would give me the repository I am waiting for, I'd be totally happy.

The image to the right is the first screen shot i took, the image below shows where i moved the rectangle to.

The color change is due to a button that's being pressed.

Bursary continued

I accepted the bursary, so I'll be here until christmas '08. The nice thing about this is it will give me a place to work at. I hope it's at some high end game studio so I can get some real experience in how these guys go about there stuff.

Bursary

I have just been offered a bursary for my studies. If I accept it the games companies in this area are gonna give me £3000. The only catch about it is that my dissertation needs to be done at one of those companies. And it will be longer I need to stay in Hull until next Christmas for this. Then again this isn't even that big of a catch because they are gonna pay me during my dissertation stage.

I have to let my supervisor know what I'll do about before Monday but it think I am going to do this. It solves a lot of cash flow problems that might arise this year.

Second and third lecture and first lab

Well i had to lectures yesterday one was in C++ programming and Desgin, the other was in Real Time Computer Graphics.
In the first lecture the prof basicly introduced use to all the basic elements of C++. Wasn't that hard but he warned it was gonna be in a few weeks. He also asked who felt like a good programmer at the start of the lecture. Most of us put there hands up, at the end of the lecture he asked the same question and almost none of us put there hands up. This had more to do with respect for the teacher and feeling we couldn't match his knowledge, than beeing humiliated.
The second lecture was about Graphics, this was actually a pretty cool lecture because he showed us a lot of game trailers. He also told us what the project was going to be for these two courses.

We have to write a spaceflight simulator that's going to destroy a spacestation.

The tutorials we get are hard but good because we are getting up to speed really fast so we can start our projects. The 5 C++ tutorial was a bitshift one which is not that easy to understand.
The OpenGL ones are a bit nicer and go a bit slower.

First Lecture

Just had my first lecture about game development and architecture.
Basicly it was just a layout of how our course is going to be and what we can expect of it. During the lecture the teacher showed us some of the projects people did in the previous years.
They actually look really professional, so I'm wondering what my skill set will be at the end of this course. I hope I can managed it all because I think it's gonna be really demanding of me.

Wel tomorrow is the next lecture it will be about C++, lets see how good I really am at it.