Thursday 13 December 2007

It's done

Finally i am about to hand in my coursework and have vacation. I really need a vacation at the moment, i have never in my life worked so hard.
Last two days were spend coding and cleaning up my code. I am really glad it's is done tomorrow or the day after I will put up the executables and resource files so you all can play it. It will be about 50Megs.

Thursday 6 December 2007

Controller

Since I have my laptop I had to walk around my game with the keyboard. This is not easy when your used to using a game pad for this for 2 months, so I went out and bought a game pad today. I ended up buying an xbox 360 pad for windows, chose this because I kinda like the xbox controller anyway. The only thing is that the xbox controllers need a massive dead zone, and you can't calibrate it out with the windows controller options. So I had to code this out, although the main code is the same as a normal controller the buttons and axis on a xbox controller are different, so that required a new class. Only I made some stupid mistakes like returning the value for moving left or right on the left thumb stick instead of the up down value. That cost me two hours of work to figure out. Well I finally have it working.
It beats the shit out of moving around with the keyboard it's a lot easier and smother you will probably notice that in the next movie I put up. If i got time to make another movie because the deadline to hand it in is Friday next week, and i still have a lot to do.

Wednesday 5 December 2007

Mini map screen dumps

As promised here are the screen dumps for the mini map.

And here is the you tube movie. You can get the file here http://paul.walterheck.com/

Tuesday 4 December 2007

Mini map

Today the plan was to make a working mini map, and so it does here is a screen dump of it.(will be up tomorrow dial-up doesn't allow me to upload images.)
My first notion was to just redraw the whole map in wire frame and draw it into a new view port. This didn't work of course because I tessellate my planes in the map quite heavily. It look really bad.
Second try was to redraw only the outline of each face, this is the good approach only I tried it in the wrong class. This effectively took me back to the problems I had when I first drew the map. Then I remembered that I had already transformed all the vertices in the map, so I just had to take the first and the last vertex of a tessellated face.
The first and again wring approach in this version was that i copied the whole array over to the class were i needed it. This dramatically dropped my frame rate, which was around 5-7 fps on my new laptop. As you can imagine it was copying a lot of unnecessary data, but at least the mini map was drawn.
The final approach was to just copy the first and last element of the array and this speeded the rendering back up to acceptable frame rates.
I'll put the screen dumps of it up tomorrow it's now bedtime here so I say goodnight to you all.

Monday 3 December 2007

Laptop

Finally my new Asus G1S has arrived today, so I did absolutely no work on my project today. I spend the day installing the new laptop so i could work on my project on that. I am now installing Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite, I knew there were some problems with the compatibility with vista. What I didn't expect was that these would start in the install. Some times it can't find a cab file on the iso file while I know it's there. For now the only option seems to mount another cd image and that just failed as well. Apparently one of the cab files was corrupted, well lets see if the the pro version will install. I'll get back to this tomorrow.

Saturday 1 December 2007

Ice hockey

A frend of mine convinced me to go ice hockey tonight. Man that sport is though, it's good but though.I have never skated on ice that was just prepared by a machine, thats slick stuff. I can skate but on this ice i really needed to find my balance again. Might also had to do with the fact that you are wearing full body armor. I mean you are really suited up, and try to get a jersey over your head when wearing it is no fun.
Although i had already skated there last Saturday for fun. Bad ice that day to much marks in it, couldn't even attempt a hockey stop. Today hockey stop was easy, although trying it with a stick in my hand was a new thing to do.
Tried something new todat too goping in a circle backwards and trying to speed up. Ow yeah and it's murder for your back.

On the laptop fron it still hasn't arrived god**** it, think i'll be calling the company monday or tuesday. So they can inform me where the thing is stuck at, it's really agravating me cuz they said it would be here in 2-3 working days on wednesday.