PlayGUI Beta

Well almost done with PlayGUI; ill properly texture it etc; and make the additional buttons etc that will accompany it. I'm damn tired right now, so that can wait. Have to unwrap Ares and texture him too! :O

A snapshot of the GUI with some random spell icons and XP or whatever goes in that bottom bar filled.

Formations!

I've continued to work on AI over the holidays. I've managed to get formations working, there's currently only 1 (Double Line Formation) but should be easy to add more. The screen shot looks a bit whack because for some mystical reason setMoveDestination does not work in AFX and I gave up looking for a solution so I just used setTransform to comfirm that it did infact work. To be completely honest I haven't done as much work as I should of and I should really get my ass into gear. AMIRITE.

Will forced post

worked on scythe demon texturing
rough rig of boss monster
tail animation for the scythe demon
started work on kali

Progress

I've been messing about trying to get the dividing wall set up.
Initially I wanted to set up a scene in Max using trees & foliage we would be using in game and then render it out as image that would be the texture of the actual divider plane object. I even found a model of some realistic grass that I wanted to use as ground coverage, unfortunately the grass model had quite a lot of polys and I needed 144 copies of the model to cover the desired area. This ended up creating a scene with ~750,000 polys, that max couldn't render (I got a too many faces error).
I decided to abandon the idea of putting the grass in the scene, in favour of rendering an image of the grass and placing the image on planes in the scene. Unfortunately I couldn't get the grass to render an image that would be tileable.
Abandoning the grass altogether I decided to just use some tileable textures I had. After numerous attempts to get a decent render I fincally gave up and ended up just making a flat tileable image.

Besides the divider I've done a little work on some technical documentation on exporting character models for TGEA from Max.


Additionally I've tested the animations for Ares & the Scythe Demon in-game, which was suprisingly frustrating due to a typo that stopped most of the animations from working the first time I tried them.

As for whatever else I was supposed to be working on..... I haven't done anything and I should probably check the Project Tracker on the wiki to find out what I should be doing (which itself badly needs updating).


On another nore you may have noticed already but Tim has finished the logo for the game (see the top of the page). I've added it to the UI and documentation, though I may add it to some additional UI screens in order to make better use of it.

Ares, God of War

After Reviewing Ares, I don't care if anyone says im a perfectionist. I mean nothing I ever make is perfect anyway >:(
But yeah, I don't like the model so I'm reworking, off my own drawings etc.
May take a few days. I'll try to keep it under 3500 tris. Don't know how though ><
Almost everything is done with texturing, in low poly models; but even the mesh seems to be hard to cut down :S

peace :)

-- followup progress
He's got the horsehair tail, kilt, gauntlets and boots; quite a lot of mesh :/ and I'm still going to add a few other things. It's still <2000 polys atm, but I kind of want it to stay here.

Will Update

Well I've spent some time working on the kali model.

Animation Progress

I've gone through the motion capture data and most of it's pretty good. A few retakes will be necessary though and all of it needs tweaking. The sheer amount of time required to get the animations working in game is quite daunting and as such I think we should drop a few characters. Specifically I think we should drop Kali & Ra from the player characters, and the ghoul & lich from the monsters. This would mean we only have to capture data for Loki & the boss monster, do retakes for Ares & the scythe monster, and use Ares data for the skeleton monster. Obviously if we have time we would do the rest of the characters and if not we can place the static models in the gui as placeholders.
Of course ultimately we are programmers and it would be best if we could spend the majority of next term working the actual gameplay.

Play GUI Prototype

Just some user interface for players I'm working on. Fail half-demon thing there i need to redo, but ill just make an entirely new monster... stick the top of it there and it'll be all okay... wish i could just draw it all by hand and then shade it... it'd look better... i did draw this out prior to making it.

I may need some changes to allow for animation in User Interface; I would like to animate the liquid (life and energy or w/e). I believe there is a change we can have implemented; how difficult it would be I'm not sure of, 1.8 is the version with all the changes to GFX so I doubt it'd be that much trouble. I believe Will put it into 1.8.1 anyhow.

I'll be working on models again, as usual; and id like to implement this directly, once it is done.

:) Nick

Holiday time: some crazy Italian flash games

The McDonald's one:

http://www.mcvideogame.com/

The social ones:

http://www.molleindustria.org/en/tuboflex
http://www.molleindustria.org/en/tamatipico

... have fun!!! ;-)

I'm alive

Hey everybody, Matt here. I've been extremely sick the past week and I haven't really been well enough to come in. As for project, I've just been finishing off the AI and looking at adding in some engine changes so that Jerry has something to do for his C++ assignment. The engine change will allow us to have blood on weapons.

Okay back to bed.

Tim - Late Post 6/4

Performed my duties as a blog moderator and checked up on which people have posted their new blogs and if not when they will.

Tim - Late Post 30/3

Yet again performed my duties as a blog moderator and checked up on which people have posted their new blogs and if not when they will.

Tim - Late Post 23/3

Again I performed my duties as a blog moderator and checked up on which people have posted their new blogs and if not when they will.

Tim - Late Post 16/3

Performed my duties as a blog moderator and checked up on which people have posted their new blogs and if not when they will.

Win2008... sh***t...

I kind of knew it... I installed a Win2003 cluster using iSCSI connected to an OpenSource NAS target and everything worked really cool... But I kind of knew it... Windows 2008 iSCSI interface requires more iSCSI commands which are not implemented yet on the iSCSI target I was using (which is the best one if you are looking for something free... of course you can get better if you pay lots of $$).

But the funny thing is you can actually connect the Win 2008 using the MS iSCSI Initiator and you get no errors at all:


and I can assure you all... both the cluster nodes could connect to the remote partition!
But when you start your cluster... the tragedy happens... Windows could not start the device (the one which was working so sweet using Windows 2003):


So... no shared device no cluster... I knew it because I did read a lot of posts about it... I would not really want to build the cluster using same sort of "fake" technology like the ones which are provided with the virtual software... that would be too easy! But... I already have plan "B" ready to start... something really AWESOME is going to happen on my cluster! I promise!

For The Horde!!!

Ermm....since we have to post blogs and all....

well the week before last...i was sick

last week the same again.....

and now this week....

well we werent meant to be here app...

early hols and all.

so adios...

Sunrise

Well after much hardship we finally have a sun for Ra. The animation is a bit jerky, the glow/emissive effect looks a bit off on the flames and the billboard doesn't actually work quite as well as we had hoped but it's good enough for testing.
Making this object has taught me a number of important things. Firstly I've learnt a good deal about graphics manipulation in Photoshop and Gimp. I've also remembered a lot about using Flash. I also learnt how to have animated textures in Torque.

Finally I learnt that Billboards and I shall forever be mortal enemies. I had to steal Alan's Billboard after my best effort ended up looking like this:

30/03/2008

For this week I tried assisting Fred and Jason in physically setting up the network for the cluster servers. A few problems were faced primarily the primary server was running as an virtual image, therefore anytime we restarted the client (the real machine) the virtual image had to restart. It appears that our group may not be using virtual box anymore.

Also did some prac work for IIS and ISA to prepare for working on webservers and the clusters.

IIS search

a few days ago i have been research cool ways of install internet information services
[link: http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/29/installing-iis7-on-windows-server-2008/] ...
i also helped jason, fred, kenneth and julian and todd create and run windows server 2008 with iis on virtual pc's in the facilitation room and setting them up.. :D funn funn funn