mon 25/5/09

guys sorry for late blogging. on monday i searched for pictures n downloaded some to put on our website. plus we talked abt the layout of the website n stuffs

Progress Report

So things seem to be going okay we have some code to move bots around and next week hopefully we'll be able to add in the experience system, spawn code for enemies, enemy models, player models (maybe?), and play gui.
Keybinding is being awkward and though I've created a GUI I don't know if I'll bother putting any code into it, there's other more important things to do.

DirectX, DirectPlay and... DirectWeAreAllDoomed! :-)

Hi guys!

I think the problem we are having connecting the game server to the client is because the DirectPlay libraries wich came with the old DirectX are now deprecated. So while the XP client is trying opening a network connection to the server using DirectPlay the 2008 server might have problem answering. In fact network connections to game server were usually coded using DirectPlay. According to MS documentation some components of this library were already obsolete when DirectX 9 was released:

DirectX Doc

That said we need to know which part of DirectX are being used by the client/server in order to figure out whether any of these components are still available on the latest version of the library. In fact:

DirectX FAQ

The interesting part says:

"... The Direct3D Retained Mode API was completely removed from Windows Vista. DirectPlay Voice was also removed, as well as DirectPlay's NAT Helper and DirectInput's action-mapper UI. Support for the DirectX 7 and DirectX 8 interfaces for Visual Basic 6.0 is not available on Windows Vista..."

So as we could imagine some components of that library have been removed. But... the thing that we should make clear is: have these components been completely REMOVED or just DEPRECATED? ? ? Documentation does not seem to be really clear about it...

Skeleton Warrior: Rigged

Skeleton is finally rigged, took like 10 minutes when i actually bothered to pay attention to it :D
He will be in game once i fix up the base animations I suppose; should be working on Are's rig ... which wont be too hard, ive just put it off o.o;

Anyhow, here's the skeleton warrior, are's rage animation.

Skeleton: "Rawr!"

Matt Update

Hello everybody. Here's what I've done the past 2 days.

• Merged my code into current build.
• Fixed AI movement bug (not really a bug, more of a screw up by me).
• Created navmeshs and spawnspheres for the new level.
• Added new function skeleton spawning.

Next I'll be looking at adding triggers for spawning, tweeking spawn code and spells.

Stronghold Gui Fix

I put the modified Join Server Gui in the copies of Stronghold on the computers in the facilitation room. If you need it again it's on earth in ProjectTemp; it's a file called joinServerGui.gui and it needs to go in the Stronghold\game\scriptsAndAssets\client\ui folder.

Scythe Resolution

Bounding box issue is fixed. Apparently the player (and by extension aiplayer) objects get the size of the dimensions of their bounding box from script [specifically the boundingBox variable in the datablock definition for the player object].
Fortunately I found a post on GarageGames that had to do with a similar problem, though the post was nearly two years old & by someone using Torque Game Engine.

Anyway the bounding box for the scythe demon is now the correct size so collisions work for the entirety of the demon's body.

The picture shows 2 scythe demons, the left one has a correctly sized bounding box boundingBox = "6.2 6.2 7.3"; and the right one has a bounding box with the default value boundingBox = "1.2 1.2 2.3";

Statistics & Classes System: Update

After a review today with Brett, and the Silent Will; I believe he was busy. I'm going to remodel the classes and condition the scale of stats:level, currently.. they're pretty much broken!

Since the last post/comment/update on this:

• Added in toggle GUI function
• Limited decimals on all shown values
• Cleaned damage display messages
• Tweaked giveXP function

I will update with comments from here on.

25/05/09

Came late :\
Blog moderating...
fun ;[

18/05/09

Blog moderating...

11/05/09

Blog moderating...

Miroslav

2day i have improved the poll system on the website and started working on the download pagel.

4 weeks left: Scythe Image Mounting Problems

The Scythe Demon is being painful and won't mount the scythe at the correct point, although it will mount the melee test weapon. I'll to offset the mount of the scythe and some other things to get it to work. If worse comes to worse I'll just make the scythe part of the Scythe Demon DTS and create some sort of invisible weapon that it can swing about to cause damage with (this might actual work better as getting the Scythe Demon's swing of the scythe to collide with a player could be difficult).
Additionally an old issue has reappeared with the engine moving the position of the arm when you rotate the camera in the vertical axis, useful for a first person game but not so much for a third person game. I guess I'll try to chop it out and hope it doesn't break the game.

Anyway the presentation is in the second last week (June 22nd), so there is only
4 weeks left.

What is anyone up to? (My group of course!)

What is anyone up to? Will we be able to finish the cluster part by tomorrow? What about Ventrilo documentation/presentation? Tomorrow I'll be checking just to make sure I can easily integrate your work guys with mine... next week I'd like to work on network getting ready for the final test... I wouldn't like end up doing everything the last minute... I'd be like that:





















eh eh eh ;-) Reply using comment if you like so I'll be able to know your progress... I'll be checking this afternoon...

Skeleton warios, now with MORE armour!

This is the new improved skeleton!
I don't think there will be time to make a caster-skeleton so this one will suffice. He's relatively low poly coming in at 1300, and should have low 512x512 textures when I finish this today.

It's also a quick rig, seeing as how he is made of bones. :)

Here's the previous skeleton..

Statistics & Classes System

This is touchy, to make this effective it needs to be put into the source. I've worked it up in Torque, it just cant reach some things; I've got updating functions etc working for stats, and damage modifiers, parry modifiers, block modifiers; you name it; they all work. It's mainly when you get to saving these values; we could possibly make a server file really o.o; I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to set it up ourselves.

In any case; this is being added to the melee code; not the AFX of yet. I don't really have that or the knowledge to implement this design.

Unfortunately I rushed into it; but it works okay; classes have base statistics; these are modified by level using a formula. After this is done, additional stats from items etc are added; then the total is finalized and given to that player (they don't see any of the underlying attributes)

The above goes for parry, block etc for our players. I will include the stats for Undergod in this; then port it over. (I'm currently making and testing this system in a melee C++ assignment).

The major issues are apparent when you need to apply changes to maximum health and energy values.

Either way ill update my team on Monday with what I'm doing.

*EDIT* - Character Page UI 22/05/09
*EDIT* - Combat Text 23/05/09

Supercool programming presentation!

Hi programming guys!

I really liked your game-presentation... you do work hard! If you are modifying C/C++ graphic libraries you are really working on the hardest task! I can tell you that because I used to be a programmer... but my screen was less colorful, it got no explosion at all and it looked like this:











... boring! Just do not try this at home ;-) ... I also played a bit with Visual C++ and I think it's the hardest programming environment you can choose! But anyway hard work pays off and I don't think you guys'll have trouble finding a job :-)

Multiplayer

Woo, my multiplayer gui works. I've tried to make the gui as easy to use as possible by automatically checking for servers when the gui opens.
















The above pictures show the gui and the game running the level in multiplayer mode. The gui does need a bit of checking to make sure all it's elements actually work when a server is found (can't do this myself at the moment as I need to run the game on two seperate machines and that requires going through the firewall, which needs admin rights) but I'll do something about that tomorrow.

Matt Update

Hello everybody,

Soooooo, what have I been doing the past 2 weeks? Well, I've had my face in a bucket because I can't have my precious drugs. Anyway, back on topic, I've been continuing to work on AI (IT'S SO IMPORTANT!) and fining tuning everything. What's done?

• Formations
• Attacking
• Swarming target
• Following target
• Leader complex (One leader, rest of the group goes by leader)
  
• A* correctly working
• Aggression levels
• And plenty of finer details that I don't remember

I'm going to move onto my other tasks now (I will go over AI with Brett on Monday to confirm I've done it all).

Message to... my awesome group!

Hi guys,

It would be great if everything that still needs to be done will be ready by next Monday... that's because we still need to perform some installation on the cluster (Ventrilo, services needed by Ventrilo, etc...) and in case the cluster gets corrupted I need 3 hours to rebuild it so we can't wait till the last minute... I could perform the Ventrilo installation by myself (well... I did something but I won't tell you anything about it :)) but I want to share the work that still is to be done...
So... let's get to work because we should be able to get everything done by next monday... guys I know we can do that!!!

If any of you hasn't got anything to do...

Hello guys!!!

if any of you (I am talking to my group of course) does not have anything to do I would suggest something you could do because we still need it:

1) Deploy the actual application on the cluster
2) Further documentation is needed about the website and the game
3) You could help with the website... even though I think Miroslav is doing a great job at the moment

I am sure you can still come up with something else to do ;-)

Miroslav

Today i did a class presentation on the website i made for the game

Undergod Website Presentation

Hello there Guy's hope you liked our Presentation.

Please feel free to add any ideas or comments that can be added to this Presentation for fututre reference!!
Cheerio for now xxxx

PLEASE NOT THAT SOME IMAGES HAVE BEEN SOURCED FROM THE WEB, DUE TO LACK OF IMAGERY FORM THE ACTUAL GAME. THESE WILL BE REPLACED ONCE GRAPHICS ARE FINALISED.

Undergod Website

View more presentations from Cafigee.

today's class

me and emma completed the powerpoint presentation on ventrilo that we need to merge to get a good overall presentation for our team !!! Just need joseph to add some more ventrilo screen shots. Research teams do work !!! :)

Presentation Report

Today we had our little mock presentation. Both teams of the networkers made interesting presentations that were quite different from each other.

Team A was more unified in their presentation, though only three members spoke (not good guys; this suggests that the rest of the team did nothing to an audience that doesn't know otherwise). Including a network diagram was an excellent move, and the explainations given on how it all worked was very good. Only working with 2 nodes at the moment might be an issue if problems occur when you try move onto 4 nodes late in; of course I don't know if that's a realistic concern or not.
The website had a very nice layout and the plan for how it would function was excellent. About the only possible addition is the inclusion of pages for individual players, though that sort of thing isn't strictly necessary and would take too much time to do well.

Team B was essentially had two seperate presentations by two different people.
The networking presentation went through the actual process used to create the cluster and was particluarly interesting to me as I've heard a lot about clustering over the past two semesters but never really had any idea of how it was all setup.
Presentation of the website was good also and whilst the site wasn't as pretty as Team A's it was just as impressive since it had been built from scratch. I was particularly impressed with the scripting.
Unfortunately it appears that there is a distinct lack of unity in Team B and several members have expressed annoyance that they have not been assigned meaningful work. From my outside perspective it seems that two key factors are affecting Team B:

• Firstly there appears to be a lack of coordination by the team leader.
• Secondly there it seems that team members are not trying to work as part of a team enough.

Anyway this is just how thngs appear to an outsider like me. Hopefully Team B can resolve whatever issues it has before the final presentation and all members will be able to present what they have contributed to the project.


Finally as for the programming team's presentation.... Yeah we just babbled some crap for way to long. Only me and Nick were here in time for our presentation, though Will did show up later.
We didn't really take this presentation seriously. We will however be devoting the two weeks before the final presentation to just work on the our presentation.

Update

Cathy and i have been working through the design and implementation of the Web Server.

For the past weeks its all been revolving around the design aspect of the website. We have a good template that we are modifying to suit the style we feel will make the game appealing and attractive but most of all professional. Post on the design will be up soon.

Next on the agenda is to find possible scripts that will allow features desired by the Programmers such as the webshop, player ranking and server status updates to be intergrated with the design.

over the past couple of week i've been trying 2 investigate different sites that provide free php scripts such as
http://www.hotscripts.com/
http://www.phpjunkyard.com/
Scripts for logining in to user stats
http://www.devshed.com/c/a/PHP/Creating-a-Secure-PHP-Login-Script/
http://php-login-script.com/
Displaying game server info on the website
http://www.hotscripts.com/listing/squery-game-server-module/
http://www.codango.com/php/dir/webapps/fungames/gameserv/

now it comes down to working with the programmers to see if they can help utilise the scripts found and to link them to a database.

Ultimately, we seem to be on track but we now need to come together to create the final preperation. With the help of Jasons initial Network Design, i have touched it with love and given it a Visio facelift, and now with the team coming together every1 will be able to input their findings, knowledge and love to produce the required final outcome, a great Powerpoint presentation and a documentation to back it up :P

thanks for reading

hope this makes up for the weeks i've missed out on blogging...
ciao 4 now

What I have been upto......

Hello All!!

Just to keep you upto date with what I have been doing. I have made a start on the actual Web Design and content. I have taken into consideration what is required by the Programming team and am also working with Robert to how the website will fit in with the actual network design.

We are presenting today where we are upto and have examples of the site layout and structure.

Cath Networking

Presentation...

My presentation will be completed by Sunday afternoon. It is going to be about:

1) Software requirement
2) Shared resources configuration
3) Cluster setup procedure

... As we still need to test the actual game server the final part will be added by tomorrow... if nothing strange happens to my cluster... of course ;-)

Level and pathed camera

Finshed making a usable level, though I want the rest of the programming team have a chance to review it. I've implemented the pathed camera for the menu, the screenshot shows the camera at various points on its path, I'd post a video but it's too much trouble trying to capture in-game footage. I've had to modify the game scripts a bit so there is a new version of the game on the share called "UNDERGOD_150509" (only the scripts are included as I haven't changed the source recently).
Earlier this week I attempted to port AFX to the new Torque3D Beta1, unfortunately the changes to the lighting and shadow system as well as the Terrain rendering procedure means far too much time would be required to get a working build going even if various features are striped out (e.g. zodiacs, afx lights).
Next week I'm going to propose some changes to the character select GUI that should fix the problem with the fog shader. I need to get the textured version of the Scythe Demon into the game sometime and hopefully I'll be able to get a working Play GUI going soon. Then I'll start work on the AFX for special attacks.
We have also decided to drop the Minotaur as the Boss and promote the Scythe Demon. We had to do this as we haven't done the motion capture for the Minotaur, the rigging isn't quite finished and he isn't textured either. Hopefully we can still use Nick's awesome model as a statue or something.

Undergod Icon

Just a quick post, I made an... unreal.. icon (yes -.-; I realized AFTER i made it). Coincidentally the U/D of our UNDERGOD title, made by Tim; looked slightly like the U of Unreal Tournament! :O

Here ya go.

In theory...

In theory we should be able to build the Microsoft cluster (Windows 2003 edition for sure) using a Novell server as iSCSI target! I would like to play a bit with it just to count how many times the Novell machine crashes :-)))))))))))
If you can run a MS cluster using Novell as storage server let me know... we will celebrate with peperoni pizza! :-)

Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 users...

I have been noticing people moving their cluster on Virtual PC 2007 (which I did as well because it is already installed :-)).
You might already know about it.. but... if you are using Virtual PC 2007 installing a Windows 2008 guest DO NOT install VM extensions becuase they will screw your network up! If you need/want all the fancy stuff that come with the extensions you have to install Virtual PC 2007 SP1 which is made to run Windows 2008 guests...
I hope this will help someone ;-)

Jerry Found And Accounted for!

After scouring WWII Russia, and The middle east During the Crusades (i have a Time Machine) I have finally Located Jerry in a Naval Hospital in San Diego California. Apprentice after contracting the Swine Flu Jerry Crawled out of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, on his hands and knees across the border.

After a Short Flight via Osprey to Fiji and a run in a Trawler across the southern ocean, i'm pleased to announce jerry is at home in bed and recovering well

We free to make monetary donations to the 'Save Jerry' Fund but address it all to me. i'll try and get a good 15% of it to him.

Tim

Ares, God of War: Update

Unwrapping Ares, capturing animation in the studio and hopefully working on the actual texture soon. The graphic content of games is quite time consuming, so ... lesson for the future to avoid it... or get others to do it for you :D

I'll texture the shield and sword.. and spear when I get to it as well. I do need to do my C++ assessment, C#/XML based torque assignment and... ASP x.x; so... yeah!

* EDIT: Added another image, just progress at this point; when i reach another milestone ill make a new post.

Will Update

WIP of the texture for scythe demon and here is a render with lights so the details are a bit easier to see

Cluster update Last week 04/05

On Physical servers in help desk room got Quake3 and stronghold to work with cluster just before leaving. Today are smoothing out some faults and work towards some documentation.

4/5/2009

TEAM A GROUP WORK

Primary Setup for the cluster
Machine 1 (Cluster 1 and Domain Controller which is running of vmware)

Machine 2 (Cluster 2 and XP Virtual machine on vmware running Quorum Disk)

Machine 3 (Game Testing machine) Noted on;y machine with graphic card

Used Quake as the testing game
Group got direct X to work

Problems that Occured
XP expired
The quorum software came up with error this resulted in issues with Starwind
Clusters had some issues connecting

Environment Design

Here's a rare short post from me as I'm feeling quite tired right now.
I've been working on the level, here's some pictures.














Thanks to Bianca from FTI we have some great motion capture data for Kali.
I've made an attempt to get the image based health gui working in game, with some success.

Character Statistics Foundation

The base behind all monster and player-character attributes so far..
(this is all off the top of my head!)

Attributes - Strength, Dexterity, Toughness, Intellect, Will

Strength: Damage dealt with melee weapons
Dexterity: Damage dealt with ranged weapons, speed of all weapons
Toughness: Health & resistance to stun/knock-back effects
Intellect: Energy capacity & power of spells
Will: Energy regeneration rate & resistance to disorient effects

Resistances would simply be tied into the onHit components of the spells/attacks.
Armour, for now would be static (damage resistance level) and based on the character.

Realistically these statistics would all be tied into a Player File, which would then be stored on a web server. However, for now attributes and other stats will be placed in the datablock of the character, as with the monsters.

:: Any suggestions or comments would be helpful ::

Will update

done Initial recording of Animations for kali.
Fixed up some of the Scythe Demon UV Map.

timmeh 4/05/09 - Blog about blogs.

After checking Team B members blogs, there is a lot of catching up needed to be done. Firstly Aru hasen't even started his first blog (correct me if wrong) and the rest aren't looking too shabby (Joseph) >.< god damnit you guys...

except for Libero he has like 250 blogs woohoo, most aren't too far behind either.

This is the blog count of who has done how many blogs each.

• Libero: 12 (GOOD WORK LIBERO KEEP IT UP PRO)
• Mirsolav: 8 (Nearly there, keep it up)
• Pravesh: 6 (Nearly half way there)
• Emma: 5 (Gotta get it going Emma)
• Joseph: 2 (*&%$%#$&**%&#*) :]
• Aru: 0 (dude...)
• Hieu: 0 (Hiue's gone dude :-\ )
• Myself: 14 (I'm the blog moderator, what you except ;-] )

I'm not trying to be pushy but as it is my job I gotta get on your backs now and then about doing your blogs you need it to pass, it's apart of this Module. Do it for the team you big sillys... and yourselves.

Jerry: Missing, Presumed Dead

Jerry has failed to return from holidays. As the last anyone heard from him he was getting over a serious case of alcohol poisoning. Jerry being Jerry we are assuming he has done something stupid and drunk even more alcohol whilst he was supposed to be recovering.

Thus we say Rest in Peace Jerry
(you better be dead or you will be)

timmeh 27/4/09

Last late blog, still moderating, lots of Team B are behind :[

timmeh 20/4/09

Catching up on own blogs, blog moderating.

timmeh 13/4/09

Catching up on my own blogs whilst checking other Team B blogs.

problem n solutions to help us to run our ventrilo game server smoothly

trying to find problems n solutions with ventrilo so that we can run our game servers smoothly
trying to find places as well where we can get help professionally if we cant solve any specific problem

http://www.ventrilo.com/faq.php
http://www.octopusoverlords.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=63487
http://www.ventriloservers.biz/ventrilo-instructions.html
http://www.ventrilo.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=4

http://www.ventrilo.net/support.dml

Now we need a presentation!

Hi guys,

I have completed my task... all we need to do is installing an application on the cluster... that can be done easily... as you can see on the left :-)

Now what we really need to do is creating a presentation to explain all these cool details to someone who may not be "tech savvy" :-)

I will be doing that because I thick I will be enjoing... so see you next week guys!

Cluster: a 100% Microsoft implementation

Hi guys... so as you can see the 2008 cluster is up and running...

But this is a project management course and not a technical course so let me talk about what I found out just working with this cluster so I can share my experiences with you all guys!

Building a cluster using 2008, at the moment, is a bit harder than using 2003. That's mainly because the iSCSI target needs supporting persistent reservations. Unfortunately just few iSCSI target support this feature...
If you read my previous posts you may know that I tried building the cluster using OpenFiler (a free NAS server Red-Hat based) but I failed because of the persistent reservation which are not supported by OF. So... how could I fix the problem? It's simple... at the moment the best solutions are:

1) Microsoft Unified Data Storage Server (which I used... there is a trial version!)
2) The last version of OpenSolaris
3) StarWind (which is free... well... the standard edition)
4) A hardware NAS solution... very expensive and looks like a coffin! ;-)

I really loved the idea of using a 100% Microsoft solution so I installed a trial of Microsoft Unified Data Storage Server and I fixed the problem but you could try different avenues...