Thursday, June 25, 2009

Review by Matt (with a final paragraph by Brett)

Here's our review document mostly composed by Matt (I tacked a crappy paragraph on the end).
Anyway I hope the 2nd presentation went better for the networkers. I know personally how hard some of you guys worked, so hopefully you were able to get that across better this time.



Undergod

A review

Our project, Undergod, had various issues, some we overcame and others left us scratching our heads. Many of the problems we had were due to something being poorly documented or just beyond our skill levels, here are the issues we had and how we solved them:

Animations
Animations were the most time consuming part of Undergod, the process of creating a model, texturing it, rigging it and then applying animations is a long one. Although we completed this process for a few models, getting the finished product to work in Torque was another story.

One of most noticeable issues in the presentation game build was Kali's second pair of arms being unanimated, the task of controlling two sets of arms without them conflicting with each other is a extremely time consuming one. This was never corrected and the model was left with a pair of static arms, with more time we would hope to finish Kali in the future.

Another issue relating to animation was the motion capture process, although this technology makes creating great looking animations easy it doesn't integrate into Torque seamlessly. Thankfully we did find a solution for this, we found that the sequence node must be oriented such that it points forward in the direction that the character model looks at; this is best achieved by drawing the sequence node in from behind the character model.

A lot of the problems with animations were also learning experiences. A bounding box defines the shape's orientation and position in the world, this came into play when our scythe demon model was disappearing when it was still in sight. The reason this was happening was because the bounding box was too small, smaller than the model in fact. The solution for this problem was easy thankfully, by simply increasing the bounding box variable in the scythe demon's datablock corrected the issue.

Melee
A brand new feature we implemented into Torque with the help of an online resource was the melee mod. Currently the Torque game engine is built to only handle projectile based weapons and one of the main concepts of Undergod was the use of melee weapons such as swords. A couple problems arose from this addition however.

A less noticeable problem with melee was hitting your enemy twice in one swing. The cause of this problem is being too close to your enemy and attacking, for example, if you hit the enemy first with the tip of your sword and then if the handle also came into contact with the enemy in the same swing, they both are counted as damage. This isn't ideal because bigger swords would always have the advantage over small swords. Since this issue wasn't really noticed until we were well into development it wasn't fixed.

Another problem with melee which is the complete opposite of the above was the weapons not doing any damage. The problem arose when creating new attacking animations, we found that the melee mod works by defining an amount of time that the weapon can do damage for each animation. Fixing this was simply modifying the time to suit each animation and weapon.

A*
Although A* wasn't really utilised as well as it could have been nor really needed it was still a good learning experience. I say it wasn't really needed because our terrain turned out to be quite open without a large amount of obstacles.

Possibly the most annoying effect of the A* addition was the fact it destroyed a bunch of other useful functions. Most notably being setMoveDestination, it took several weeks for us to come up with a solution for this but in the end it was discovered that the A* movement function could also take in a vertex as a parameter making it exactly the same as setMoveDestination. A* also broke a few other AI player specific functions but thankfully we didn't require those functions.

Another issue we had was the enemies stopping before arriving at their set destination, it was later discovered that a variable in client preferences was the cause of this and lowing it resolved the issue.

An issue that didn't arise until very late into development was enemies getting stuck on tree branches. Trees are correctly detected on a navmesh however things protruding from them are not, there really isn't anything you can do about this other than moving the branches to have a lot more clearance from the ground or removing their collision mesh from the tree.

GUI
The graphical user interface for Undergod was one of the less problem ridden tasks and probably less important compared to others since it doesn't have a major effect on gameplay.

The character select screen had the nice touch of giving you a 3D object view for each playable character. Unfortunately, this along with the terrain as a background caused it to remove the fog effect from the game. A solution for this was never discovered so rather than spend time trying to fix it ourselves which changed the 3D representations to 2D ones.

Another nice touch to Undergod was the use of circle health bars to give the illusion of a bowl of blood, something more exciting than the typical rectangle. Yet more problems arose from this engine change, mysteriously the health bar was using the health variable as a float which would give an inaccurate view of health since you can't draw a fraction of a pixel. The issue was easily resolved by rounding the health value up and making it a whole number.

Finally an issue that came from poor coding on the AFX side was the spell bar displayed across the bottom of the player's screen. While trying to draw the spell bar at the beginning of a game, two spells were always mysteriously skipped and not displayed. Strangely the solution for this was to also include the two navigation arrows for switching multiple spell bars into our version. Even though we only had one spell bar.

AFX Spells
Probably the coolest addition to Undergod was the new effects by the AFX resource. With these cool effects came complexity.

One thing we were quite ambitious about was adding our own spells, it turns out that this actually really difficult and time consuming. We settled using the default spells that came with AFX and they still looked awesome.

Management
The Battlefield of the Gods project started with five people working on various aspects and as such required a firm commitment to maintaining focus and remaining coordinated.
In order to ensure maximum productivity and collaboration remained at an optimum level. Regular check-ins with team members by the Team Leader and weekly meetings to update each other on progress made towards currently assigned goals.
Additionally posts were made to a project blog to allow members who were unable to make it to TAFE to remain up-to-date with other members’ progress. In order to facilitate offsite access to documentation and tasks assigned members a wiki site was created.
When challenges arose due to lose of participation by a team member, we were able to adapt quickly and efficiently by reassigning outstanding tasks to other team members.
To cope with a potential disaster the latest copies of all files were stored in a centralised location and members endeavoured to maintain current copies on their personal storage devices.

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

hey

WE"RE DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

23/6/09 Tim

After presentations on Monday, it came to realisation for most of us that we hadn't put enough effort in to having met the requirements of the presentation itself. Team B are currently doing a presentation make-over, this time , with intentions on doing it the right way. So... Come on Team B lets do it ;)

Also, everybody else, good luck I truly hope all goes well.

Monday, June 22, 2009

Week 9

Deus Ex seems to have a few issues with Windows Server so i have to actually modify the .U scripts to allow scripting compabilities with Windows Server

late blogging

had team meeting abt how is it going about our class. everybody was briefed on their role

late blogging

looked up for some game administrators. sent a few emails bt didnt get replies from everyone.
most of the guys run small games n dont require a powerful computer or server

Week 8

Its turning out that the actuall game isnt working really well on our server so we have decided to go for a different approach and use a differnet game to try to get it working. We have decided to go with Deus Ex cause i have previous experience with setting up a server with this game.

emma,s blog

checking out the blog posts.......

w 4

went to multimedia room to help sapic with site..

Week 7

Ok Emma has got a working copy of Ventrillo and I have started working on the actuall script of it so it can be implemented into the server and the game server! The script seems preety flexible so i should be able to get it working to our needs and goals

week3

i help emma with reserch..

week2

got Asign to a team B..my role was "helper"

week 1

just a new blog..

PRESENTATION WEEK

Am preparing for my presentation

BLOG FOR LAST WEEK

still worked on the research.......

Week 6

Stupid VMWare dosent seem to like parts of Windows Server expecially the main cluster parts Libero is working in overtime to get it working so hopefully we get it working :-)

Week 5

We started installing Windows Server onto VMWare and its seems to be running ok for now me and Libero will test it through the paces a bit to see that all the server features are running ok and that we wont hit any problems later on

Week 4

Continued finding out information with Emma aboutVentrillo and Windows Server 2009,
Also looked over the final presentation from the last class to do Project.

15/06/09

Worked on final presintation to be done next week wont have a fully working cluster with the game on it but at least we tried!! Should be a good presintation next week.

20/06/2009 and 21/06/2009

Worked with other group members to finish off the portfolio booklet

Fred, Robert and Catherine worked on the powerpoint as well as the booklet
Fred did some last edits.
YEAH

Sunday, June 21, 2009

16/06/2009

Today in class our group started work on the power point for the project presentation. In terms of our severs they seem to working quite well although they can't run stronghold.
Our group also started work on the booklet.

Julien

Week 15

We put a graphic card on a windows 2008 machine so we can launch the game.
the game was working on windows 2008, but after configuring the clusters and launching the game, it wasn't working.
We changed some parameters on the clusters configuration but without any results.

Julien

Week 11 - 12 - 13
We had to re install all windows 2008 because the time before activation was finished.
we changed the location of the cluster, so every images run faster.
we had to re-configure all the clusters.

Julien

week 7 - 8 - 9 - 10
now that quake 3 was working using the clusters, we tried to use the stronghold game.
we got many issues, directx had to be updated but we still had problem with some parameters on the clusters.

Julien

week 4 - 5 -6
we decided to use more than 1 computer to run the virtual machines.
we used 3 local computers from the helpdesk room to run our virtual machines.
we install all operating system and configure the 2 clusters.
we tried to use our clusters with Quake3, we got some issues but it was working at the end.

Julien

week 3

I am assigned to work on the clusters with frederic and jarrad.
we started to install windows 2008 on virtual machine.
running 4 images on 1 computer.

Frederic - Networking - Team A

Week 15

Brett helped us on the client connection problem.

He changed some codes, so the game client could add a specific IP address to connect to as the server.

Still, nothing...

Frederic - Networking - Team A

Week 12 - 13

  • Windows 2008 launch the Stronghold engine
  • ... but not through the clusters

After many tests and research, to make the engine work on W2008, we had to :

  • install a new graphic card (the onboard one, even with updated driver was not enough)
  • update the driver
  • and more importantly, update the DirectX10 on Windows 2008

After that, the game was running (as client or as dedicated server). A game client could connect to the dedicated and play.

But still, when the dedicated game server is put in the clusters, game client could not connect to the server (no server detected).

Gamers Wiki???

Has anyone had thier access removed form the Gamers Wiki? Reason being a s want to update some information what I need from thier site and am denied access???

I could access this site no problem a couple of weeks ago.

Just to make people aware that Images what were used in the presentation a few weeks ago will have to be used. I realy would have liked to get the updated images.

Cathyxx

Frederic - Networking - Team A

Week 09 - 10 - 11

  • Clusters are operational
  • Testing with the Stronghold engine, but doesd not work
  • Testing with the Quake3 engine : work

That took a lot of testing, cause at first, we thought we did the installation of the clusters wrong. So we did it again, but it turned out Windows 2008 would not launch the Stronghold Engine

We swapped to Quake3 engine, and after some testings, the game server worked, and we could connect with a client, using the clusters.

So back to the Stronghold engine and trying to find a solution for it.

Frederic - Networking - Team A

Week 06 - 07 - 08

Change of plan. Instead of virtual machine, we'll be using real ones.

  • 3 machines for our network : enough to create a DC, 2 clustser servers and 1 XP for the virtual disks.
  • Creating and testing all this to make it work.

Frederic - Networking - Team A

Week 03 - 04 -05

  • More research on the creation of clusters
  • Tests on virtual machine, using Windows 2008
  • Use of Starwind to create virtual iSCSI drives for the storage and quorum disk

Frederic - Networking - Team A

Week 01 - Week 02

  • Repartition of tasks
  • Creation of the wiki
  • Research and implementation of information on the wiki

The End is finally near........

Hi Guys!!

The time is now upon us to put all our research and team work together!! I am currently reviewing the project document and inputting the web stuff.

Bye for now xxxx Cathy xxxx

Friday, June 19, 2009

learning abt ventrilo 3/3/09

www.ventrilo.com

working on website design with miroslav

trying to sort out the scripts errors we got

late blogging - website

working on website design with miroslav

late blog 14/5/09

working on presentation

15/6/09 Tim

Summed up all blogs so far of Team B so far (better catch up a few of you!)

8/6/09 Tim

Continued project powerpoint presentation and marked off blogs (mostly Libero's)
<.<

>.>

1/6/09 Tim

I started the Powerpoint presentation for Monday for Joseph.

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

I forgot how to sleep

So the game may or may not be playable in time for the presentation. Animations are likely to be glitchy, there will most likely be no changes to AFX, our presentation may be dodgy as all hell and documentation may or may not be in existance. So if you hear swearing or screams of frustration coming from 104 this week you'll know what's up.

Overall things are going pretty well considering our ambitions.

will late update

worked on kali model.
exposed the maximum health to torque script so the characters can have a dynamic maximum health.

Monday, June 15, 2009

Ares, God of War: Model and Animation Export

Just a quick update from me; with Brett's knowledge on characters in Torque and animation Ares has been put into the game, finally; learned a fair bit today about animation etc; of course running and walking animations need to be figured out as they seem quite obscure and slow.

With so little time to go it will be trying to actually get this all testing right; if Ares' animations are done then the skeleton will be a quick-fix to put in and have in the game as well.

I will be writing a sequence for character export / animation; because plenty of errors occur from simply putting things in at the wrong time. I shall then give this to Tim, I suppose.

UPDATE: 16/06/09

Redoing animations thanks to scaling issues; this is solving the immense gap on animations, image scaling and bounds scaling.

2:53 PM

I will continue to work on animations at home as I know that Ares will work from now on.

4:09 PM

I will continue to sleep..

08/06/09

Still having issues with the graphical restrictions of server 2008 and are still unable to get it working properly on the cluster

25/05/09

Continued to try to get stronghold working on the cluster. it seems to be a directx issue.

18/05/09

Continued to try to get stronghold working on the cluster. We decided to get notepad working on the cluster as a test and we were able to do this with ease. The problems with clustering stronghold are due to the graphical restrictions of server 2008

11/05/90

Had a go at getting quake working at the start of the class but then gave up after a while as we decided to try and get the actual base game that we are using onto the cluster working instead

15/06/2009

i like networking its owesome!!!!!!!! lol

04/05/09

Continued trying to get quake working woth our 2008 servers without success

Braining

15/06/09,

power braining to remember what we all did all this week.

Daryl

Emma Update

since i had no more research work, i have been going through the project work for the networking class..........

15/06/2009

mmh got nothing much to be done.....

What I am up to.........

Hello fellow Team Members!!!

Just to keep you in the loop as to what I am doing today . Just created a Win2k3 image in which I am about to install MYSQL server so that we can uses PHP scripts and Mysql Database for Player login to the website. Robert and I have decided to keep the logon process simple by using First Name, Last Name, UserName and Password only.

We have also decided that we will place the MYSQL Server\Database on the Webserver.

Will Let you know when we have accomplished this.

Cath x

ReBlogForgot 12

25/05/09,

we finally got stronghold working with LAN on the servers.
testing the game, it worked well.
now to config the accounts.

Cpt. Lady

ReBlogForgot 11

18/05/09,

Clusters were having some LAN issues, for the stronghold was still having accessing issues.
we managed to get quake 3 arena to work rather well.

Cpt. Laser

ReBlogForgot 10

11/05/09,

configuring our servers to network our testing games.
we used Quake 3 and stronghold we had some trouble with the servers and working to fix the problem, but in due time.

Cpt. Licker

ReBlogForgot 9

04/05/09,

Group Presentations, we sat on our backs, listening and absorbing info like we meant to understand,
but at the same time we were learning something new.

Cpt. Look

ReBlogForgot 8

27/04/09,

Public Holiday: Anzac Day

Cpt. Low

ReBlogForgot 7

20/04/09,

helping the other group member with the Isa server images. the server that expired had to be reinstall and had to be retransfer images.

Cpt. Loser

ReBlogForgot 6

13/04/09,

Public Holiday: Easter Monday

Cpt. Lol

ReBlogForgot 5

30/03/09,

Were in the facilitation setting up the network for the clusters.

Cpt. Lame

ReBlogForgot 4

23/03/09,

Continued to sett up our ISA servers and IIS within the servers.
everything was working and running according to the plan.

Cpt. Load

ReBlogForgot 3

09/03/09,

We were setting up our ISA servers and IIS within the servers, making a designing a plan.

Cpt. Lonely

ReBlogForgot

02/03/09,

Public Holiday: Labour Day

Cpt. Lazy

ReBlogForgot

16/02/09,

Creating our PB wiki page with the others editing and uploading information for our project.

Cpt. Late

update 08/06/2009

In this lesson our group was able to get the servers working after we found out that stronghold was working due to the config files being heavily edited. Mahbod came to the conclusion that we use another copy as he was the one who configured the original version. Althougha few issues came up but overall the servers seem to be working pretty well.

update 1/06/2009

Was told to start some work on the portfolio, although I have to collect some of the diagrams and notes from other memebers to include in the Networking Team A portfolio. I also asked Fred if he could take a few print screens while he was running the servers, I may include these in the portfolio. The print screen present how the clusters are configured/setup and how iSCSI is created.

ISCSI definition
http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid5_gci750136,00.html

site also states how iSCSI functions.






update 20/04/2009

Was told that ISA was not necessary although if I were to do it I wouls still run into a few issues one being that A our group changed the images into Virtual Pc types and B the old images I had expired and quite useless right now. So for the day I just assisted Fred, Julien and Jason on any tasks they needed me for while working on the servers.

update 20/04/2009

On this day I used the old virtual 2008 server machines to to install ISA.

Although a Few issues came up one being that the server image that I was using expired.

ISA DESCRIPTION
Microsoft's ISA Server (Internet Security and Acceleration Server) is the successor to Microsoft's Proxy Server 2.0 (see proxy server) and is part of Microsoft's .NET support. ISA Server provides the two basic services of an enterprise firewall and a Web proxy/cache server. ISA Server's firewall screens all packet-level, circuit-level, and application-level traffic. The Web cache stores and serves all regularly accessed Web content in order to reduce network traffic and provide faster access to frequently-accessed Web pages. ISA Server also schedules downloads of Web page updates for non-peak times.

Sunday, June 14, 2009

14/06/2009

i have been going through the blogs posted by both networking and programming teams.and its owesome..........kudos to programming team you really have done good work.

Saturday, June 13, 2009

To whom it might concern... my super-duper-team!

Hi guys,

just read your blogs... I think the work you've been doing so far it's ok... I guess the major issue we have at the moment is with running the game in a virtual environment. I worked with Fred last week (do you like cross-team work? There's plenty of it here! :)) because I thought that trying something with real machines would've helped... nothing like that... Well.. we did achieve some goals but nothing spectacular... In conclusion that "thing" still wouldn't work.
We are able to build a Windows 2008 cluster as I showed you last time during the presentation using 100% Microsoft software compliant which would work for a business environment but it wouldn't for a gaming one.
Tafe is about finishing and I really can't make much time to work on this (by the way today I got flu...) so I guess we can just show our team work as it is, merge the presentations we have in order to come up with something well organized.

Probably we are not gonna fix this issue but we shouldn't be feeling crap... At the moment finding NAS solutions able to run with 2008 is not easy, finding desktop virtualizations able to run 3D app is not easy (most of'em just sort of run OpenGL but not DirectX) and the semester is going to end...
Running DirectX in a virtual env is not easy simply because:

1) DirectX is not OpenSource
2) Vendors are not happy with releasing docs about video cards specs

That's a big issue... I wrote some lines on the forum of VirtualBox (wich runs OpenGL but not DirectX) and the moderator got irritated... he wrote:

"You and dozens of others want it, and it's been shouted here dozens of times. The devs know, alright. It's not as easy to implement DX, especially on non-Windows systems. And DirectX isn't OpenSource, which is a bit of a problem for VB.

... I'm locking this, as there it's already known users want it. It will come in due time."

Did I make myself clear? :)))) It's not easy...
At the moment we know that the game'd work in a 2003 cluster env but it won't in a 2008 one.
Please post ANY comment you guys feel like write because it could help for the final presentation... once again I ain't gonna work on the 3D issue during next week, I'll do it just on monday (I hope with Fred again) and then I'd like to get the final presentation done.

1/06/09

was going through the research work....make make sure was upto date

29/05/2009

me and Pravesh 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 !!! :)

14/05/2009

below are some of the links i researched on...thanks
http://www.ventrilo.com/faq.php
http://www.octopusoverlords.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=63487
http://www.ventriloservers.biz/ventrilo-instructions.html

4/04/2009

today i read revised some of the research work i did during last semester classes.i.e game engines and the source codes.

on 30/02/2009

read through some of the source codes websites:
http://www.gamespp.com/sourcecode/aberMUDII.html

on 23/03/2009

hii all,
as i said last week ,did research on source codes games though didnt get time to finish up.......today am continuing with the same research and this is some of the source codes links that i have come a cross.

http://www.gamespp.com/sourcecode/aberMUDII.html
http://www.gamespp.com/sourcecode/arena2_1.html
http://www.gamespp.com/sourcecode/asteroidsClone.html

16/03/2009

researched on Ventrilo game server(firewall) its all about how you can blog the other web instead of games.and also deed research on source code game server though havent found any types yet.but am hoping to do more research.


you can confirm them on Awesome teambee

16/03/2009

researched on Ventrilo game server(firewall) its all about how you can blog the other web instead of games.and also deed research on source code game server though havent found any types yet.but am hoping to do more research.


you can confirm them on Awesome teambee

on 9/03/2009

today i researched on F.A.Q/ Documentations. and it explains how its important for the users should look at the Ventrilo log file for any indications of potential problems some messages being generated by the Operating System will vary from platform to platform.

Thursday, June 11, 2009

Isa, pizza and... farewell!

Hi guys (the networking ones),

Probably it might not seem the right blog to write this message... but this is a damn team work too :)
In fact I was thinking about organizing something special with food and a lot of useful Microsoft technology... We could meet at TAFE and I could go through the whole isa/exchange configuration needed to pass the test while eating pizza, drinking coke... By the way it's about waiting a lot till the software gets installed... (the best config would be: Win2003 Sp2, Isa 2004 Sp3, Exchange 2003 Sp2)
I would suggest to do this on next thu cause it will be after the very first part of the very first attempt so we all will know what exactly we are required to do.

I thought that could be the perfect way to end this diploma. In fact some of us will be soon looking for work, some of us will be going to Uni (Rob and Miroslav go to Uni!!!)...
Well... what to say... I did enjoy this semester because we have been dealing with security architecture/issue/etc... which is what I am interested in: in fact I think it will be really useful at Uni cause I will be dealing with security most of the times.

Monday, June 8, 2009

today

i just wrote news for the website for miroslav
i just wrote news for the website for miroslav

Miroslavs

Well basicly just continued working on the webpage, fixing up codes that didnt work and inproving stuff i thought needed improving

DaryL.Late.Post.Sorry.Foundation.Day

bloggggging googgggggling... info for website and isa server

Testing

it seem that we have fixed stronghold and it is running swimmingly like water flowing streamingly downstream like fish that bears eat and than digest and then poo.

06/04/09

continued to try to get quake to run on the cluster may turn out to not work since there are a few video restrictions when working with server 2008

30/03/09

Finished configuring the servers so that they will run in a cluster. Started to add quake 3 into the cluster fo0r testing.

23/03/09

Started configering the 3 machines (one virtial 2 hardware) so that they will work in a cluster.
Spent this class installing server 2008 on the 2 hardware machines and the one virtual machine that will be our Domain Controller

Team A - Clustering

It seems Windows2008 won't make the game work properly.
We've been trying different combination. The game server work on XP, work on W2003 but not on W2008.
We are trying to update the DX10 on W2008. That's may be the solution.
More updates later.

16/03/09

Tried to get things working in VMware again. At the end of this class we decided that we had spent too much time on trying to get arround the restrictions of a virtial machine have have decided that next week we will try to get some hardware machines.

09/03/09

Tried our best to use vmware server working. Its proving to have lots of restrictions and at some point we may have to give in and use hardware machines.

week 3

Started looking over as agroup what was actually need to be done for the assignment, and organising who was doing what. I somehow got appointed leader so that will be intresting. Emma is going to be my right hand woman to find out stuff about Ventrillo.

Sunday, June 7, 2009

18/05/2009

Had started some work on the previous ISA servers although the group has decided not to use them.
Although the images are uslesss now as they work through VMWare in comparison of the of the other servers which work in Virtual PC so either way they will be useless.

More work was done on the Clusters to get the gaming LAN issue to work

Robert Made a design for his websevers and also for the cluster servers the documents might be useful for the our group design portfolio.

11/05/2009

Our group was able to extend the expiration date of the clusters, to about 30 days which should be adequate enough.

Mahbod also started assissting with the servers.
To fix the Quorum Disk isssue had to be reinstalled, at first there were a few complications with the installtion but after a while it starting working.

Had a few more issues with the servers not being to access any of our gaming networks.

Although after testing we able to get games running on the machines.
Their were also some issues when Fred, Jarrad, Julien and Jason were trying to run Stronghold.

04/05/2009

Worked on clusters with team although many problems came up
The Quorum disks running on the XP Virtual image has expired (That will need to be made again)
The clusters running windows 2008 are about to expire


Positives
We were able to increase performance of the clusters and able to run them properly for now with the use of the software Starwind .
http://www.starwindsoftware.com/

Also we downloaded direct X software for the test gaming machine. Proper test should be able to be done soon after resolving the clusters and quorums issue.

6/04/2009

Was assisting Fred, Jarrad, Julien, Jason and Daryl with setting up the cluster servers.
Made plans for project portfilio.
Some plans were produced for daryl and myself to use the old Windows 2008 servers we had on our drives that were runnning as test servers and install ISA.

Fred and Jason were also able to get a gaming machine to test out the games and see if the LA N options were available within the network.

Saturday, June 6, 2009

Nerworkers mob! Read this...

In order to solve the "well known" issue with DirectX 9/10/11/12... I would suggest to install Windows 2008/Vista on a laptop (which would work as client) which could be easily shared between two teams. Should the configuration still not work we had better consider investigating in a really thorough way which would mean an extensive logs analysis. Using a network sniffer at that stage I think would be more than necessary, it could answer to these two basic questions:

1) Is the client trying connecting?
2) Is the server accepting the connection giving the client an answer?

Friday, June 5, 2009

Spellcasting without clicking on GUI buttons

I read through the code for how a spell is cast when you click a button on the spellbank GUI. Most of the code can safely be ignored, the castspell source function can be called directly if we have the following:
-a spellbook with the desired spell in it
-the slot of the spell in the spellbook
-the gameconnection for the client / caster who has the spellbook
-the id of the target object

I haven't looked at giving the AiPlayer a spellbook yet and I can't remember if we are using AiClient for AiPlayers; both of which will be required for bots to cast spells.

I think by using components of the Smokin' & Arcane in the Membrane spells we should be able to give the Scythe Demon a nice constant effect below him that sheds some light on the model so it doesn't look so dark.

Smokin' Arcane in the Membrane

Thursday, June 4, 2009

AFX fun

As you can see in Matt's post below I've got the demo AFX spells working. This was actually quite a trial as the management system for spells is quite complex.
I additionally had a problem where the first two spells on the spellbar weren't showing up, but were being created as data objects. I eventually found out (thanks to Matt) that it is assumed that the first two items in the spellbar will be arrows to scroll through sets of spells. Considering I spent at least 4 hours trying to figure this out, asking for help from everyone who could possibly help, for it to turn out like this is quite aggravating.
Anyway, I'll probably spend today & tomorrow trying to modify the demo AFX spells so that the can be used for our characters, and next week we'll start planning our presentation & finalising our documentation.

***Update***
Oh, and I guess we have to
  • add in the models + animations for the skeleton, Ares, & Kali.
  • add Nicks stat system.
  • finalise the monster spawning system.
  • create some AI for the Scythe Demon.
  • test multiplayer, again.
  • create seperate spell books for each character.
  • and whatever else I've forgotten.
Anyway the core basic gameplay should be complete by next week.

***UPDATE 2***
I got selectrons working so here's some pictures.

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Matt Update




Brett and I playing Undergod on a server.

Statistics & Classes System: Done

After three quarters of an hour I've managed to have the client-server link for the Character Page Statistics UI done. The naming font is pink.. I know; it'll be replaced with the character's font in the current game build I suppose.

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Ares, God of War: Animation

Just a quick post from me tonight. Are's is pretty much rigged. A few clipping issues on the shoulders still and the reactor stuff to add in; but otherwise he's doing okay. Hopefully he'll be in smashin' skeletons soon enough.

I suppose ill be finishing off the client issues with the statistics GUI.. then hopefully moving onto the Under-Demon, 'scythe demon'; for his fight and AI.