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!!!