Alpha

12/05/2012

Our game has reached Alpha!

Last night I installed my capture card to try and get some good pictures and video from our game in action. Some of the pictures will be used in a poster when we show off our game at the EAE Open House. The videos will allow us to look back after Spring semester to see how far we have progressed.

Here are the action pictures:

Ninja Avatars

Here are the action videos:

Aspect Ratio

12/05/2012

Yesterday in class one of our artists noticed that all the models looked squished. I told him it probably changed when one of our developers updated to support both widescreen and full screen. I looked through the code with him and found that the AspectRatio was set to 1:1 even on widescreen's. I updated it to change based on the display type.

I also showed him how the double jump ability scroll was not attainable due to it's mesh overlapping with another model's mesh. I updated the FBX file to change the location slightly so that it would not be a problem anymore.

Dynamic Water

12/03/2012

The artists on my team thought it would be nice if we had dynamic water. I looked into it when I started to research lights and found it would not be too difficult to implement. I have added it to our game with a water texture I found on the web. I also had one of our artists create a custom water texture and have tested it in our game.

Here is his custom texture:


Water with texture I found:


Water with custom texture:


Town overlook with Skymap, Directional Lighting, Water:


Town overlook with Skymap, Directional Lighting, Custom Water:


I updated the location placement of smoke plumes to any ability scrolls or objective scrolls located around the map to help the player find where he needs to go.

Here you can see the smoke throughout the level:


This will change to be more dynamic, showing the player only the next objective with a different effect (one line of code).

Directional Lighting

12/03/2012

I was able to get Directional Lighting to work with our latest version of the map. I updated some changes to the skybox scale and rotation to fit the direction of the directional lighting, and also added smoke plumes to any ability scrolls or objective scrolls located around the map to help the player find where he needs to go.

Here is the map without no skymap and no directional lighting:


Here is an above view with no skymap and no directional lighting:


Here is the map with a skymap and directional lighting:


Here is an above view with a skymap and directional lighting:

Upcoming Code Lock

Upcoming Code Lock

12/01/2012

Our team has put a code lock for our Alpha version for Monday 12/03/2012. Today I re-factored some of the code with the DrawManager class and the IDraw interface. I fixed the camera projection's PerspectiveFieldOfView, which was causing clipping in the game where you couldn't see the whole layout of our level. I also updated some Effects but they still need some work.

Lastly I updated the Skybox I implemented with the DrawManager class with new images given to me by one of the artists on our team.

Long Sprint (Sprint 5)

11/29/2012

This week I continued to work on lighting with varied success. I also spent a lot of time refactoring all the partical system code to make it cleaner instantiate new partical effects. In class I showed off the different effects I had in the game and how easy it was to instantiate new ones.

Working with another student, he quickly drew up a new texture on his iPad for me to use with the smoke particle system. Here is his texture:



The particle system has the ability to modify the color of the texture on the fly to different colors. Playing with this I was able to create differnt looking effects for the the game:

Smoke with Original Texture:


Smoke with Custom Texture with red colors:


Smoke with Custom Texture, and a second effect Ring of Fire:


Landing Cloud with Custom Texture, brown colors:


Double Jump Cloud with Custom Texture, white colors:

More Lighting

11/20/2012

I continued working with some different tutorials. This time I went through Riemer's 3D HLSL tutorial. Using this tutorial I was able to give different lighting effects, directional lighting, including a drop shadow that requires drawing the scene twice, but in theory does not cause any performance issues. This will have to be tested with our game.

Here are some photos from my version created from the turorial:











In class I was able to work with another student again was able to get new models that I could use but I was unable to have any of the normal mapping to work. The drop shadow worked fine but without any light on the model it doesn't look good.

With Thanksgiving this week our sprint ended today. Our next sprint will continue until next Thursday.