Better late than never... I hope

Seems to be the motto for my life...

I had just finished modelling and UV mapping Ice Queen, which is seriously overdue. I had been a bit obsessive in making her look good, and would spend hours just tweaking her vertices. Derek telling me that I only had to combine the dress and crown into the model for both UVs and rigging to work for it was god sent, because then I would of had to extrude the dress and crown out of her hips and head respectively. I extruded the hair out of the head, so when it fans out the UV coordinates get spread out more, not sure if I'll lose marks for this, but her hair is a big puff of white.

Nice that Maya .png's have a transparent background =D

I still have to add the skeleton, paint weights, rig the character, and add textures, which will along with programming for game engine design homework, and programming for the game, suck up any possible time I have awake. Though my little brother still insists I play Pokemon Friends with him whenever I arrive home, technically he has made more games than me. 

Cat Mullets in Roms and Braid Advice

Well I've been assigned to do the spline camera control and key frame animation. So I finished the functionality of the spline controls, but the only problem is that I hard coded it into the game. I didn't start this way, I did the whole UML run down and started on my way making three classes: Keyframe; which holds the translation and rotation information of a Spatial node, MotionPath; which has a vector of keyframes and either LERPs and SLERPs, or uses catmull-rom and spline rotation to traverse the points, and finally a Cutscene class; which has a vector of MotionPaths so the motion paths can be played all at once.

I found this to be slow to code, and Tyler suggested, along with Colin that I just hard code it to see if it works. The creator of Braid according to Colin said that you should get the functionality working and then create a class around it. So the catmull-rom spline works, show below (you may have to refresh your page to see the animation):

But this is only splining between two points, none the less it's quite smooth. Now I've got to extend the functionality back to classes. Extending this to spline through more than 2 points makes me hit a lot of vector out of bound errors... which I know all too well, seen too many, and frankly still have no idea how to make my code robust enough so they don't appear. It also doesn't help that catmull-rom splines like to ask for points before and after the two points you are splining through...

I feel most inadequate ;_;

Oh I don't know why the scene is pink and blue, and the player character is falling off the constraint plane because that piece of code is commented out.

The game... it's alive?

Well the very basic prototype of the game is running:

Now to point out some of the things we have:

1. The main character R3mote as a rigid body which can move through setting its velocity.
2. The main character R3mote can jump by applying a force to it.
3. When left mouse is clicked a sphere is generated at R3mote's position, (A place holder for firing the laser).
4. The platform highlighted in red is a phantom, and when the player collides with it they are pushed up. (A test for collision events and triggers)
5. The player is constrained to a 2D plane in the XY axis of the scene.

Of the list I worked on the constraint plane, which is a constraint class in Havok and I only needed to do some perusing in the demo files to find out how to constrain the player. It just constrains the pivot of the player, which is at their feet, to a 2D plane that is shown by the flat plane facing the camera. Something that needs to be done is that the player shouldn't spin around when they jump, and any collisions with other rigid bodies causes the player to spin onto their head. This can be remedied by using a character controller class in Havok, which sets the player's inertial tensor to infinity... making it not spin.

I also worked on the movement, but those were just four lines of code. Though since the velocity of the player is set to move left and right, the player can just float across the screen. This is just place holder , and will be changed. 

Also checking out the Character Control documentation it shows how to create rigid bodies that would stop colliding when the player state is set to jumping. This would be a great way to make platforms that the player can jump through, but land on. Havok really seems to be on our side.

Completed Logo

Here's the coloured and completed RGBA game logo, from the inked version I posted before:

I find that most of my time spent in Photoshop when I'm "graphic designing" is scrolling through the layer effects, and staring at the picture to see if it looks nice...

Hopefully the game does this logo justice, and vice versa.