Camera and Player Movement and Orientation

Last night "lollerskivvies" and I discussed player and camera movement and orientation in our world. We drew a little diagram on the whiteboard which I later replicated in Visio shown here:


Our tool, which lollerskivvies is developing, will be able to define points which will construct the player's path, along with points to construct the camera's path. At this time, we decided that it would be best if these points were 1:1, as to not screw up any timing issues.

I figured I would use quaternions for the smooth camera orientation interpolation, I have done this before and it works great. The problem I'm facing now is how to get a nice curve for the position interpolation. If I just LERP betweeen points, the character in the above diagram could cut straight through a wall. I briefly looked into spline generation, but most algorithms involve defining more than two points. I could possibly just use the circumference of a circle as the path. Eh, it's something to think about.

In other news, lollerskivvies and I got his particle system running at a framerate independent speed last night, so now fire looks as sweet on my laptop as on the alienwares in the lab.

Forum

There is now a forum dedicated to our project at http://ohnoes.repins.net/

Go ahead and post any issues or concerns or things that you want to discuss with the team there... and check it often!

Milestone 1 + Source Control

Milestone 1 is now under SVN source control, so everyone can start contributing their individual research code at this time. The address is svn://repins.net/svn/ and a password has been mailed to your rit account. Once we get back we'll have some major integration and things will hopefully start falling together smoothly.

I also did some profiling on our Milestone 1 code and tried to find some bottlenecks, but everything seems ok. I think the fact that we're using huge 512x512 32 bit textures as test samples is part of the reason why the framerate isn't as high as we'd like it to be. We'll talk more about this later, but now we have some decent profiling code that I wrote for future issues.

User Input

I've been working on user inputs for the game so that it can easily support multiple input devices. I am using Action Mapping to define how game actions are mapped to controls that might be used for the game. I am also using DirectX built-in user input configuration interface that allows players to easily configure their controls. I used Chapter 5's Sprite Demo of the yellow book as the base application to add my input implementations. The code works well with the keyboard and today I was able to test it with a ps2 controller and the guitar hero controller. The good news is that the controls "worked" as soon as they are plugged in. The bad news is that the mappings between actions and buttons are jumbled up, and I also find out that my configuration menu is not saving configuration changes.


Fixing the action mappings is easy, though I haven't been able to figure out the problem with my configuration menu.

World Builder

The World Builder version 0.1.0945827niner BETA is done. We can create our 3d sprites, move them, rotate them, see them in both an orthographic and perspective view and save the data out. Can't read it back in yet, but it's on the list. Boo yah



-Lollerskivvies

I said "NO"

no, I don't want to post anything

woo

The p3000 appreciates the liberal use of adjectives in this blog's title.