Engines 0.6: GDW Progress

In my game design blog I tried not to talk about programming. No, I saved that for this blog, because to me, Game Design has always been an artistic thing, not something that requires hard numbers and logic and code.  Anyways, our game is starting to look pretty good. I think it's because we have a skybox and particles as well as the beginnings of a HUD.

The particles in our game are Ogre particles. They use a script which is really not hard to use (http://www.ogre3d.org/docs/manual/manual_34.html here's the documentation in case you were looking for it). I tried to write a seek function for our enemy ships but failed horribly. That's ok though. I'm just not the greatest at math and Havok makes things confusing. For some reason if you take the orientation of an object using Ogre, then try to apply that same orientation to another object using Havok it just doesn't work at all. The other object will just face random directions.

So I guess I should talk about what I HAVE done instead of what I haven't. In the past few weeks (I'm not sure if it was the past few weeks. The engines midterm feels like it was last week even though it was this week and time feels all skewed. It's just skewed in a bad way where it feels like there's no time to do anything or work on the game and all I want to do is work on the game and gaaahhhh!!). Anyways, I worked on a "ship" class. This defines an object as a spaceship. Albert suggested we write scripts for our ship attributes, so I implemented that. Scripts make it very easy to change variables and save you compile time because you don't have to recompile your game each time. Speaking of compile time, our game took 2min 47sec to compile. I restarted my computer and the compile time was much more reasonable. I dont know why that happened. But 2 minutes is a looong time. Anyways, the scripts aren't complicated:

health     100
ammo     500
speed     10
amount   5
particlePos1 1.7 0.7 -3.5
particlePos2 -1.7 0.7 -3.5
particleTex particleTexture
particleSysName testParticles
billboardSetName shipBillboards
thrusterTex redThruster
thrusterPicSize 1.6

As you can see, it's just defines the ships' health, speed, the swiftness with which it rotates left and right, the positions of its thrusters of particles and billboards and the textures applied to those particles and billboards. We will also have shield strength.

The ship class has functions to move the ship forward, pitch up or down, and roll left and right. These functions all apply Havok impulses in different direction or orientations. As I said before, we have particles and billboards for the ship thrusters. There are also functions for that.

Our game is really simple so far. It's coming along though. I just wish there was more time to work on it. We could make it so awesome. Sadly, the harder we work, the more work we seem to have thrown at us, cutting the time we can work on the game. I know I shouldn't complain. I still have time to sleep. But it's just a little frustrating knowing that I have to put aside what I want to do (work on the game), for written assignments and things of that sort :C