Hello everyone,

Working on collisions has been a long and interesting experience. Today we discovered that collisions were probably working all along, but the normals of the triangles in the Mesh were sometimes backwards. That's why our player kept falling through the earth for like random reasons... because the normals were backwards.

Today we're finishing up collisions 100%, at least, hopefully. I can't wait for FF1 to be finished.

Another day.

Wednesday.

Well, what can I say about today? Today is going to be another fun day of working on collisions. We went to see Matt Norris yesterday to talk about our collisions. He suggested that we use an articulated collision mesh to test collisions against, followed by aligning any collisions the player has to the skinned mesh that is rendered.

Ted was late today. Again. He seems to be late often. Our IP informed us today that when Ted gets here he's going to have a discussion with the EPs about his attendance issue. Hopefully this will resolve the issues we've been having.

As soon as I finish this blog post, Miguel, Xander and I are going to rip the guts out of the player collision response and start anew. Wish me luck.

~Bruce

Blah blah blah!

klihuilhuioyu8ho;ghuihjkl;jhiuhiopmnui;ghopmljkbuihj

That just about says it all.

We've been doing a lot of crunch time. And our 'game' still kinda looks like crap. There's all sorts of issues with the collisions and orientations in our game.

I always seem to end up on teams that want to do advanced forms of regular things. For example, when I was in SGP, my group was the only team to do a 3D game. And now here in Final Project, my group is doing an advanced form of collisions, colliding a sphere with the triangles of a mesh, no matter how big or small the triangle is or what it's orientation is. And our character has to orient to that surface.

Ugly stuff.

It's kind of funny though, as DirectX actually has a function that does all of that for us... Something like D3DXMeshCollision or something like that, and it gives us a collision point, a surface normal, and just about everything else that we need. I just find that really amusing that we're struggling to reinvent the wheel. The downside of that though is that we'd have to use .x files for our game.

Today is Proof of Concept turn in. I'm really tired. I can't wait for this day to be over.

I'm always in the middle of Blah Blah Blah's going on. Blah blah blah's on my left, Blah blah blah's on my right. Just a world of Blah Blah Blah's.

Another day

Okay everyone,

Let's see; today I have been tasked with getting moving, climbing, and the transitions between the two to work, and to work well.

I finished collisions last Friday, but there's still an issue with sometimes falling through the floor... It kinda sucks because I'm not 100% sure where the issue's at. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to work on my task of moving/climbing, and when I get home I'll tweak the collisions.

I'm not the sort of person who can take an insult like that, where my code doesn't want to work. I like to try to establish a reputation of someone who makes code that works!

Anyways, other than that, things have stabilized. Miguel's got a new place to live now, so I don't have to worry about helping him out... that whole fire thing was rough.

Okay then, I'm done writing for now. Have a nice day, everyone.

~Bruce

Well.

Refusing to die, the Tech Doc has resurfaced for today. Yesterday was a good day with friends. After all the collision work in school, after we were released, I went with Miguel to help sort out the debris in his house; it had burned down a few days prior.

I can't imagine losing so much stuff the way he has. Especially all because someone flicked a ciggarette butt. Makes me want to kick some butt.

I don't really know what else to say here.

I did at least improve the framerate of the game with the new collision stuff. From 67 FPS to over 240 FPS. Good stuff. However they're not perfect, sometimes if you do something just right.. you'll fall through the earth. Still trying to figure that one out.

We're probably going to do some more debris sorting after our work today. I gotta remember to bring the pants I wore yesterday... they're covered in soot and ash, and I'd rather reuse those pants than get another one tore up like those.

Heh. Maybe I should wear my old army uniforms, my old army boots. Those things haven't seen action in a long time now. I'm thankful for that too.

Speaking of which, I actually got some orders for Muster Duty... so sooner or later I'm going to have to miss class so I can drive to Lakeland, get my blood drawn, do a drug test, take a PT test, then watch a 2 hour video of why *I* should join the Army Reserve. Blagh. No thanks. At least they pay me for my time though.

I don't really know what to do with my free time anymore... what little free time I get nowadays. I just sit. It's being wasted. The summer is approaching and that's usually the worst time of the year for me; too many bad memories associated with that time of the year. I think that's weighing more heavily on my mind these days.

So in conclusion - BLAGH.

COH-LIH-SHIONS!

w00t, w00t, w00t!

Today we finally started programming. I am thrilled! I am tickled to death! And to make matters even better; I got collisions. I love collisions. I've been working pretty hard and getting them done. We had some collisions done and working for our prototype, but they were very buggy. Now that collisions are under my rule, I'm gonna bring THE PAIN.

My collisions will work, and they will work EFFICIENTLY. w00t w00t w00t.

Hello everyone,

Spring Break is over. It's time to get back to work. In just 3.5 short months, I will be graduating (unless something horrible happens). Today will probably be another day of documentation. I know I probably need to add a module in of the camera swing-through.

We just had a meeting, and sure enough, we need to work on the Context Module Description plus the Module Breakdowns. I can't wait for the documentation stage to be over with...

~Bruce