Dead... Line...

With only a few days left before the GCAP submission date, work has picked up its pace pretty quickly...

Im working on the in game store, and tim is working on our missions and their format...
Time is also messing around with how the scene graph is set up in the main game, and this has affected my 3d gui work, so im holding off until he is done...

Progress...!

I have coded up, using default GUI skins, the main menu system...!
Now I am moving on to making the actual game play start to happen...

I am also working on a video, and am thinking of making a site that explains a bit more about the game...
I have tried to keep as much information as possible out of this blog so far...
Maybe it is time for a bit of a reveal...

Ewww its all GUI...

I have added CEGUI components to the game, and they are performing admirably...
I have decided on how to change through GUIS, player objects can be created, and it looks like a default scheme...
Thats because it it...
The look of the GUI will change in future, but it is serving is placeholder purpose for now...

I have also added a large story element to the initial GUI, that may change slightly in future, but for now fits in really well...

Got over another issue... Still going...!

Bah, after looking at an issue for days, it turns out the order was a little screwy when it came to creating the ogre objects...
After getting over that little set back, things are on track again...
We have separate scenes, guis, moving objects and a ground...

I have also started working on a title animation...

Monsters and Monstrosities...

We have moved the project over to Ogre3D, and added a new programmer to the ranks...
As such, development is progressing much more smoothly...

Getting the groundwork complete for the menus and gameplay and having the ability to easily switch between them is the current ficus, and is so much easier without having to redesign the engine every 2 steps...

Death and Slowness....

So... My laptop has destroyed its 3rd power supply in 3 years...
We spent the afternoon and evening pair programming on a mac... oh the horror...

Our randeom terrain generation is working, though there are obvious flaws... But that was expected and will be worked out... when my laptop is running again... At least its not crashing now...

Our biggest problem is the speed at which the program is operating while rendering the terrain... Its not that great... We are going to be looking into other ways to process all the geometry... There really isnt that much...
We sorted out some normals, and moved the light position and now we can see better...!

We refactored Tims map mesh generation code a fair bit, and it looks much smaller now...
Still works, which is also good...

Tim also tweaked the camera movement... its better now, but will be improved later... not that we need it...

Generation of Errors...

We managed to integrate my map generation and Tims mesh generation into a working mix of both on our first go...
We can now randomly generate a map of whatever X/Y size we want...
Only issues are :
- No VSync, so its thrashing the CPU for everything its got...
- My Map generation has cases where it crashes because we believe it is reading outside of the allocated array...
- There is lag between button presses and camera movement... We arent sure where its coming from yet...
- Optimization... We have none...

Tim is continuing to work on merging terrain heights together and I need to find out why the map generator is crashing and fix that...