Published on 10/11/2011

So ya'all figured the project was dead?... No it's not.

Progress has been steady, but nothing that was worth posting. I've finished all the tiles for the basic level layout. There were quite a few do to, but now that it's done I can start working on the level generation. There is already something happening there, but with missing content things didn't work very well.

Other than that, I've also started on the targeting system, e.g. basic hit testing. The chopper's gun follows the cursor on screen and the system correctly identifies which object is being aimed at. Some simple reverse projection calls and maths really. The biggest challenge was to do that as part of the pre-process loops to avoid having to traverse the object structures a second time. Of course it's easy to just make a bunch of global variables... but come-on... seriously? So, since there's already loops happening to identify viewable objects and LOD distance in the pre-process phase, there was no point in looping through that list again to find my target. Also, the gun does fire, ammo gets expended, but no visual cue and no damage is being delt yet.

Next on my agenda, I'm looking for a small success item, so I'm gonna do the HUD. But not as you might think ;)

There's also other stuff that I'm starting to think of. Especially sound and music. I've asked Ramon to start on an intro sequence as well. Whether that will be stills based or movie based we're not sure yet. But now that the basic level layout options are done for the most part I can get on with rounding out the experience, story line, missions etc. At some point though I'll have to go back and revise all the art, get normal maps in there etc. That will be the polish phase.