Website - Check it out!

Please check out my updated website at:

tristonthorpe.weebly.com

Thanks!

-Triston

Post 42 - Audio Ahoy

Audio is being introduced this coming week for our GDC build.

We are going to be making small changes to the menu UI, inputs, and working on game bugs. Playtesting is occurring at a rapid rate, in house, to confirm issues that may arise.

More to come next week!

Post 41 - Completing Features

Fewer updates.

Everyone is on task completing the current needed pieces.

Prototyping took a hit, due to a dynamic tube building situation, so that has been delayed momentarily. We will be done with the prototyping this coming week and polishing for three weeks for our GDC build.

Back to work!

Post 40 - Slight Alterations

We presented our current build, received great feedback from the professors, and some not so great feedback.

I believe we are having a miscommunication with the professors during our presentation. I believe they were afraid that we were adding a significant amount of changes, and I don't believe that's the case.

So, we were suggested to build something simple that involved a "Bomber Man" style play. I explained that we are not going to have the engineers alter their current tasks, in case we don't go with this new test.

Skip will be prototyping something very simple for this to be play tested for Thursday.

Post 39 - Back to Building

We came back to the semester and are back on track.

We lost a few team members, and we gained a new one. We restarted with a viewpoint to get things done ASAP.

Team members who were struggling have recovered for the past two weeks and have been working hard. Things are being done, and we are progressing forward quickly.

We are working on new ideas, and we had a long discussion about camera and character control movements. We've updated our controller to working with better button inputs and trigger influences. 

We've updated our camera and removed an existing jitter that was causing movement issues. The camera is now also static in position.

We are working on some updates with our current design, but our schedule is requiring all of us to complete and lock all features as of the beginning of February. No more iterations as of that point, assuming we are content, and it is somewhat fun.

At that point we will be polishing for our builds from February up to a particular date in March, at which point we will have a our build being published from that point until graduation.

Onward and upward.

Finally, we heard the reveals for the IGF student submissions, and they all look great! Some really exciting stuff there.

Engineering III - Assignment 3.01

Engineering III - Assignment 3.01

ZIP Link

Assignment3.01.zip

Write-Up

The objective was to use an existing mesh and materials and imported them with correct rendering into the existing game engine. We also needed to provide simple "Fly Cam" camera movement.

Technical Write-Up

Meshes and Materials

We were given a mesh of a building, and each piece of the building has a particular material associated with it. There were over 1,000 meshes for the entire scene. Due to the number of meshes, I wanted to simplify the structure of the scene. I didn't want to import each mesh separately.

Below is a picture of the entire mesh:

Overall, the scene only uses 5 different materials. This allows me to group the meshes into combined meshes that are using those materials.

I was able to separate out the multiple sections of the mesh, using the same materials. This created a total of 7 meshes that I had to export for the entire scene, instead of over 1,000 meshes. To export these I accessed the "Hypershade"r. The image below shows where this is located:

The "Hypershade" allows the user to select portions of the mesh using the same material. The image below shows that if you right-click on the material name, and select "Select Objects With Material", it will select every mesh object with that material:

The image above shows the material name is "ceiling_m", and this means all of the mesh objects with that material will be selected. The image below shows those selected objects:

Once these separate meshes are selected, they can be exported for use in the game engine. I saved a total of 7 meshes, allowing me to simplify my scene structure.

Once this was completed, I created new materials based on the texture files I received, and imported them into my game engine.

I assigned the correct materials to each mesh. Each of the meshes is attached to an entity in the engine, which means I had to generate each entity for each mesh.

One of the meshes, "lambert2" didn't have a recognizable material, so I placed the "railingMaterial" on this, because it stands out as a yellow color, helping the "lambert2" objects stand out from the walls and floor.


Camera Controls

I kept the controls for the camera fairly simple. I had to remove all of my control scheme I had from my previous project, but this allowed me to place most of these on the camera. I gave the camera forward, backward, upward, downward, leftward, and rightward movement. The controls are described as follows:

Up Arrow Key - Forward Direction Movement
Down Arrow Key - Backward Direction Movement
W Key - Upward Movement
S Key - Downward Movement
A Key - Leftward Movement
D Key - Rightward Movement

I didn't currently add in any rotational movement for the camera, as I didn't see the point of it yet, because I don't know why I'd be altering the direction of the camera, and saving that for the entity.


Realized Learning Moments

I had to alter the Maya Exporter to allow multiple meshes to be exported at once, which required a little research from old emails for our class content, and an update from our other professor. I also realized I had still been using a particular "water shader" I created for a water effect, and I needed to remove it from the scene.

I altered the shader and confirmed it works appropriately. I learned a bit with this, and it was exciting to see the mesh working well in the engine. It was also a good reminder of some of the code from the Exporter I hadn't seen in a while.