While the last month and a half may seem like I have little to show for it, I have learned a great deal about 3D modeling. Not that I really want that as my excuse, but it is how I explain it to myself, so that is about all I can say about it. Life really has been harsh the last month and a half, so hopefully it starts to ease up a bit. As far as programming goes, the last month or so has been a complete washout, basically being stuck at the same point for he entire time, but that has now changed!
Tutorial 2: Loading a Scene has caused me nothing but pains sine I started it. As I commented last post, I had almost finished it for that post, at that point my errors laid outside the coding. As it turns out, having required files in the same folder as the other project files is not good enough for Visual Studios, you actually need to bring the files into the project inside the program. It took a bunch of thinking to get that one, so this is as much a note to myself as a warning to others. Once I solved that trick, I was almost home free. As it turns out, the strings of names given in the program need to match the XML file, but that was nothing to correct. So I am done with that, unfortunately, all it does is display a corner of the static map, so it is really nothing to look at.
Now onto the next tutorial, Adding the Player. The part of this one which took the longest was adding all of the minor changes to the parser allowing items to be parsed right into the game engine instead of a secondary scene manager. Overall this tutorial went very smoothly without too much new material learner. Though I did find out what kind of shooter this tutorial was making: a fixed shooter - think Space Invaders or Centipede - with a little better graphics than those old arcade games. I know it is not the perfect match for what I am doing, but it covers most of the basics, which can then just be applied to three dimensions from the two already programmed.
The final tutorial I finished was more of a bathroom reading material type of exercise than an actual tutorial. It was called Populating the Level but was really just a collection of links to sites which offer free or cheap low polygon count models. I am most likely just going to use the models the tutorial does to finish the tutorial as quick as possible, being a month and a half late already from where I wanted to be, and then make my own low polygon models for the game. To be honest, besides the pains of making sure the Credits page is one of the first done, I would also feel a little weird using someone else's materials.
On a programming side note, I also wrote my first pair of server/client programs. I know all they do is send the string "Hello, World!" from one panel to another on my Linux-box, but I under stood 80% of the code use to make them. There was a few functions which I did not quite grasp but the text outside of the program said that what I did not understand was okay since the author had not gone over the code previously.
The last thing I would like to discuss is a redefined timetable (I know I go over this every post, but this one should hold unless something really goes wrong with my program of Life). For now I would like to say that the Shooter tutorial should be finished for the post just before Christmas. The Advanced Framework should be done for the last post of this year. Once those are done, I can begin actually coding on the game, which I am going to say early to mid January on the Progress page (I know that was originally early November, but I hit a speed bump), possibly using some of the starting coding to make the proof of concept I want to do. Well this post is too long now, so I will stop here, hopefully more good results for the end of the weekend,
~gunnah
No comments:
Post a Comment