Sorry for the lack of updates. I've been off in a deep dark hole recently.
Now I'm coming up for air just to let you know what I'm doing.
We're done with the demo so I can devote some real time into getting big
parts of the engine together. Right now it's the animation system that needs to
be overhauled. We want to animate a bunch of things in the game.
- Ship idle (hover)
- Weapon hardpoints
- Weapon firing animations
- Particle systems
I want to get this all down in a standard way. This should be the final time
we touch meshes. It'll definately take some time and effort to get it done
right. I'm using the code from
Jim Adam's "Advanced Animation with DirectX". It's a great book. I highly
recommend it. It demystified a bunch of stuff for me. Plus he's got a working
replacement to D3DXLoadMeshHeirarchy.
I managed to fix a couple of little bugs today. Nothing much, but things that
were bugging me for a while. First of all, I like to write code with no warnings
or errors. I like to fix any I see as they come up. I also fixed the viewports
so that the 3d view has its own viewport and when you zoom in, it zooms to the
center of the viewport, not the entire screen. It's more natural that way.
I had a discussion with Cari about how to do FOW. I think we've come up with
a solution that works and is extendable to other things we want to do.
Got a cool demo from the Max 6.0 people. Cool technology for the artists, but
nothing really cool for the programmer unless you license the Havok engine. Not
something we're going to do in the near future.
Anyways, enough talk. I've got to get back into my hole. Bye...
Oh yeah... A lot of Halo going on around here. It's sweeeet!!!