Plan for Mychal McCabe

We committed to a schedule this past week that should take us through May of this year, targeting three internal milestone builds, after getting input from the group.

We committed to a schedule this past week that should take us through May of this year, targeting three internal milestone builds, after getting input from the group. A big help with this round of meetings was breaking the team up into task area specific groups (code, art, biz dev) rather than trying the ten-person hotline-based conference-room approach.

At the same time we actually began to produce code and content:

ai
r.furlan has been working on the code here, and introduced some constructs that allowed me to develop an initial set of conceptual parameters - from which we'll develop our tokens. a promising idea for an extensible AI interface came out of these discussions as well.

level design
j.trevett is making great progress with our first test arena, this should be in TGE any day now. the effort has required him to weld well over 2000 vertices by hand, a technique which he describes as "the hard way" and entirely not the way to go.

music + sound
n.tschetter and I have been working our way through a list of what's looking like one hundred or so sounds, in addition to music, and narration. this process is held up by me going tangential at each sound and saying things like, "do you remember the switch "click" sound from the original Atari ST Dungeon Master", before launching into a nostalgia-heavy reverie about the days when games let you kill a dragon and then eat it in steak shaped bites, but i digress.

player movement
j.baxter is patiently explaining to me the difference between Quaternions and Euler angles, and anticipating the need for sticky shoes. wink wink, nudge nudge.

ui
c.morrissey has made some progress with bitmaps for the HUD, and opened up a enthusiastically replied to thread on our forums called "Notes on My Balls", turns out everyone was eager to talk about them. here we are, some us well past the age of 30 and still giggling about anatomy.

misc.
j.baxter also added .fgd file parsing to map2dif, here's a tidbit from his commit entry:

Quote:

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one cool new feature is that it is now able to generate an "entities.def" style entity description file, based on the information from the .fgd file, for use with editors like GtkRadiant.

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apparently this worked overlapped with similar worked done by another community member.

g.findlay has offered to take a crack at our ball and other projectiles, as well as certain functionality i have in mind for class specific cross hairs and other HUD elements.

we've begun tracking our time, using an excel workbook. the same workbook contains our schedule, and a "parts list" for code and content. the parts list contains estimate slots, priority information, and a bunch of auto sum fields to tally each entry - this information was vital to our first crack at a schedule. the spreadsheet was pretty much my baby, and a really nightmare for the group members who hadn't been a corporate monkey in their previous lives.

it'll also be a help should we ever have to document our work habits to any external parties. ::straightens tie::