Plan for Mychal McCabe

we reached first playable on the 12th of this month. our goal was a spinning crate, g.findlay gave us a very cool glowing ball, our ball-launcher was the TGE SDK crossbow without it's skin, and we had to turn off all animations to prevent an unsightly crash from happening whenever anyone ran into anything really hard (which happened pretty much every time you tried to quit moving).

but after j.baxter's all-nighter, we could shoot the goal, with the ball, and score points, while the clock ticked down from 12:00 to 00:00.

ai
r.furlan has implemented first pass code that allows our bots to generate, follow, and even modify (obstacle avoidance) their own splines. We're working to get the useable bits of this code cleaned up and out to the ai core project, where I've also been proposing some basic behavioral interfaces.

level design
j.trevett delivered our first test level. the initial reaction on most everyone's part was that the arena was just too small. Some quick calculations however, and turns out it is nearly a 1/2 kilometer long. The space is so big that it is very difficult (pretty much requires an accident) to smack into an opposing player, or even to see one when each of you are standing at opposite ends of the arena.

modeling
we hired two pc-enabled modelers this month so that we could end run the Mac tool situation. we're very excited to have keith andersen and matt taylor aboard. I found keith's work while rummaging through the developer profiles here, and found matt's work at polycount. keith has already begun modeling some of our equipment.

music + sound
n.tschetter purchased a library of sports sounds which should be a big help for us. We'd briefly considered descending on a local high school football team, sound rig in tow, and handing out some releases before realizing that it was, well, February.

player movement
j.baxter has successfully applied the quaternion code which TGE vehicles use to our player. this gives our player the ability to stand on their head at ground level or walk along the ceiling of our enclosed arena levels.

our game takes place in a zero gravity environment, and settling on a quality movement scheme has been tough. Our ball is currently about the size of the default TGE model's head, and is very difficult to hit reliably while in first person mode, and nearly impossible to run into reliably when in third person mode.

so, joel is implementing a new scheme with a different friction model that should help get us running into each other and the ball reliably.

ui
c.morrissey gave us our first-pass UI which is very cool. He's well into the second pass, and as soon as we can get the AVI functionality restored we expect the UI to really hum.