Plan for RavenSlay3r

Specular Highlights of a Setting Sun - An updated look at where I am and where I'm going in the new year. And a snapshot of a new TGE-feature i'm working on.

Quote:

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I have often and often in the course of this session, ... looked at that behind the President, without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting; but now at length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting sun.
Ben Franklin

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Well actually this sun is setting, however, as any ending is but the begining of somthing else it may-as-well reperesent both. For all of us I suppose the sun is setting on 2005, and rising on the next-gen of gameing. For me, personally, it is setting on college and rising on, well, life, I guess.

In torque-terms this means the end of Senior-Project (for now..) and the beginning of development on Enviro-Torque 2.0.

Senior Project - Legend of Zelda
For those who have been following, senior project is due on December 7th. So basically development is frozen in it's tracks, while I compile documentation, a demo release and graduate my butt outta here.

Up till now I've pretty much prototyped the overworld, the inventory system, and part of the first level. I wanted to at least program some of the advanced charecter movements, but I haven't finished Blendering my 'Link' charecter model yet, so that won't be happening... :-(

I did solve some neat problems with triggers, and got the joystick working etc. So my efforts weren't totally in vain. Mostly I just learned alot!..

For now i'm going to take a break from this one. When I'm done with my new environmental resource I'll port what I can slavage into TLK-1.4 and try again in my spare time...


Enviro-Torque 2.0 - Pre-Production
In my original
Enviro-Torque Resource I refreshed the most recent Celestial day/night cycle and did a hack job of "integrating" it with a weather-resource to create more of a single Dynamic Enviroment System.

Now, I'm currently designing Enviro-Torque 2.0; a ground-up rewrite of my dynamic-enivroment system resource. It hopes to offer fully modular and scaleable managment of date/time, weather and celestial events.

The specific-feature wishlist is fairly long but heading it are multiple celestial bodies, and multiple (independently configurable) weather zones.

One of the many new features of much smaller scope is the sunset above. Didn't think I'd get to it, did ya? This is an early prototype of a new hook from the celesial sub-system into the water-block to scale the specular highlighting as a function of the position of the sun.

In the final version I want to shade and scale the reflection using a weighted average of values from all celestial objects above the horizon, with those closest to the horizon getting the heaviest weight. This is just one of the many new features coming, from me to you!

[The Design]
Currently the class diagram stands at 14 classes! Sounds like alot. The basic run down is a scheduler on top which opperates on a collection of task-objects. These include the Calender-Module, the Weather Manager, Celestial Manager, and any user defined tasks large or small. Similarly the Weather Manager opperates on a collection of weather-zone objects, while the Celestial-manager opperates on a collection of celestial objects.

I intend to have several celestial-objects like celSun.cc, celSatelite.cc, celStarfield.cc all derived from celestialObject.cc. For celSun.cc, I really want to capture the essence of Sun.cc and fxSunLight.cc into one class so everything that goes together IS together, and I can have multiple instance of it. I don't know if this is possible though, depending on how tightly the rest of TGE is coupled to Sun.cc

The last and most nebulous componet of the whole thing will be numerous hooks from the celestial subsystem into various parts of the engine to create the actual day/night effects.....
[/The Design]


Enviro-Torque 2.0: Coming to a Garage Near You - Spring 2006

Well that was longer than I expected but thats where I am and where I'm going. Is that a plan or what?

Comments, Suggestions greatly appreciated!

WebSite: www.stevengpeterson.com