Graduation and Freelancing

I apologise right now if this blog seems a bit "self pimpage" but meh, what are blogs for if not to pimp yourself or your wares? :D Also, no pictures... but still an interesting read I hope :D

Graduation

First off, some good news, I've graduated! I'm now 'Craig Ashley Fortune BSc Hons' and I have a piece of paper that has the rather nice wording "First Class" on it too ;) I'm now officially not stupid, lol. But on a more serious note my graduation yesterday marked the end of the road for three years of hard work and I'm glad to have achieved as highly as I did. It's a fantastic feeling to have finished university, although a little sad at the same time, knowing that my student life is now behind me.

Marching On

With all that being said, I'm now looking to find some work. If anyone works for a games company in the North-West of England and think I might be interested in a vacancy they have then I'm all ears. I'm looking for either design or coding jobs. (Side note: I'm based in Bolton and I don't wish to relocate at this time, so Liverpool is just a tad too far)

If you work for a company that are looking for a graduate with very good C++ skills etc and are not games related, I might still be interested, so drop me an email.

Heck, if you can even offer an offsite position for games stuff I might be interested in then again feel free to contact me :)

Freelancing

In the meantime, until I get fulltime work sorted, I plan to do some freelancing work to keep the ol' bank balance ticking over. If you have a short term need for a programmer, designer or 3D (primary) or 2D artist then give me a shout. Even very small jobs I might be interested. No harm in contacting me, the worst I can do is say no thanks :P

Development / What I'm working on

Currently I'm working on a little system that will allow multiple players to be in control of different aspects of a vehicle simultaneously, and also deal with the mounting aspects etc. A couple months back I had coded up tank functionality into the wheeled vehicle code, basically I could have a rotating/rising turret that would move independently of the main body of the vehicle. It was hooked up to work with an xbox360 controller (left stick = movement, the other = turret) and simply utilised blend animations for the turret movement.

It worked nicely, but I thought I'd take it a step further and have it so I could have drivers, gunners and passengers all in one vehicle. Having different players in control of the guns etc isn't too tricky a task. (You have the extra guns as separate mounted objects and then just set the client controlling them to one of the players mounted to the vehicle in a gunner designated mount node spot)

However, the problem arises with developing a nice technique for letting the player select which position within the vehicle they wish to enter. Games such as Planetside rely on you standing on specific locations on the ground around the vehicle when attempting to jump into a spot in the vehicle, I don't much like that method to be honest, I find it to be cumbersome and sometimes you get situations where you can't quite get to where you need to be to get into a specific mount location. Annoying to say the least!

Solution

The system I plan to implement will work like thus: walk up to vehicle, press use button (probably 'e') and a little GUI control will popup, showing the available positions. Click on the position you want and get auto mounted into it. Job's a good'n. I'll simply have to free up and lock the cursor down before and afterwards.

Also, I'll probably put this up as a resource after I finish it if people show some interest.

Anyway, ciao for now.

www.craigfortune.co.uk
craigfortune _at_ gmail.com