Plan for Justin Mette

With the release of V12 last week, the development team for Myrmidon has started building prototypes and getting used to the new engine. So far, things are looking rather good. Following is a summary of the accomplishments by the team over the last week (note this is written in the third person):

(*) The requirements for Phase One of Myrmidon have been solidified. This phase will start on September 1st and run for 8 weeks. The features incorporated into Phase One focus on infrastructure (both code and artwork).
(*) Justin finally returns from vacation on Wednesday of this week. It was brutal because the engine was released on the evening before his 12 day trip - LMAO. The good news is that while on vacation, Justin designed the first mission for Myrmidon, called "Research Station".
(*) Dave has been learning about user interface in V12 and has started prototyping the Compass Control for the HUD.
(*) Justin is prototyping movement and camera control similar to Asheron's Call.
(*) Ryan is working on the game inner lobby as well as a new startup screen.
(*) Mark is fleshing out the background storyline for Myrmidon.
(*) Forums/Chat topics discussed this week include: Inner Lobby, Enemies, and V12 related issues.
(*) We are in serious need of an art lead for the project. Someone who can incorporate terrain, models, animations, etc into the V12 engine and who also can lead a small team of artists in realizing the visual aspects of Myrmidon. We have been contacted by a few artists and are currently evaluating their skills for inclusion into the team.

On a personal note, I spent about 16 hours yesterday (eyes were bleeding) working on implementing movement and camera controls in the V12 test app similar to those found in Asheron's Call. This type of control mechanism is what Myrmidon will employ. Anyhow, the changes to movement control were pretty easy and ended up being all in script. The only thing I have to do now is figure out how to add a walking animation - which I am going to wait for the art lead to help with. So then I moved onto camera control and spent quite a while in the engine figuring out how the first/third person camera, "orbit camera", and the "chase queue" worked. Unfortunately, the "orbit" camera doesn't help me because it is a separate object in the world. You see, I need to control the player and camera from the keyboard at one time so I it ends up that I have to enhance the "third-person" camera support already in the engine. I ended the day yesterday finally locating the best place in the engine to make the modifications and now just have to hook it up to the scripts.

Finally, I got Max Payne for my birthday on Monday and have started playing that. It's a single player game that provides a nice 1/2 hour distraction from Myrmidon/V12 coding/learning during the day. "Bullet Time" is really, really cool. If you want to play with "bullet time" in the V12 Test App, try dropping the console and typing "$timeScale = 0.2"!