Plan for Matt Webster
by Matt W · 02/18/2002 (10:09 pm) · 3 comments
Help wanted
The Tactical Assault team has decided to find a new project lead/director. For more details on the opening, please visit this page.
My thoughts
Well, the first edition of the Garagegames Community Newsletter (name pending) has been submitted to GG staff (over a week bac) for "Editing" and review. I'm not too sure on when they plan on releasing it, but it has a lot of things that would appeal to the many aspects of the GG and independent games community.
One such feature of the newsletter is a case-study of how I designed, planned and coded the radar I am using for my project, Tactical Assault. Tonight, I realized a much more efficient way to deal with the radar and know that I'll have to rewrite much of that article (unless you wanna learn how I made crappy radar)
Hopefully, this newsletter will grow with input from community members and keep all of those looking for information on independent games developement and the games industry in general. More news on this later in the week.
My progress
3d select (tutorial posted by David Meyers)
* Added "null" select (click non-object to clear selection)
* Show "arrow" icon over object selected
Nightvision (base from tutorial posted by Stefan Gruffman)
* Converts to green monochrome (all red and blue is removed)
* Cool looking scanlines (ever play Perfect Dark? The nightvision has scanlines to represent a low resolution digital display)
* Toggleable by user if holding Nightvision item
Radar
* Rewritten to use data collected from ghosted (client-side) objects as opposed to server-side container information
* Optimized for error checking (if you're an observer it won't show up now)
* Up/down arrows added
Level creation
Spent 20 minutes making a simple bridge and watchtower, only to find that I had "108 orphaned polygons". Looking at a post from GG staff, they said it wasn't important. When I try to add the interior to the map it crashes the game :\ I now can't add *any* interiors without the same crash (even the ones already existing in missions... wtf?) I'm thinking it's some wierd bug with my video card (afterall, it's messing up a lot of other things) So I guess I gotta spend some cash on a Geforce 2 and a nice lil' 800mhz chip.
My goals
1. Implement observer mode
2. Implement solid team select (right now it's a bit buggy)
3. Arrange playtest for next weekend (hurray!)
4. Figure out a better way to light with nightvision (point light at player's location is resource intensive)
The Tactical Assault team has decided to find a new project lead/director. For more details on the opening, please visit this page.
My thoughts
Well, the first edition of the Garagegames Community Newsletter (name pending) has been submitted to GG staff (over a week bac) for "Editing" and review. I'm not too sure on when they plan on releasing it, but it has a lot of things that would appeal to the many aspects of the GG and independent games community.
One such feature of the newsletter is a case-study of how I designed, planned and coded the radar I am using for my project, Tactical Assault. Tonight, I realized a much more efficient way to deal with the radar and know that I'll have to rewrite much of that article (unless you wanna learn how I made crappy radar)
Hopefully, this newsletter will grow with input from community members and keep all of those looking for information on independent games developement and the games industry in general. More news on this later in the week.
My progress
3d select (tutorial posted by David Meyers)
* Added "null" select (click non-object to clear selection)
* Show "arrow" icon over object selected
Nightvision (base from tutorial posted by Stefan Gruffman)
* Converts to green monochrome (all red and blue is removed)
* Cool looking scanlines (ever play Perfect Dark? The nightvision has scanlines to represent a low resolution digital display)
* Toggleable by user if holding Nightvision item
Radar
* Rewritten to use data collected from ghosted (client-side) objects as opposed to server-side container information
* Optimized for error checking (if you're an observer it won't show up now)
* Up/down arrows added
Level creation
Spent 20 minutes making a simple bridge and watchtower, only to find that I had "108 orphaned polygons". Looking at a post from GG staff, they said it wasn't important. When I try to add the interior to the map it crashes the game :\ I now can't add *any* interiors without the same crash (even the ones already existing in missions... wtf?) I'm thinking it's some wierd bug with my video card (afterall, it's messing up a lot of other things) So I guess I gotta spend some cash on a Geforce 2 and a nice lil' 800mhz chip.
My goals
1. Implement observer mode
2. Implement solid team select (right now it's a bit buggy)
3. Arrange playtest for next weekend (hurray!)
4. Figure out a better way to light with nightvision (point light at player's location is resource intensive)
About the author
Recent Blogs
• In-game Music• Plan for Matt
• Animated DTS Model Viewer
• Plan for Matt Webster
• Plan for Matt Webster
#2
02/19/2002 (6:28 am)
Matt - we would definately be interested in your new radar as a tutorial. I am real curious to see how you are accessing the positions of all the other players and objects in the game from a client-only implementation. Have you tested your new radar in a true client/server scenario where you have a server on one machine and a client on another?
#3
This weekend we'll have our first finished "test" map and playtest so we'll know for certain if it works.
The radar, unlike my previous version, only processes data that the server has given the client already. This is done by going through all the ghosted objects that are currently "accessed" by the client's connection. If you want to see an example of this, check out guiShapeBase (the thing that prints the names and health bar when you target em)
That gui element scrolls through the list of ghosted objects much like how my radar does. It shoots out a ray to the object's "eye node" for some reason (still unsure on that one :/) and if that isn't visible it'll shoot out to the object's center. If visibile it'll draw the name above it, and if not it well... won't.
I turned off the mask for terrain and interiors so I can locate my bots quicker for testing purposes (I think the variable is "LosMask" or "maskLos" I don't remember) so if you wanna do that (I found it saves a few minutes when a bot spawns in a wierd spot... just follow his name through all the walls!)
More on this to come...
NOTE: I've edited out all junk code, and the comments are so well-explained I think even George Bush could add this to their project :P I'm just debating if I want to hold this out to be released hand-in-hand with the case-study for "attention" reasons for the newsletter.
02/19/2002 (1:44 pm)
No I haven't tested it on a client connecting to a server (I have a p533 witih buggy vid card and a 56k... I can barely run the game itself hehe), but I *know* the radar works hehe.This weekend we'll have our first finished "test" map and playtest so we'll know for certain if it works.
The radar, unlike my previous version, only processes data that the server has given the client already. This is done by going through all the ghosted objects that are currently "accessed" by the client's connection. If you want to see an example of this, check out guiShapeBase (the thing that prints the names and health bar when you target em)
That gui element scrolls through the list of ghosted objects much like how my radar does. It shoots out a ray to the object's "eye node" for some reason (still unsure on that one :/) and if that isn't visible it'll shoot out to the object's center. If visibile it'll draw the name above it, and if not it well... won't.
I turned off the mask for terrain and interiors so I can locate my bots quicker for testing purposes (I think the variable is "LosMask" or "maskLos" I don't remember) so if you wanna do that (I found it saves a few minutes when a bot spawns in a wierd spot... just follow his name through all the walls!)
More on this to come...
NOTE: I've edited out all junk code, and the comments are so well-explained I think even George Bush could add this to their project :P I'm just debating if I want to hold this out to be released hand-in-hand with the case-study for "attention" reasons for the newsletter.
Torque Owner Matt W
EDIT (10 minutes after I posted lol):
I had dglClearBitmapModulation() commented out. DOH! That's fixed, and I just noticed another perk besides less server side processing (which, looking at my original code was overkill) is that dead/cloaked objects are now detected (well, NOT detected) faster. Instant they die now they dissapear from radar. Previously, they had to complete their death animation.
I am currently removing junk code (comments make up over half of the code) and hope to rewrite the case-study from the Community Newsletter mentioned above (and in detail in my previous plan) in order to account for the new changes as well as a tidy little package for you guys to mess with.