Plan for Melv May

Torque Retro 2D steps further back in time!

Spent most of my sparetime this week refining the core-object upon which all objects are derived. Getting the functionality right at this level is extremely important for everything to work right. Lots of work gone into the scenegraph itself.

You can now specify an alignment for the object which is essentially the point at which it will be placed into the world and rotated around e.g. a pivot point. This allows you to refer to you space-ship from the bottom of the graphic or perhaps the center for an asteroids ship. A small but powerful feature especially since you can change it dynamically and all the collision detection adjusts appropriately.

The scenegraph system is working a treat as is the collision detection. I've been working hard on the collision detection side of things here. I've been speaking to Phil Carlisle tonight and he's given me a few pointers to some papers as well as a pointer to the TNL app Zap. The collisions are really easy to setup. Each object can be on a seperate layer and be assigned to a single collision group. The layers are used to order rendering but can also be used to seperate objects for collision (if you want). Setting up a collision simply involves calling '%obj.setupCollision' from the scripts and telling the object which layer(s)/group(s) the object can collide with and the scenegraph takes it from there, reporting any collisions to the scripts.

There are other neat features that you can select using this function which allows you to specify that the object can only collide with a single object (per update) or that the collision detection for that object is automatically turned-off if it collides with anything (handy when you want to do some special-fx and ignore collisions until you're ready).

The next bit I'm working on is the implementation of simple physics for the core-object so that you can position absolutely and/or move with applied forces as well as linkeage to the collision detection system so that the object can automatically 'react' to its surrounding in an appropriate manner for soft(damped) / rigid body collisions.

It's still really fast, 1000 aliens whizzing around like on the dev-snapshot doesn't phase it and hangs around 300fps. With full collision detection on each and every one, this drops to around 180fps which is a big loss but still fast enough. There's plenty of scope for improving the collision detection though.

I'm hoping to be in a position by the weekend to actually start making a simple 2D demo game from it. Nothing spectacular but very bright, flashy and noisy!!

- Melv.