Plan for Toby W. Allen

NinjaSticks
NS is up into crush time... and without much to crunch really. We have about three working levels, a semi finished GUI, trees, rocks, and 3ds models. We initially set this game to launch for the fresher's fair, which is next week, the 22nd, 23rd and 30th of September. Over 24,000 student come into the fair to sign up to societies like ours and we really wanted to show this off.

This doesn't seem possible now - NS is an ambitious project, with which we hit many serious problem. These problems are linked to internal organisation of the society (getting bugtrackers up, etc...), additionally, getting members to partake into the project has been difficult due to the amount of members we have and the ones that really want to get cracking on this. This in turn limited our abilities on certain aspect of the game, specifically coding and art. While the concept art side of things was fine, the actual modeling and content creation was limited to myself and Joe Shellard, our head of Art. While Joe was learning, I was working on a lot of models and all this with other aspects of the game and the society - hence I was madly busy.

Another main problem we had, was with the motion capturing. We've been very proud of being able to do this, but the useable results have been far from what we expected. The system at the University is not adequate for our needs, it was good at showing some on-screen nodes for their Biomechanics course, but useless for actual production of content. This was highly due to the limitation of the system in that we we're able to capture a whole body. Which we also presumed would be ok, as we could link in the upper body and lower body together - A big no no, we've learnt now. This is not to say it was a total failure. I'm very happy to fail, if we are able to learn something out of it; and that we have, we are planning on possibly using mocap some more next year, at Leeds Met, not Leeds Uni, to see if we can't get it done properly. Our members that participated have certainly learnt a lot.

Linked into this subject, I wanted to talk about the player character for NS. We've have zillions of problems with this, and still do, which limites our game to showing levels without any real players. The main problem occurs with the exporting, as random vertices are said not to have any skin weights, but the envelopes, the weight table and the dump file show that these vertices contain a weight value, it's hard for me to understand where the issue is. We are able to export with the 'Collapse Transformation' off, but it doesn't help us when we have this ticked. Additionally, the root animation doesn’t seem to link into the model, while it's all correctly (as far as I know) setup. I've followed the tutorials and smd videos, and yet see no viable results. We have Sticky in his t-pose without any progress.

If someone can help us with this, we would much much appreciate it - I have the other models ready and if we can get a fully working player model, then I can do the rest with the other models, but I can't seem to figure out any of the problems with this model. Check out Sticky The player model to download our player model - which is highly basic in structure, which is why I don't get these issues.

We have done something cool for the moment - which is while we're (me) working on GDS Leeds 2.0's website, we've recently added Gallery to our geeklog system, which has allowed us to add the whole of the NS development and Concept art into one big album which can be found here

(Click me....)

Our Next Project
NS is in a bit of hiatus for the moment - The committee will be meeting soon (Sunday?) to discuss the future game project for Torque (TGE or TSE is yet to be decided). What we are thinking it making this more of a Torque-ready game. We have now a year's experience with this engine, actually it's only six month. So in retrospect we've done a lot. Right, so we would make it either a racing or FPS/Third person base game. This will not only allow members to base features they want to create on already released games, but it will convey the structure of the engine and scripts to them in a manner which they can directly relate to due to the amount of games released in both areas. We are more likely to release something along the lines of an adventure cold war type effort - The committee has yet to decide on various projects, and then get member approval as to which will be made. There are also possibilities into splitting the projects up - this is a difficult thing to do, with the development knowledge of the committee and members being quite different. Additionally, member involvement into smaller projects could risk not learning how to work in bigger teams, on a bigger project. Not sure how to go about this, but this is my secretary and my decision to push forward with.

Toby W. Allen
President
GDS Leeds