Week 4: Progress Report

A hectic week indeed with the completion and release of our first demo which was just in time for our mid-project presentation on Wedensday. The demo was a great sucess as essentialy it consisted of 12 people in the class downloading from our website, changing the ip address in the config file, and then connecting and playing on a server started on one of the back machines.

Everyone seemed delighted by the collision detection, awsome gui effects, model loading, and networking capabilities. Though we still have a long way to go, the team is very pleased that we managed to make it our first milestone with everything intact and ontime.

The rest of the week was a lot more laid back, but we still have work to do to stay on target for an early May release.

Things we accomplished:

• Groller made sure model loading got in this week, fully textured and colored with light values. We are working with the artist to reduce polygon size of the tank and make the included textures compatible with the loader.
• Groller and Kam have created a configuration file manager which allows dynamic model loading and scaling, as well as server IP adress assaignment and client port assaignment.
• Illuminus has split the movement code for the tank from the camera class. This allows more realistic object movement and provides easier acess by other game objects such as physics and gui.
• Kam is working on adding buffered input and output which will facilitate the inclusion of a chat system. He has also made the direct input wrapper functions thier own distinct class.

Things we did not accomplish:

• More raw code for the physics and collision class is in, but it has not been activated due to changes in the core engine and some strange compile errors when trying to acess the new quad tree code.
• Waiting on the artist to provide a clean model of the tank. Efforts to modify the existing 3ds model by programmers' chimpanzee-like brains have result in less than optimal results.
• Frustrum culling is still not in, though it is being worked on. May have to wait while Groleller works with Decompile to assimilate the existing Octree into the physics engine.