Presentation, Collision and Sound

Our group got to talking and we feel like the presentation went pretty well.  We've been spending some time working together which has been a huge help.

I was having a lot of trouble with the collision detection for a while though.  Even now, it's been a little crazy acting.  For the demo, we got the collision to be EXTREMELY basic so it wasn't that interesting to look at.  We've been claiming that the way it works wasn't a bug... it was a feature.  Curtis and I were working on it trying to find the difference in the midpoint of each of the objects that were colliding, but since we were having some of that not working, we, for the demo, just had it jump back to where it was before the collision with a new velocity of (0,0).  Then gravity would just start taking affect again.

When it's coming strait on, it just looks like it's bouncing, but at any angle, it looks like it sticks.  For the demo that was fine, but our next skirmish will bring a much better detection.

One of the projects that I've been put on is helping the artists with keeping organized.  Part of that consists of getting the artists to collaborate with files, the other is keeping those files organized, including file names.  After speaking with Steven and Lukas, we started on a simple naming convention and we'll start implementing it over the weekend.

I really do think that moving to weekly pushes is going to help us stay focused.  Most of our work was done in the few days before our goals need to be done, so cutting that time down is really going to help us work productively and output a great game.

Collision Reworking

So it seems like collision detection has unearthed some other major projects.  Yay!  The code for collision detection "should" work, but when it came time to test it, we ran into some really hefty snags.  See, here was the problem:

We had three classes: GenericObject, PhysicsObject and Player (whose parent was PhysicsObject).  The problem lies in that PhysicsObjects are abstract so we'd have to create another class to inherit from Physics to do some work.  That would work, but then it caused some issues with detection of collisions. So some reworking of our structure is the next big step.  We have a plan which will make it much easier (using inheritance for different types of objects) and make collision a breeze, but it'll take a day or two to implement.

I never thought that making a working game would really be this consuming.  I think for the most part, we are going to be behind for Thursday (at least with collision...  the rest seems pretty close), but in the end, all the work we are doing now is going to make an AWESOME game.  Each of us really gets excited about working on it and being able to see our progress really makes a difference.

Work Continues

Work continues on the Gravity Shift game.  I'm still working on the collision detection, but this weekend has been a little busy (since Thursday) setting up for Halloween and Murder Mystery Dinners.

But today (Sunday) will be a good working day to get some more work done.

I've been looking at the code and I really feel like I'm going to have to change quite a bit because we really want to deal with two types of objects.  The first part is already done: Gravity-affected objects.  This includes the player and any environmental object that we want to respond the change in gravity.  The second is objects that the player (and other gravity-affected objects) can run into but is a non-gravity-affected object.  And then easily have them coordinate with the level editor...

I've got my work cut out for me.

As for Git, I feel like I've gotten the kinks worked out.  There were some problems which a few of us had, but I think that it is all taken care of and it should be easy from here on out.  Whew.

Collision Detection

I'm moving onto working with the collision detection for the game.  From what Tyler was saying, he tried a simple implementation that didn't seem to work.  His ideas were about the same as what I was thinking of implementing, so I think I'm going to have to do some drawing-board work for a little bit here.

I haven't done a whole lot of coding as much as I have been pouring over the code.  Tyler had some issues that he didn't know how to address which I'm working on solving but we'll see.  I'll have some more time tomorrow to work on it and I hopefully can get some real work done.