Stardate 64339.5

This week most if not all my work revolved around implementing the core of our game, pods. The realization that we could store meaningful information in the form of locator points in maya was a major plus to our idea. After a naming system was established i wrote code that would look at all the locators for various pod types and then created the data structures to support those points. All said and done every ship can now read a significant amount of data in from it's own model and will manage it's own pods and types appropriately. Also the pods now fire satisfactorily from the ship. 

Progress or something resembling it.

This week we moved away from the twice a week mandatory meetings to a single saturday morning meeting.
I think this is a smart move for two reasons: 1, we won't get burned out as easily meeting only once a week, and 2, meeting Saturday morning gives us a lot of time to work with compared to after school during the week. Also i personally find it easier to code not after a long day at school and work. It is somewhat hard to give up sleeping in Saturday morning but ultimately i think the gains will outweigh the negatives.

This Saturday I implemented a large portion of the functionality of the pods. There is now a base pod class that all ships can interact with by picking up, droping, and shooting. To begin with I added on test pod that makes the ships "laser_strength" variable grow and shrink accordingly. the firing animation if you can call it that is not exactly polished though and the pod sometimes jumps to a new location as it is fired from the ship.

The deeper we dive in to the 3d of xna the more we find that there is much we can use built into the framwork.
 when researching how to generating bounding boxes for the collidable models we found that xna will make bounding sphere's for each seperate mesh of the model as well as for the model as a whole. So by having our artists break up their models into several meshes the bouding spheres will be generated for us. However it was hard for our artist to know how the bounding sphere's where going to look so i made a small windows forms program that incorporates xna and will draw the model loaded with the auto generated bounding spheres.

Coding Away

Between the meetings Friday and Saturday a lot of functional code was put together. My task was to get the controls for the ship working. To get it to the point that this was actually testable Felix and myself put a lot of general coding in various places. The Ship behaves very well now and combined with the work that Felix did on the camera I think that we have an excellent base on which to build the rest of the game.

Confusion. While we are able to make fairly significant progress in some areas other parts of my job confuse me because I don't know what the final product is actually supposed to be. Exactly what the ships are and how they interact with the ship is somewhat up in the air still and i think that we are going to pound out and possibly vote on one issue tomorrow.