Yes, I’ve started working on this thing again, despite the awfulness of the game in terms of both quality and subject matter. Asylum has completely stalled, no idea when I’ll feel like working on it again. But Zygote is sort of amusing in it’s own hideous mathematical kind of way.

A couple of things I’ve been trying to work on:

Frustum culling, nearly have this working, only a slight change in the order of matrix multiplication was needed, sad really, I might have gotten the full mark for it if I had been clear-headed. There is still an issue with it with the near and far planes, it doesn’t respect them, and the culling doesn’t cut the stuff behind you. Still it’s an improvement.

I’ve added the beginnings of a targetting system for the player. I have another key bound to the feature right now, so that when you’re within a certain angle of an enemy, the shot you fire goes right at it. This helps with accuracy problems (both for the game and the player). I’ll have to have it pick the closer of available targets. I was also thinking of having a targetting reticle that appears when you are in the angle threshold, and maybe a lockon system, so if you maintain an enemy in that zone long enough the reticle is solid (unless you turn too far away) and your next shot will go right at it. Right now the shots merely go straight from the player to the enemy, I haven’t decided if shots should be able to track. Probably not given how that would detract yet further from the reality of the environment, heh.

The thing I’ve mostly recently been working on is a method of fixing enemy rotation. In the version I submitted for my graphics project, I was only barely in time able to find a method to make the enemy point at the player, via a simply-calculated lookat matrix. However, it didn’t allow a gradual tracking with the player, it just, frame by frame, pointed right at the player. I finally was able to get something working late last night that appears to work properly, but I only managed to get it working while in the middle of writing an email to my former graphic professor. I decided to send the email anyway since I could still be totally messing this up.

And I might as well close with what is the effective Zygote programmers slogan, “’straight to hell”.