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19day

2007-02-23

Zygote Dev Journal (or how I spent my winter vacation)

Filed under: General, zygote — 19day @ 06:54:38

I took a week off from work, not really for any reason, just to relax.

And relax I have, to the point where I’ve got nocturnal again. Oh, it wasn’t a-purpose, my sleeping had been very chaotic since day 1, going to bed at 6pm, waking at 3 in the morning, and then lounging about. But still my body is quite aware that it’s not sleeping at the right times, since the glare of the midday sun is painful and I feel in a zombie state, despite not actually needing to sleep at that time.

And having the week off, you’d think I’d have lots of time to work on Zygote, but alas, I haven’t… working on it that is, I’ve slept a lot, but not so much work.

Collision detection hasn’t been touched, though I bought a new big book on 3d game math topics, which has all sorts of lamdas and a-knots and matricies and stuff, so I’m sure it will help.

To distract myself from the real work that is tricky, I’ve been playing with eye candy instead. I’ve been working on… ah… hmm.. a debris field. Well, my imagination had it as being like the flecks of debris you see with underwater cameras. It’s a useful thing since it shows that you are moving. Unfortunately, at the moment, they kind of look like stars. Also, at sufficient ranges, they wink on and off as they alias. The trouble I’m having is that I’ve implemented the system as a particle cloud, in an axis-aligned box. The particles have a slow downward drift, and if they exit the box, they die and respawn at the top. But at a sufficiently high particle count, the game bogs down (on eye candy, that’s bad). The particle count has to be high when the size of the box is enlarged to contain a game level.

The reason something that simple would bog down the engine has partly to do with my simulated dynamics. Oh, it’s quite crappy, but the idea is that as you pass by the particles, or shoot through them, or what not, they spread apart, not in any mathematically correct way, but I’ve just been trying to get that working at all. And that requires all sorts of collision detection (simple detection, but still, more computation).

I’m currently experimenting with having the particle cloud bounds follow the player, and perhaps not having them descend. This will allow a larger concentration appear in your field of view, with a fewer particle count. The trick is that they would continually die and respawn (this time they would need to appear randomly in the plane of direction so as you move it doesn’t look like they’ve all suddenly started to snow from the top). I’m not entirely sure how to make that work. I might just give the whole thing up as needlessly complicated, and icky.

I’ve also implemented a basic targeting reticle to go along with my change to allow auto-targeting an enemy. It’s a little graphic that, within the threshold, as you point more directly at the enemy, the reticle gets smaller and tighter and brighter. It’s hard to describe, and I may not keep it that way, since I liked the idea of it rotating. I might use the rotation as an indication of lock-on, so you can move away and still fire directly at the enemy.

What else is going on… well, I got my watch strap adjusted. It’s a metal one so I had to take it in to have it done. It was a christmas gift from Alicia, a nice silver clockwork watch with 3 sub-dials, one for 24 hour time, day of month and day of week. It took a while to figure out how to set it, I guess my timex digital watches have spoiled me. Anyway, it’s very classy.

Also, my brother, for some reason asked me to render a truck tire and rim. I dunno, I followed a tutorial (badly) for the tire, and winged it for the rim, Here it is for those who like links in blogs.

Vacation is nearly over, I guess I’ll just cry for the next 3 days.

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