Bits and Pieces

I've been working on creating all of the art assets for the first part of the project, so there hasn't been much room for programming yet. Mark and I tested out exporting proxy models for the main character, and even then it took a while and caused performance jumps due to the amount of geometry. We're going to try and avoid spheres to cut down on faces, but smoothed cubes make for rather lumpy planetoids. Lighting is also working, but we have to use specific Gamebryo assets or else they get ignored when exported.

Currently I'm working on finishing the main character model so that I can create a KeyFrame file for it to start programming animation sets. Gamebryo doesn't allow you to edit .nif files much after you've exported, so it's very important to put in the extra effort in this stage to avoid problems later. The Animation Editor is fairly intuitive so I didn't spend too much time messing with demos. More on that once the .kf file is ready.

Camera is working great, I can export models from Maya to my app, gravity is programmed (but not tested), and I need to decide between PhysX and Gamebryo collisions.

Gamebryo will probably be easier to control for my own stuff, but PhysX will be better for objects that need to bounce around. I wonder how hard it would be to do some of each, and still have them interact? Probably harder then I want to deal with, but it's something to look into.

Camera

Spent a few hours today figuring out camera and mouse/keyboard ui in Gamebryo. I have most of a basic system for flying around working, just need to debug it then adapt it for running around spheres and having alternate modes to distinguish running and jumping.

Alternative project idea

Probably better suited to a pure CS major then me, but something that really needs to be made:

A better way to manage linking multiple libraries together, so people like me don't have to spend hours trying to figure out all the different directories that need to be added to the project settings.

Maybe something that attempts to compile it, reads through the errors, and searches your computer / the internet to figure out what needs to be linked and what needs to be installed?

The current system has been a struggle for me every time I've had to install new SDK's onto a machine, and is almost as frustrating as debugging, only without that rewarding feeling of a working system you get when the bug is fixed.


Anyways, I've finally gotten Gamebryo to compile, though PhysX is still complaining about a bunch of classes not being defined (classes like NxClothMesh, which apparently don't appear anywhere in the SDK files). I'm just going to skip that for now and get some basic stuff running in Gamebryo, get back to PhysX when it matters and there are people nearby who have gotten it to work before.