Some people have been curious what I've been up to, so I'm starting this thread to post updates on the little things on an arbitrary basis. This isn't intended to be a discussion thread, but rather a place to dump information about what I'm currently working on, so please don't post questions or request that I work on something else instead. If you have a request, post it in the request/feedback forum.
That said, you're probably well aware of some of the recent stuff I've been working on, namely reflective water with fragment programs, skeletal animation support, rscript support on skeletal models, the jersey, etc., so I'll just start with last night:
Last night was a pain -- one of those nights were you spend many hours to implement one small, yet difficult, feature. I had to do it the quick and dirty hack way, too, since I want it done for dpcon. Aside from tweaking the rigging on the model (which needs constant work as vertexes never seem to go where you want them to), I worked on attaching a weapon model to the player hand. Quaternions, matrices, vectors, transpositions, translations, Euler angles, arctangents, Greek symbols... I was up until 6am, and my brain is still fried. I was supposed to be done with that crap when I got out of college.
These things never seem to work out the way they're supposed to. I'd get the yaw right, but the pitch would be wrong and it would spin the wrong way, then I go to figure out the whole thing is whacked out -- fortunately I'd experienced that before and it was due to the world matrix being different then the model matrix or some such crap -- basically I had to switch the rows and columns around, but there were other issues beyond that. And the fact that I couldn't figure out which Greek symbol corresponded to yaw/pitch/roll because every site I brought up on google said something different didn't help. Nobody can explain the frustrations of matrix mathematics. You have to experience them for yourself.
Anyway, I got it all squared away:
http://www.digitalpaint.org/images/devel/biggun.jpgHeh heh, that's what the carbine ground weapon looks like at its actual size (what you see spinning around on the ground). Obviously it's been scaled down and textured now.
I did a crappy face texture that'll need to be redone after dpcon when I have more time. Also figured out how to get animations in. The character will probably need to be completely reanimated properly after dpcon (if I can even get it animated in the first place).
Good news. The bounding box fits the new player model
perfectly. No more shooting through heads... at least while it's standing, making a crouching animation low enough might be a completely new story.
Tonight's plan, if I'm still functional:
- Update the dpcon page with detailed directions and photos (the place is kind of hard to find).
- Whip up a quick map that does a better job of showing off the water, take a screenshot, and submit it to PQ's POTD -- hopefully generate some last-minute interest in DPCon.
- Invade a small to moderately sized country to further plans of word domination.
- Create some player animations.*
- Sleep.*
* These tasks may not be completed in the time alloted.
