Convert
to dx9
3) Incorproate
the explosion into the project
4) Scorch
marks
5) Mini
map
6) TRON
blur!
Thanks a bunch George!
Well, Friday before a long holiday. I was hoping to get more
done today. Started out working with Scott to get the new graphics for the
political machine map. We sat down and worked out step by step (with some help
from Alex) the procedure to make the map. We’ve got to come up with some
automated way of doing this. Every little tweak is going to require some manual
editing.
Scott also showed us some HalfLife2 movies. Is that game
going to be awesome or what?! The really did a good job with the physics. I know
they’re really pushing that too because one movie was all about the physics
engine. Are they using Havok?
I then got into a futures discussion with Alex and George
about the cool effects we can do in GalCiv2.
We took a break for lunch, and in the middle of lunch, we
got into our weekly meeting. Man, that was a long meeting. We spent about an
hour discussing the merits of “m_ulVar” versus “this->ulVar”. Really, I’m
used to using the “m_” notation. I think it’s what you see nowadays in all the
code books. Other peoples code etc. This kind of standardized variable naming
makes reading other peoples code much simpler.
[queue violins]
But, alas, I fall prey to legacy systems. We’re not doing
that here anytime in the near future. For consistency sake, I fall on my sword.
My member variables will be naked in the world. They will fight with other
local variables for name space. At least our globals still use “g_”.
[end violins]
Enough of that talk. Let’s move onto something positive that
happened today. We got an explosion animation from MAX!!! Woo hoo! Now we can
blow up our ships with style. It didn’t come easy though. Our first try didn’t
work. We couldn’t export a space warp as an animation that DX9 would
understand. Kris and Alex had to do some fancy things to get this to work. Our
savior, MaxScript. I love that you can do that in max. Kris came up with the
initial script to move the objects and I tweaked it a little bit to get the
rotations in. Now we can get random animations with a little script.
for
i = 1 to selection.count do
(
move
selection[i] [random -20 20,random -20 20,random -20 20];
rot
= eulerangles (random -180 180) (random -180 180) (random -180 180);
rotate
selection[i] rot;
)
