Week 4 Round Up


Though I should start updating what I do on a weekly basis, I’ll try to explain the assignments as we go through. Week 4 was actually last week; I’ve just come out of week 5, so I will get some updates ready for tomorrow.

Team Software development

The game our team has been working on is a Bullethell game; the idea is to get the mechanics of the typical space shooter down before we work on anything else, all we know is we want a Bullethell game with multiplayer support. My contribution to the project has been fairly disperse; I haven’t contributed fully to one aspect but I have had input on a number of different aspects.



Nothing fancy yet, but we got some weapons working; paralax scrolling and enemy pathing; and I will also have a Boss entitiy ready to show off for next time.

Console Development

The final goal for this module is to create a billboard based particle system which will be used as a benchmarking tool on the PSP. So far we have only covered the ideas behind memory management and what kind of results we can deduce from a benchmarking tool. We have also been covering optimisation and efficiency in our code. Unfortunately because we are still only going through some of the theory behind the benchmarking tool, there is little work I can show for this module other than a basic Vector and Matrix library written in C which may not even be used in our final assignments.

Interactive 3D

The scope of this module to build and design a game engine written in DirectX11. Because of illness in the third week I was slightly behind on my DirectX framework, so this week I had a bit of catching up to do. I started by setting up a ‘sceneGraph’ and ‘sceneNode’ classes, and then creating a ‘Textured3DCubeNode’ which would inherit from ‘sceneNode’. 

Once I made sure this was working properly, I set about on my next node; ‘ModelNode’. For this I used the ASSIMP (Open Asset Import Library) to load my model files, whilst it’s not perfect and fails to load some file types, it was recommended by the lecturer. We were also provided with a ‘ResourcesManager’ class to handle the loading and storing of these files.



Once I had the model on screen and updating, I had finished this week’s work. I spent the weekend learning HLSL (High Level Shader Language) to try and get specular shading to work, however I was unable to complete it.

Mobile Development

The assignment for this module is to create an application on the android device. This week I got my idea for my assignment app approved. A very brief and rough description of the application follows:

“In this app people can write out their own recipes and these will be saved to a database so that they can retrieve them when and where they like. Users will be able to store information such as ingredients, nutritional information and step by step instructions. They can then rate their recipe and send it to a database to be stored. They can also search the database to find a recipe based on food type and/or rating. The recipes will also contain timing information for the second purpose of the app. Users will be able to set a recipe to “I’m Cooking” which tells the application the user has just started making it. Once one of the timing schedules is hit, the alarm will ring to tell the user to start the next step. For example if you need to start boiling water and 5mins in the app tells you to stop, the phone will set off an alarm to warn you the first stage is over and the next is ready to begin.”
If time permits I would like to add support for SQL database interaction.


The exercises this week were to experiment with the 3 Menu types available on the android: The Icon menu; Context menu and Sub menus. In my spare time I also set up some of the classes I would be likely to need in my assignment project.

Operating Systems

Currently, no coursework has been set or had the specifications laid out. However we are given weekly tasks to complete; this week’s topic was looking at interrupt and polling messages within operating systems. For the task we were given a program that displayed a message box with the mouse co-ordinates every time you clicked the screen; we had to modify this so it could pick up some other buttons being hit with the use of ‘wParam’.

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