Added in smoke and updated some models.

Brian, How do hit points work? Right now, smoke just always displays. In order to change this, I need... well... a centralized way to see how many hit points an enemy has out of how many total and create things based on that. -- JasonArold - 05 Dec 2004

I made the powerpoint presentation for our thing today. I listed about 7 Risks and our solutions, which outline nicely our class structure decisions as well as the design decisions we've made. Brian's UML and Sequence diagrams are AMAZING, so we'll show those separately. I'll get stuff from Mac today before class. -- JasonArold - 30 Nov 2004

Particles and ground texture have been added. We may want to decrease the draw distance or something as things are going pretty slow... I can't tell if this is my fault or not. The biggest chugger would probably be the ground texture. I implemented it so the texture is only a 128x128 bitmap loaded once and tiled for the entire terrain. I don't THINK that this would cause major slowdown issues... I'll tinker with it and see if I can help it out. Also, I think we should up the speeds on some things. Your movement speed and the enemy movement speed would help make the game SEEM like it was going faster. I don't feel scared right now, I want to feel scared. -- JasonArold - 25 Nov 2004

Models are in and doing well under most circumstances. I changed a few things and made it so each instance of a type uses the same model file, saving on space an incredible amount (and making more sense). This involved changing brian's stuff around (sorry brian). Specifically, the constructors now take pointers to model files. I'll move the initializations into their own class perhaps at a later date.

Right now the main concern I have is the incredible slowing that happens with relatively few things on screen. I can't tell if that's the computers in the LAC or some horrible programming thing, but I feel as though I've streamlined as much as I can. I remember our golf game where we had 6 ghosts on screen at the same time, each with 1092 polys, and didn't have ANY noticible problems with slowing... Granted, they weren't textured, but... still. Right now, poly counts are as follow: Enemy tanks: 488 Wall segments: 96 Warehouse segments: 200 Turrets: 180 Turret Towers: 152 Palm Trees: 125

So, with 20 palm trees, 5 enemy tanks, 10 wall segments, 18 warehouse segments, 3 turrets, 3 turret towers, you get 2500 + 2440 + 960 + 3600 + 540 + 456 = 10496 polygons in a single scene. Personally, I don't think this is bad at all and I'd like to be able to get double that. As a result, I'll try simplifying some models. I'd like enemy tanks cut in half, warehouse segments down closer to 75 (really, they're just blocks), turrets down to 100, Turret towers down to 100, and keep palm trees where they are. The thing that's bugging me is I can COUNT the polygons on the palm trees. 5 on each base segment * 3 = 15, plus 8 on each leaf * 5 = 40, total of 55, which is less than HALF of what it lists. I'll check this out...

EDIT: I used Milkshape's Model Cleaner and it reduced the palm tree to 55 triangles. I applied it to everything and took off TONS Of redundant triangles. Enemy tanks are now 160, down from 488. warehouse segments are at 60 from 200. That helped things out a LOT. still a LITTLE slow down, but almost unnoticible. -- JasonArold - 19 Nov 2004

Phewf! I finally got the textures on the models working, which was estimated to take a whole week! So this weekend I'll try and get working on making the textures pretty. I'll also work on finishing up some models. Additionally. I'll work on getting the particle effect system in by next week so we can have lazers and bullets and whatnot. Time permitting, I'll work on dynamic modeling as well, which would put me about 2 weeks ahead of schedule. I doubt that will happen this weekend though, perhaps just the particle system. -- JasonArold - 12 Nov 2004

Model implementation's been added. Some of the models were added to CVS. Also implemented the same lighting from our last project to help out with things like camera movement and whatnot. I'll get working on texture implementation and possibly some crude camera stuff (unless mac likes this). -- JasonArold - 08 Nov 2004

%META:TOPICINFO{author="JasonArold" date="1099772817" format="1.0" version="1.1"}% %META:TOPICPARENT{name="ProjectThree"}% The models for some of the things have been made (turrets, towers, wall sections). Some have 3-4 different models for damage (the walls, for example). I'll be ready to import once we have a game in a condition I can import and view stuff. -- JasonArold - 06 Nov 2004