Video Update #4 . . . sorry for the delay!

So, Valentines weekend was last week, so I apologize for the delay in updates, but Love knows no deadlines. ;)

There is SOOOOooooo much going on right now in the game it's going to be hard to explain it all.

First here's the video for Video Update #4:



This is sadly the last video we shall see in this environment. . . it also marks the last time we'll see characters without animation. . .

What's this?? you ask. Well, not to be too dramatic but the truth is I started the game over, almost from scratch! . . . Why??? Well, three reasons,

1. The code was getting increasingly bloated with code that for whatever reason I had written but abandoned along the way. These things happen when you are developing "straight ahead" to borrow a term from my animation background. I'd think of a cool feature I wanted to add and without really thinking it through would plow into coding said feature. Then later on I'd realize I needed to do something a different way or worse decide not to use that feature at all and I would abandon that code I so feverishly added. This presents a lot of problems later on as I end up with tons of extra code in the project that I'm not sure I can delete because I can't remember if I had abandoned all of the code in the file or just snippets or what. So, to fix this I needed to start a new project and move over only those code files that were still relevant to the game.

2. I never made a Windows copy of my game. On the surface this isn't really a problem, I'm making the game for the Xbox 360, not to run on Windows Pc's so why do I need a version of the game that will run on Windows as well?? The answer is, because it speeds up the development cycle immensely if I don't have to recompile the game and redeploy the game to the Xbox each time I make a minor change. Now that I have both a windows and a Xbox copy of the game, I can do a lot of testing on the windows side without ever sending it to the Xbox which opens up the ability to use profiling tools that are only available on the PC. Also, I can now use SunBurn's editor to edit the textures and lights in my game in real time which is also a huge win.

3. I have to abandon my animation clip management in favor of using XNAnimation api instead. This is actually a sad thing for me, I was quite proud of the fact that I had successfully implemented Brian Phelps animation clip manager in my game. However, since the method requires a specific content processor to work, if I use the anim clip manager then I can't light my characters with SunBurn. . . For my next game I will tackle the daunting task of fixing this problem, but since the deadline for the game is a mere 15 days away, it's time to cut anything that can be cut and make this game as good as it can be in that very very short amount of time.

So, this all seems very doom and gloom I'm sure, but believe me when I say things are moving much more swiftly now! I've redesigned the Fiji level and re-sculpted all the terrain. I've re-rigged Captain Spice so that he is now actually three separate rigs. I've got a rig for his body, another for his face, and still another for his cape. This allows me to keep all the controls I had in the animClipManager and still stay under the requirement of 74 bones or less per entity sent to the GPU. It does introduce a kinda convoluted workflow where I animate with the whole rig but export three separate baked out rigs from Maya, but thankfully I've got that scripted in .mel (good thing I'm a character rigger by day ;) ) so this was only a couple of hours to transfer him over. I've also got the menu system working and re-skinned to be much more appealing and match the game's style. I've got the bare-bones save game working too, but load game is still not working.

Tonight I plan on converting the girl rigs, and getting their path-finding in this new game. This will be the first time I'll be able to see them lit in the engine so I'm excited for that! I'll also move over the BEPU physics engine to this new game as well.

SO the next video update will be this Sunday, and it will include ALL of the new features as well as some new enemies, and if there is any luck in this world I'll have the HUD and actual gameplay implemented as well!

So, Stay tuned there are great things to come!