Team work is key!

Last week we added in the early level design into the main game engine. Due to good early planning most of this went very smoothly but there was one issue that caused concern. We were finding that the collision system used was doing far too much work and slowing the game down. Luckily for us we employ the author of the collision system and I was able to call him in to help out. Within a few hours he had fixed some bugs and improved it to work great for our needs.

Coding this week has very much been making the new level work and some fine tuning had to be reported back to the level artist. I am quoting what the programmer reported to the artist so that anyone reading this can get some idea of the sort of issues that come up when developing a game.

• The vertical route (i.e. on the z-axis) down through the 4 generators is too narrow. The scale I gave you for the width of the man must’ve been slightly out. The player almost gets in there, but gets stuck once almost inside. I would suggest moving the generators outwards from each other by 1/5th of the distance they are already apart. That should be enough.

• The bricks near the emplacement, because they have some height, can’t be walked over. I could probably fix this programmatically fairly easily, but if it’s just as easy for you to provide the bricks as a separate model, then I could import them that way and exclude them from collision. I’ll have a bash at a code tweak first and let you know.

• Aside from that, there were no problems with the geometry. If you can tweak those generator positions, and then re-upload the level, I’ll confirm they work ASAP.

• One other issue. The forklift texture was a TGA, but in the .X file, it’s referred to as a BMP, so it couldn’t load. No problem though, since this was just a test level!

Later the artist reported back with a new version of the level;

• Corrected collision around generators/ furnaces
• Converted the map to use separate meshes for collision and visuals
• Added detail to the warehouse area and broken wall
• Added collision meshes for complex geometry
• Added test texture to walls
• Testing the Multi-sub object material on walls
• Created a layer system in 3ds max to make object selection easier
• Export no longer looks for BMP textures

Here’s an image of the current test level from within 3ds max;

Cheers, boos and excitement!

As reported in the blog last week the lead programmer was going to experiment with crowd sounds to add atmosphere. Using just some basic sound effects the game has taken on a whole new dimension. Now when you cut someone down the crowd cheer you and get excited but if you’re taken down the crowd boos at your poor performance. We’re looking to add to this in the coming weeks by adding more sounds, music and voice overs.

This entry was posted by The Game Creators, on Monday, January 26th, 2009 at 10:27 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.