lack of progress report

yay for Bezier curves
Despite having been out of school for two weeks, I have not managed to make much progress on my project. I did a lot of thinking about my animation system though, and I've decided that I will try to implement a simple version of Maya's graph editor.

My original plan to do frame by frame animation with linear interpolation between frames doesn't seem good enough after animating with Maya. I need the smoothness and slow in/slow out that gives the movement weight and makes it convincing. Also, the ability to set keyframes at any point in the animation, rather than regular intervals, will help with the timing.

Hopefully I'll have something interesting to show before I have to go back to school in two more weeks.

texture

I was given a model to texture in rendering class:



This is my first time texturing a 3D model. It's two 1024x1024 colour maps, spec maps, and bump maps (for a total of 6 images).

I gave her my eye.

character design

An assignment for my drawing class:



And yeah, that's a shovel.


[edit: flats]

cutout animation

Yesterday I learned that the style of animation I'm going to use in my game is called cutout animation. Two examples of it can be seen here and here. The best example of the use of this technique in a game is probably Odin Sphere:



My implementation is going to be rather primitive looking compared to this though.

inverse kinematics

After discovering the Joint and IK Handle tools in Maya, I decided to implement IK in my animation editor:



It works much better for animation than the particles and constraints; it's like a cross between that system and the bone hierarchy in the old version. I used Cyclic Coordinate Descent for the IK solver.

old pixel art

Some old sprites for my RPG that never got made:



Some of the pixels were shamelessly ripped from Seiken Densetsu 3 and Chrono Trigger sprites.


Perfect Dark mod for Soldat, Part I:



Part II:



For this mod I also did all the little in-game graphics and ripped the sounds directly out of Perfect Dark using an N64 emulator. The second part was made 2 years after the first part, and was never fully completed.

sprite

Based on the last random face:





The rock tile was inspired by Cave Story.

more physics

Another simple physics test:



I made the wheels "turn" - when a particle is in contact with a line segment, and the left or right key is pressed, a force perpendicular to the line is applied to the particle. It's pretty fun to play with.

planets

I made these a long time ago, but I still like them.







I'm pretty sure I used this planet tutorial and this starfield tutorial.

reboot

Quite possibly the best show ever.

It looks like every episode has been uploaded onto youtube, so I'll have to go and watch them all. Here's the first part of the first episode.

editor rewrite

The fourth version of my character/model/animation editor, in progress:



I got rid of the bone hierarchy and cleaned up the interface; it's easier and more fun to use now. I've been working with Maya for a few weeks at school so I ended up stealing some interface ideas and I have plans to incorporate more Maya-like features when I re-implement the animation stuff.

game music

One of my more recent discoveries in game music archives is Mirsoft: World of Game Music. They've got DOS game music in several different formats, mainly S3M, MOD, and MIDI. I was surprised that they don't have the Tyrian soundtrack in LDS format, but that can be found here.

Zophar's Domain is a great source for game music. It doesn't seem to be updated anymore, but it is probably the best place to get NSF (NES) and SPC (SNES) files. There are also various sites dedicated to certain formats: USF Central (N64), GSF Central (GBA), PSF Central (PS/PS2).

Also available for download is Cave Story music, which is playable using OrganyaView (click on the icon located at 2004, Music), all of Nifflas' music, and Wings 2 music.

random face 02

I coloured this one at school, no tablet:

side scroller physics

I was working on porting my collision detection stuff from C++ to C#:



It's a simple AABB colliding with line segments using SAT for collision detection and response. I added friction so it's not sliding around everywhere, but this kind of physics doesn't seem appropriate for this game. I'm going to try to make it work more like old side scrolling SNES games, where the movement is more predictable and easier to control.

Also I made a little particle physics test. It's surprisingly easy to implement this kind of system:

random face

old programs

I came across my old programming stuff from highschool. These are some of the more interesting examples.

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QBasic

Behold, my first game!






Some silly ASCII animations:





I was a Star Wars junkie back then. This was made with the drawing commands:




Fake scandisk with animated progress bar:




Connect Four. No AI or win detection though:

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Turing

A little tile based program with an animated player-controlled character and collision detection. I came up with an interesting method of faking the tile transparency so the tree tiles would overlap the character properly. The tiles were stolen from various SNES games but I made the sprites myself, including walking animations:





Obligatory Pong clone:




The Maya were another one of my obsessions. This program takes a date and calculates the Mayan long count date from it, then displays it in Mayan numbers:

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Visual Basic 6


A clone of Flying Pictures which is a clone of Flipull. Graphics are from Gundam Wing:




Some tile map editor, more stolen tiles:




Paint program:




A clone of that slime volleyball game, no scoring and no collision with the net though. Background stolen from Gundam Wing: Endless Duel:




A game I made with my friend Michelle. We had to do a "who wants to be a millionaire" type game. Yep, Gundam Wing was yet another one of my highschool obsessions. The graphics were made by me and I animated Heero; he blinks, moves his eyebrows, shifts his eyes, and looks like he's talking while the text is appearing. It's a pretty cool effect:





I wanted to make an RPG but never got past the tiling graphics/animated character/collision detection stage. The sprite in the middle is mine:

bunnydev

I really suck at coming up with names for things. BunnyDev seems to fit though.

The icon is based on the arctic hare:



=:3

c++ vs c#

One question I keep coming back to is whether or not I should switch to using C# and Managed DirectX instead of C++ and unmanaged DirectX for my game. (I also considered XNA, but decided against it for various reasons.)

I'm a lot more productive in C# than C++ and I'm already using C#/MDX for my tools so it is quite tempting. However MDX is no longer being developed, and I'm not sure what kind of features it might be missing compared to native DX, if any.

I already have a lot of working C++ code, but it shouldn't be too hard to port it. Any drop in performance would probably be negligible and I'm not too concerned with cross-platformedness at the moment.

Another thing about C++ is that it makes me feel like a Real Programmer™, which is kind of stupid, but I spent long months learning the intricacies of the language and I'm hesitant to give it up now even though a lot of what I learned also applies to C#.

The most important thing should be to get things done, but still, it's a tough choice.

sketch dump

I have pages and pages of notes and sketches that I make while trying to figure stuff out. These are some of the better ones.