Well...this is it. I spent all week on a 5000 word final paper for my fourth year class, but it's finally done (pretty much). Everything else is now out of the way and I'm left with one hard question to do before the exam. I have 1 week. I'm very worried. I'm STILL not sure whether I'm going to attempt the FMOD question, which after looking at it today seems like an unbelieveable pain in the ass, or if I'm going to dive hardcore into the AI question and just hope for good results.
My only strategy going into this is to ask somebody tomorrow during GDW if the FMOD question is perhaps, as I'd previously heard, "easy" and I'm just not seing something. If it isn't then I honestly don't know if I'm going to be able to pull off the AI question. Here goes nothing.
Monday, 26 November 2012
Monday, 19 November 2012
A short, brutal road ahead.
I haven’t made much of any progress this week in terms of programming. Most of my MIGS week off was spent preparing my business assignment and doing some preliminary work for the final paper of my critical game theory class, in which I’ll have to write an adventure game and then do a critical analysis of it. It’s meant to substitute the capstone project which I won’t be in until next year, and I’m still not sure if I traded up or down. At least I’m writing, I guess.
I did however do some thinking about what I’m going to do in terms of the last hard question I need in order to write the final exam. I’m leaning more and more towards looking for some assistance and trying to get the audio question done, which again, I’ve heard is simpler than AI. It's not that I think the AI would be extremely difficult, but I know that it will be time consuming, and I find myself extremely lacking in that department, despite my efforts.
Everything is culminating, and I'm rapidly losing faith that things will turn out positively.
Monday, 12 November 2012
One question left
This week I worked through the rest of the camera question which it turns out I was not nearly as done as I had previously thought. I ended up completely re-working the cinematic camera so that it kept the moving object in frame while it travelled around a wall that I set up in my pre-determined path. Most of the work was just playing with values in order to get it looking right, so I set up a text box to display the cameras x, y and z values in order to track where it was moving. After that I spent entirely too much time working on the frustum, but was able to finish just before my demo time.
Regardless, it's finished and now I can focus on the one hard question I need to do in order to write the exam. I'm going to be trying the leveled-up AI question, which should be fairly easy to do once I get going. The hardest part, I feel, will be figuring out the basics of AI and how to get started implementing it. After that I feel it will just be a matter of adapting the process to whichever behaviour I'm working on.
My back-up plan if the AL question falls through is to do the sound question, which I've heard is "easy", but what others' criteria of "easy" is could be anything. I've worked with fmod before, I think, so I may take a look at it.
Regardless, it's finished and now I can focus on the one hard question I need to do in order to write the exam. I'm going to be trying the leveled-up AI question, which should be fairly easy to do once I get going. The hardest part, I feel, will be figuring out the basics of AI and how to get started implementing it. After that I feel it will just be a matter of adapting the process to whichever behaviour I'm working on.
My back-up plan if the AL question falls through is to do the sound question, which I've heard is "easy", but what others' criteria of "easy" is could be anything. I've worked with fmod before, I think, so I may take a look at it.
Monday, 5 November 2012
A change of Plan
This week I re-examined my time frame and realised that it would be difficult to learn to program an entirely new concept such as morphing, so I looked at all the available questions again and found that number 7 was a fairly simple camera assignment. I am happy to say that after only a few hours of work I am about 95% done that question and should be ready to present well before Friday.
My main problem going into the question was that it required an object to be going moving on its own so that one of the cameras could always be focused on it. I'd never done that before, so working out some of the logic behind it took probably the longest chunk of time.
My other problem came about when I tried to implement the maya camera as the fifth camera and ended up with an un-handled exception problem. I'd had problems with the maya cam before, so I sort of half expected it to happen, but unfortunately didn't know how I was going to fix it. After looking through other assignments I'd done that had a working maya cam, I realised that in my haste I had included the attach camera code but had neglected to create a separate camera for that particular one. Basically I had 5 attach camera commands and 4 available cameras. Once I fixed that it worked perfectly, and now all I really have left is to draw each camera's position and frustum.
My main problem going into the question was that it required an object to be going moving on its own so that one of the cameras could always be focused on it. I'd never done that before, so working out some of the logic behind it took probably the longest chunk of time.
My other problem came about when I tried to implement the maya camera as the fifth camera and ended up with an un-handled exception problem. I'd had problems with the maya cam before, so I sort of half expected it to happen, but unfortunately didn't know how I was going to fix it. After looking through other assignments I'd done that had a working maya cam, I realised that in my haste I had included the attach camera code but had neglected to create a separate camera for that particular one. Basically I had 5 attach camera commands and 4 available cameras. Once I fixed that it worked perfectly, and now all I really have left is to draw each camera's position and frustum.
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