White Wind

Game: Need For Horse
Name: Chua Wei Kar
Admin: 052087M

Week 1 - Week 2

First day of school, tired....
We grouped ourselves up into 4 person per team and started brainstorming on our game.
Some wanted Racing game, some wanted RTS(Real Time Strategy) game.
Majority chose Racing game, but THE minority didn't give up......
What can he do??? NOTHING....HAHAHAHAHHAHAHA....
I can only say that....We are a team, its either we survive the 15 weeks of hell
or we hug together and die..............


Week 2 - Week 3

Nothing much, designed the game's GUI



Thats it...managed to make fun of the company - Osim.


Week 3 - Week 5

Yeah...did camera for 3rd person's view... Thought it was easy...but i did until 2 am.
Ms Dioselin wanted us to finish our camera in the lab,
she assumed that we still remember those stuff we were being taught last year.
But the fact is... i had forgotten every thing. Spent the whole night going through last year's compG notes, trying to refresh my memory. It was my first time using pen and paper to work out the vectors, the programming logics...quite useful. I modified some of Ms Dioselin's and add in some of my own codes. Finally...it was done, even though its still quite jerky.

Ya...almost forgot...Spring damping... thats the thing which makes the game....realistic???

Week 5 - Week 6

Great....Wednesday 11:38 pm, finally done with Need For Horse.
After 6 weeks, i can only say...we are fighting a handicapped match. Looks like one of our "hand" is missing.
Its ok, we are still able to meet the deadline.

Heres a list of stuff our handicapped team has done:
- Attach gun models and a Darth Vader model to the horse, animation when moving(Gallop???).
- Created class for loading Items( Ammo, Health, PowerUp)
- Implemented speed.
- MainMenu is finally linked to the game.
- GUI for the game - hp, speed, endurance and FPS??? ( Words only...)
- Collision detection for the map's boundaries.
- Adjusted the map to the correct view, loaded Finishing Line for our map...

Basic Collision detection(CD):
Went through last year's notes again, created a class purely for CD. Still thinking of ways to optimise my codes...

Speed:
Searched Wikipedia.org for acceleration's and speed's formula, thought they might be useful. After playing with the formulas for about 1 to 2 hrs, i found out that i can use last week's lecture notes for reference to produce the same results. There is still a major problem in it, the speed varies when i load different weapons. I NEED HELP...

Thats all for today, oh ya...Please stop saying that i keep playing GuildWars Faction and neglected my work.
I know who you are, beware of CCTVs... You need to explain why i keep playing GuildWars when i didnt play. BIG BROTHER ISH WATCHING YOU...

Week 6 - Week 7

Time to blog again.... 12:06 am....Thursday.... Done with quite a few cool stuff.

Collision with items:
Yeah... now our horse is able to pick up items, refill ammunitions... But its quite weird... I did collision for items with horse and horse with items. So, its like checking for collision twice, wasting processing power. No choice, our game structure is kind of messed up from the start.

Horse can shoot:
OK, our horse finally can only shoot 1 type of bullet(handgun). I am still not done with others yet, still thinking of algorithms for the randomness of shotgun bullets and a semi homing bazooka shot. For now, only spheres act as bullets. I might change it depends on what type of collision check is being used.

After 7 weeks, we finally realised that we are really handicapped. One of the teamates still can't be contacted through MSN which is our only communication network. Its either we got his email wrong or his MSN messenger is smart enough to block off 3 of his teamates.

Week 8 - 10
Ok good...Holiday is coming. We(Me, Yan Long and Wye Huong) are finally with collision detection of bullet and player with player, obstacles and checkpoints. We decide to programme the shotgun's and bazooka's bullet pattern at the end of the semester because we need to balance up the game. Game win is up too. We are left with level design, positioning of checkpoints. Thats all, see you guys after the holiday.

Week 11 - 12
AI's state machine is up, we came up with a chart. Some basic AI functions are implemented. We did alot of tweaking to the game level and trying to optimise it because the game is running at 5 fps.... Hope that it can be done by next week

Week 12 - 13
YES!!! Its Sunday...going to Monday....and its time to blog...!!! Alot of progress this week, I'm done with changing our bullet's projectile and came up with the shotgun's animation. The team decided to use lines instead of spheres for the bullet's projectile. The turning of the horse is quite jerky...the player might feel frustrated while aiming at the opponent. So, I decide to change the collision's algorithm. I used angle and distance from the opponent for the collision which is working well right now.... I'm leaving the last weapon for the last part of development because i want to balance the game well.

Secondly, i provided framework for Yan Long to do the AI and editted some of his AI logic... The AI part is really tough, we only get a few states to work after a few days of work. Looks like our team need 1 more week to finish up and tune the AI. After that, we need to tune again to balance the game.

Thirdly... I'm wondering why am i supposed to do this??? Providing sounds for our teamate Wye Huong. Isit this supposed to be done by someone who keeps on wearing silver jacket to school? This task is so easy that even my grandma knows how to type www.google.com and type sound effects to search for them. Why our teamate don't know?? Does he need Dummy Guide for Surfing the Net???

At first i thought that it was lack of communication, i don't blame him for not doing his part. We felt that he was to shy to talk to us, its ok we dont blame him. Something is really wrong after many weeks, he was still still that shy to take initiative but he had the guts to blog his "progress". His stories were fabulous, realistic enough for a normal living person to believe him. Now, i will tell you guys why he only use "WE" in his blog and not "I". Its obvious...he did NOTHING... I started to get really irritated when he gave negative reply like "Good Luck" to my teamate. Its my turn to say "GOOD LUCK" to him after seeing his grade. He is a Hat Trick hero, first guy in the course who managed to score 3 consecutive Fs. Lastly....GOOD LUCK.... My comrades will be watching how that guy fair during his 3 weeks project with our popcorns....

OH YA... our teamate Yan Long came up with a very nice chinese essay to entertain us.....
The list of songs mentioned are written by a chinese popstar Jay Chou.
我知道你 “开不了口” ，但也不需要保持 “安静” 吗。我真的不了解你的 “黑色幽默”。 我不是一个 “完美主义” 的人， 但我也不是个 “可爱女人”。 请不要把我当 “懦夫”。 我知道 “你听得到”。 请不要给我 “借口”。 不要以为你自闭，头发乱到象被 “龙卷风” 吹过 我就怕你。 我连你 “外婆” 都不怕。 现在已经太迟了。。。 “对不起” 也没有用了。 我不会让你看到 “晴天” 的。幸好现在不是 “上海1943”。 要不然我一定拿出 “双节棍” 把你打成猪头。