696 Hours (Day of Specular)

So, I’ve never been able to implement specular highlighting. Today, I was finally able to implement it. I’m officially further than I was a year ago! :S

Either way, I’m pretty happy about it. Ambient Light was also implemented. Graphically so far, it’s a shiny rotating cube with some texture. Not a whole lot. But it’s one small step, no?

Mathematically, I’m in quaternions which are something I’m familiar with. I didn’t finish the chapter, which is pretty disappointing, but I’m working 3 part times and going to school. Give me a break.

Either way, I need to do a bit more research since I’m still having trouble grasping them. More on that tomorrow.

720 Hours

Note one: I am postponing Zombie Plague until my portfolio is complete.

Note two: 30 Day Challenge. I am going to complete 3D Pong Room & it’s engine in 30 days. I am going to finish my 3D Math book. This is going to be extremely difficult for me since I have a part time job, game job, and school. Oh well!

These blog entries will primarily serve to keep me accountable. It will essentially be logs of what I’ve done. It will probably be pretty boring. Sorry!

Log 1:
I’m taking inspiration from a tutorial series at the moment (rastertek.com). I like how a lot of this is organized, but I’m not a huge fan of the structure, so I’m changing it. Either way, tonight I was able to implement file uploading (for models) and diffuse lighting.

Tomorrow, I will do Ambient Light & Specular Light.

Starting Fresh

I decided that my old theme wasn’t working, so I changed to this new layout. I like it quite a bit better, although I still don’t know what to do about the home screen (as of this writing, it’s blank).

Continuing the trend, I am going to start fresh on my “3D Pong Room” Engine. It was done wrong from the beginning. I’ve been going over some helpful hints from various books and online venues on how to design an engine, so I’m going to use those as a guide. I’m still going to make it my own and still make 3D pong room from it. Although, it will probably be 3D Pong Rooms.

I haven’t forgot about Zombie Plague. I have an educational copy of Maya, so I’m going to do some 3d models myself. That’s going to require tutorials, however. That will probably have to wait for the engine work to be done.

Anyways, that’s an update.

3D Pong Engine Progress

After the 3D pong room game was working, I put it by the wayside to work on more important endeavors (such as getting my education finished). Since then, I’ve worked a lot with Unity3d, both for Zombie Plague and RESTINCT. But school is pretty much done and I’ve decided to pick DirectX10 again. It’s like riding a bike. Everything slowly returns to familiarity over a brief re-introduction.

So instead of just polishing 3D pong room, I’ve decided that I’m going to turn it into an engine more or less.

It’s not going to be all that fancy. Probably closer to how XNA’s doing it. I’m going to start slowly re-tooling pong, boiling away the DirectX. Then, I will probably end up with an Abstract Language, to which I can port over to OpenGL. I’m rather excited about it.

I’ll put more updates on this later. Until then, I’ve still got plenty to do on RESTINCT, as well as another final. =D

Currently Up To’s

Alright, so here are some updates.

Zombie Game: I fixed the artificial intelligence problem for the most part. There are still quite a bit of issues with it, but 9/10 rolls result in a successful zombie play. I made some physical dice roll for each turn and I actually have attacks working. Zombies also appear randomly. The only thing that’s left as far as gameplay goes is loot, boarding up windows and doors, and a mechanic for actually winning. But for now, you can melee zombies until you die.

3D Pong Room: I looked at my code from 1 year ago, and sweet jesus & the orphans…It is bad. I actually noticed that the source code I put up doesn’t actually compile (some unnecessary files were included). But I’ve been familiarizing myself with actual collision detection & polymorphism, so I’m improving it 10 fold. By the time I’m done, I should have a small engine. I’ve been playing with the idea of Abstracting the API, but that will have to come later.

In other news back in December, I signed on to be part of a team working on a project called RESTINCT. I don’t want to give too many details since I am not a designer. But I will say it’s pretty much what I’ve been needing to do: Work with a team on something, doing nothing but programming. It’s completely in Unity3d, which I’m obviously familiar with. Since I started from scratch, I’m doing things way more efficient that Zombie Project, so I’ll have to port that polish over.