Craig Bishop

Its been a long while since any posts, too long. since the time of the last post I had been improving some of my works and searching for a work placement, fortunately I found one at Monumental Games as a Student Designer. Although not a programming position (which is my overall goal) it is a great opportunity to get some experience in the development of real games.

Outside of work I still try to keep up with programming so that i don’t slip on my C++ skills, since I shall need them for my final year of my course. To so this I have begun work on a totally new engine, in which i hope to cover areas I didn’t get chance to touch on when developing the system behind my de blob remake. The main goals I have in this development is to look more closely at areas such scene management and areas around rendering optimisations such as LOD’ing.

My aim for this project is to create a survival game where there at countless number of enemies, with a more survival aspect, the gameplay is not the main focus but a busy scene will help to show off my engine features once it is complete

To create a ramp in de blob I had to calculate what height the player should be based on their position along the ramp. This required interpolating the height value with X and then Z and then setting the players position to be at that height.

To achieve this I first check to see if the player had collided with the ramp, if so I cast a ray from the player straight down (to a set distance) to test if the player was on top of the ramp. If this was the case then I had to take the ramp dimensions and create a plane from them (ignoring height) and intersect the plane with the ray to find the exact x and z position of the player on the ramp. Then using the x and z positions I could interpolate across the ramp (started where the ramps height was 0) and find out what height the ramp was at the x and z intersection point, this returned the height offset that should be applied to the player to make them look like they were on the ramp.

The camera for the game takes two forms; firstly (and most prominently) it follows the player at a certain distance, rotating around the player when the mouse is moved left or right. It also determines the direction the player moves when they press forward (as the player always moves in the direction the camera faces).

Secondly when a player hits a target on a building the camera repositions itself to point at that building and spin round it. These was done by creating a spline around the building at a set position (when the target was hit) and getting the camera to follow the spline path until it returned to the start position, at which point it returned to original position behind the player.

To setup the camera was relatively simple, I specified a target as the players position, and set the cameras position to be a set distance away from the player and set the rotation to match the current mouse x movement.