Alan Dennis

Getting closer and closer to being like a real game:
http://www.braindonut.com/GamePrototype/Default.html

Since last week,I’ve added scoring, some limited graphics, updated the controls, threw in a start screen, added a little mp3 that’s playing in the background (need to link to the author here: http://ccmixter.org/files/THERUNNNER/19962 )… I’ve been messing with tooltips a lot, to see if I could use them to expose a bit of info about the parts. I don’t want to go overboard with the info display. I have some planned changes to make it a bit clearer, though. It’s still all quite rough, while I’m getting things working.

In other news, getting tooltips to work in Silverlight, with their datacontext set to their parents, was a gigantic pain in the butt. I ended up using the solution here:
http://www.wiredprairie.us/blog/index.php/archives/568

I needed to use the DataBindingTooltip class from this post (Thanks so much Aaron!) in order to have the tooltips accessing the datacontext of their parent. (So that the sliders could populate with the data of the part attributes)

But I had to rewrite it a tiny bit to use the new ToolTipService stuff here:
http://tooltipservice.codeplex.com/

Needed to do this in order to control the display delay and display duration of the tooltips, which are added attributes in this library.

I have to admit, I’ve gotten lazy now that my class deadline is getting closer and closer. I ran into some issues getting commands working in Silverlight, since DelegateCommand doesn’t exist. So I just cheated and broke my MVVM pattern somewhat. At this point, I’m starting to realize that I’ve made far more than what was required, anyway. But, it’s a great learning experience.

Makes me really want to play with TorqueX once I’m done with school. I could totally see making simple little games replacing the time that I spend on school, currently.

This post is probably full of typos and errors… I apologize. At the moment, I’m too lazy to proof-read…

At least reactions seem to be on par with second life:

(I kid…)

http://grumpygamer.com/8519854

So, in this character animation class, we were supposed to take models that we already made and animate them in a situation using a certain sound clip from a selection of 3. The sound clip I picked was the line from Dumb & Dumber "Got no food, got no jobs, our pets HEADS ARE FALLING OFF!" So then I took the old man model that I made earlier and the robot chick model and animated a quick scene. There's still much left to finish before the final, but here's the first run through on the animation.

I am pretty happy with how the old man turned out. Stumbling about in his anger, then looking exhausted and defeated at the end... I probably could have rigged him better, but it's passable. I'll not make the same mistakes again, at least.

I wanted to play with some new techniques so I did a quick sketch of a silly character then modeled him. I really love how this funny old guy looks:

Didn’t take long to throw him together, since he’s so simple. But there’s just something charming about a grumpy, pudgy old dude. Maybe someday he’ll be running around with a Flak Cannon.

My copy of 3DS Max 2008 finally arrived. I spent a lot of time with it this last weekend, remodelling an old character to get it ready for an animation class I’m taking. The performance improvements in 2008 are definitely noticeable. It’s also nice to have at least 1 piece of software that is 64bit.

Here’s the results of my work this weekend:

(That was captured with Jing. If you don’t know what Jing is, go to www.jingproject.com and check it out!)Next up – texturing. I can’t wait to play with the pelt mapping. I have some ideas for this model that should look pretty good.Once that’s all done, I’m going to try to get the model into UT3, after some more detailing, normal maps, etc… And once that’s done, work will begin on my UT3 level. Well, that’s not true, work has already began. I’m starting with sketches, based on a study of the levels that shipped with the game. Then I’m going to rough out the level in UT2k4 and do some playtesting. Once I’ve confirmed that the general layout is good, I’ll proceed to create art assets and get the bad boy made in UT3.

I haven’t done level design since UT… Yep, it’s been a while. I played around in UT2k4 a bit, got static meshes imported and made a tiny level that never made it to release. It’s amazing how far the technology has progressed…

I’ll be posting each stage of my progress here. Should be interesting to look back on when it’s all done.

Braindonut.com is coming back soon!