Gameplay implementation progress

Here's what I managed or didn't manage to do before the presentation tomorrow.

Improved game loop

I've spent unreasonable amount of time on it and it doesn't have any immediately visible effect but I've changed all my objects to now be updated in the main game loop which is the proper way of doing this. Previously the creation, update and destruction of objects would take place in various more or less random places.

What this achieves mainly is that I now have full control on where and how the objects are created and updated. For example I can now use postUpdate() method to render stuff on the screen, which is visible as it gets rendered after everything else. This way I've managed to implement player name and health being displayed above the character and also a simple mouse feedback animation. 

Improved code should also make a further development easier.

Multiplayer

I've managed to setup multiplayer in the level! Upon joining the multiplayer game you'll now spawn randomly into one of the teams. It is also possible to spawn on the same team as the picture below illustrates one of the teammates being seriously threatened by the AI.

Two clients and a dedicated server running Campus: Deathmatch

map progress (to be updated as i go)

Ill add images of areas as I create them here:


Update 4:
bloody spawning pool? hwahaha to much? i think it looks like a cross between biomass, water, pebbles and body-part soup! (i think it works):

Update 3:
strafing-run across the city? (bombing in a line) i think this looks pretty good bearing in mind you'll see it a bit at a times:

Update 2:
bot-lane corner:

Update 1:
human spawn:

Road block (south east): were the army trying to... keep people in?!

He's hirpling!

So, after almost a week of trying to get my animation out of Maya I decided - f*** it. I spent all of last night and this morning following a 3DS Max tutorial and it worked first time. I now having a character the walks, and now that it's working I could easily make more - but I'm probably out of time (I'll make more anyway).

Unfortunately, I had to use the base mesh from Mudbox as Max had an issue with my clothes (they were locked to a single joint, and didn't bend with the rest of the body)... but we can just apply that algae texture and no-one will never know. ;)

Master map and Game.dll

Game.dll

I have uploaded the latest version of Game.dll to our dropbox. You'll find it here:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/kzgxfx79voucla5/y3DLYGFn2k

It's far from finished but it provides a good indication of the view and mechanics, so it will help you put things in context. The camera is pretty much done, but the movement is rather retarded atm as it doesn't use the AI (working on it). Also this only affects the launcher.

To use make a backup of CryGame.dll in bin32/bin64 folder and replace it with this file.

Map

I put the map on github at:

https://github.com/jholownia/hotwmap

I think the map is too big now. The previous one was 256x256 and this one is 512x512 and everything looks a bit out of scale, but have a look yourself.

Brraaaaainnnss

I should have him fully walking by tomorrow. Animating someone herpling on the spot is unnerving - I might just make him move forward in the scene to get the visuals right, then just translate him to the middle to have him do it on the spot.

UPDATE:

I exported the model into Maya and Greg said to stick on a random texture - turns out algae makes an awesome mummified corpse look. I was scrolling through the list, and stumbled across an animated algae texture... kinda looks like a cloud of infection. Could work instead of a texture! ^_^

Playing around with Crysis 3 assets

I've been browsing through Crysis 3 pak files and there seem to be quite a lot of stuff we can use in our level. Below is a reference image from google earth and a scene from Greg's map in the same place using some of C3 assets. Once we have proper buildings this should look pretty good.

Also, if there's time, I think it would be cool to have some details on the map which are associated with the campus like a rusty UoP sign or something.

 

Coding progress update

I've finally got a working top-down camera in place. It is controlled by mouse, spawns at the top of the player and follows terrain's elevation to stay at the constant height. It also provides limited zooming in/out functionality with a mouse scroll wheel. Overall works pretty well.

The main problem was the fact that CE3 provides multiple systems for the same tasks (and all of them equally undocumented) E.g. for the input there are high level Action Maps, which use XML to map input types to in game actions, CryInput module which provides device independent input abstraction, and low level hardware access classes. In Game.dll for some reason there are also two camera systems (PlayerView and CameraManager) which seem to do pretty much the same thing (it looks like they were in a process of moving from PlayerView to CameraManager which provides some more functionality). Anyway both of these classes seem to be designed for a player-following camera (1st of 3rd person) and so after a while I gave up trying to modify them for our needs.

What I ended up with is a completely new TopDownCamera class using only low level input and basic ViewParams struct to implement camera functionality. It may not have some of the fancy features of the higher level solutions but it seems enough for our current needs and still much better then flowgraphs. I also think this is the best approach for creating new stuff, i.e. building it from scratch rather than trying to modify existing code.