COM stuff

I've put in some basic COM stuff after re-arranging the structure of the namespaces. AI/COM stuff is now under FightingEngine.AI. It makes more sense that way, why didn't I see it before? :) Right now the computer player just moves back and forth. It demonstrates that it is fully functional with the event manager right now.

Some placeholder art

Since I'm done on Modeller for a while now at least, I'm starting to work on the main Sensei project with the other guys. I put together some placeholder graphics for the character select screen so it can look and work a bit more like the final thing. I may put together a title screen and stuff like that a bit later on. I'm just about finished on my other assignments too.

Mildly busy week

Phew, it's been a bit busier than usual this week, with two other moderate sized assignments I'm working on and a "Celebrating Research" dinner I attended last night. I'm also marking assignments in CSCI356 which is sort of taking a bit out of me. I'm sort of done on the Modeller for now so I will be working with the other guys on the main Sensei project.

Dummy fighter in modeller

So I dismembered our little guinea pig fighter and put him in a spritesheet, created a character model for him in Modeller with appropriate skeleton and made a few quick test animations. With the sprites as they are at the moment, he is pretty much limited to that one fighting stance. But once we get multiple sprite-bone links in we should be able to mix and match different views of limbs to create the right perspective for that motion. It all looks pretty cool and it's always fun to see the fruits of your labour doing a little jig!

A dummy fighter.

I've drawn up a quick 10-minute sketch of a Japanese martial arts fighter, based on a stance of Ryu from Street Fighter. It's a bit hard to see everything so far since it's not coloured in but it's all drawn in separate layers to separate the body parts. Soon we should be able to have this dummy fighter in the game.

sort of based on the description of Takeshi Oshiro, however I will require
further direction from Vince as he is the primary character designer.

And here is the coloured version...

I'll pull him into the character modeller and have some fun soon :)

Modeller v0.9

A big update this time with plenty of lovely features, changes, and bugfixes. Firstly here's the changelog:


- 321 Modeller; v0.9
  * IMPLEMENTED: Sprite Rectangle deleting functionality
  * IMPLEMENTED: Bone renaming functionality
  * IMPLEMENTED: Bone ordering (i.e. draw order) functionality
  * IMPLEMENTED: "Looping" animation interpolation mode. Useful for motions which are
                 meant to be looped such as walking animations. In effect: does not grab
                 keyframes wrapped around from either end. In effect makes animations more
                 stable and loopable as you would expect.
  * IMPLEMENTED: Can select bones by clicking on them in the Bone List
  * MODIFICATION: New bones now have a number e.g. "New Bone 4" later will have
                  a name dialog box prompting for the new bone's name. (And a confirm
                  delete dialog box for deleting bones too.)
  * MODIFICATION: Brightness now goes from 20-100% in 20% steps (less clicking)
  * MODIFICATION: Changing motions now refreshes the skeleton, rewinds the motion
                  and pauses it if necessary
  * MODIFICATION: Scrubbing tools (play/pause/step etc) are now not accessible via
                  keyboard shortcuts in Skeleton Edit mode
  * MODIFICATION: Changed to an edited version of the Calibri font, which has some
                  arrow symbols in it and a pipe character edited for a cursor.
  * BUGFIX: Align tool didn't take sprite rotation alignment into account
  * BUGFIX: Translation didn't take into account parent rotation;
            and with this bugfix, all combinations of tranformations should
            work as expected now and all tools should work correctly
            (requires testing though)
  * BUGFIX: Scale/Size tools had a small bug in the calculation of angles which resulted
            in strange behaviour occasionally. Fixed now and always works as expected.

and a screenshot of course:

Modeller v0.9. Work that Calibri.

As far as I know, those were the last features before it was production-ready. There are still a few missing features that are not really necessary at this stage and some niceties which can be done which I will add in next week.

More modeller progress

Doo-be-doo-be-do, bet you can't guess what I'm still working on! Ding ding ding, Character Modeller program.

Some really sweet improvements in this upcoming version, the full details will be released with the release of the next version but a sneak peak:

• Motion parameters UI in info pane / can set motions to be "Loop" which affects how interpolation works on the start and end keyframes
• You can now click on bones from the bone list to select them. Sweet, a convenient way to switch between bones now. Although there is no way to rename bones in the application yet.
• Background brightness value is now in 20% increments.
• Alignment tool was fixed to take proper offsets into account. It was confusing to the user before if the sprite had been "AlignR"'d before "Align"'d.
• A latent but warmly welcomed bugfix in the bone chaining matrix multiplication algorithm now fixes certain combinations of transformations which had unexpected results. Now everything (translating, rotating, moving, scaling, sizing) works "as expected" in any combination. (More thorough testing required.)

Next on the list of improvements is being able to name and re-order bones (for Z-positioning) and then next big implementation is the previewing of combinations of motions.

Modeller progress

Have still been making adjustments and additions to the Modeller program. With the next big implemented feature it will be pushed to v0.8 but for now it is v0.7.21. There have since been some discovered minor bugs to be fixed in the next version.


- 321 Modeller; v0.7.21
  * IMPLEMENTED: "None" option for bonesprite
  * FEATURE: Bone/Sprite draw order can be swapped with checkbox
  * BUGFIX: Sprite Edit Rects weren't being resynced after loading character model file

Modeller v0.7.19

After playing around with it some more, discovered a few quirks here and there introduced with the sprite rendering algorithm. Fixed that up with a few other minor undesired features :p

- 321 Modeller; v0.7.19
  * MODIFICATION: Swapped Size/Scale button locations. Now buttons on top row will
                  mean local edit tools, bottom row will be global edit tools (affects
                  the bone globally, not just on that keyframe)
  * MODIFICATION: Motion listbox can no longer have nothing selected, which makes
                  little to no sense for the user (editing a 'scratch' motion)
  * BUGFIX: Move tool did not compensate for parent rotation
  * BUGFIX: Sprite translation alignment replaced with proper algorithm. Now affects
            rotation and scaling correctly.
  * BUGFIX: Global edit tools cannot be used in Edit Animations mode now.
  * BUGFIX: Loading a character did not set some motions variables properly

Modeller v0.7.13

Yay for features and bugfixes. I think I'm just about ready to attempt to make a proper dummy model from start to finish and see if everything's good. (If not, then coding that up takes priority.)

- 321 Modeller; v0.7.13

  * IMPLEMENTED: Background (subway)

  * FEATURE: Added tooltips to various new widgets.

  * FEATURE: Background brightness adjustment

  * BUGFIX: Checkboxes did not call Widget (parent's parent) update function

  * BUGFIX: Dialog boxes marked "active" by default (before being visible) which led

            to their widgets being active even though they weren't being drawn

Screenshot (click to enlarge)

Modeller v0.7.7

The remainder of the night working on Modeller. It is now theoretically possible to create a full animation set however I haven't done so yet :p I did make a smileyface though :)

- 321 Modeller; v0.7.7
  * IMPLEMENTED: Bone list view
  * IMPLEMENTED: Align sprite to bone tool
  * IMPLEMENTED: Change Sprite ID per bone
  * BUGFIX: Remove Motion when no motion selected caused crash

- 321 Modeller; v0.7.8
  * BUGFIX: Bone translation was not being affected by parent rotation

Modeller v0.7

Just been working away at the modeller program today. From the changelog:

- 321 Modeller; v0.7
  * IMPLEMENTED: "Rename Motion" functionality
  * IMPLEMENTED: Listbox UI widget (for motions list)
  * IMPLEMENTED: Add/Remove/Refresh motions list functionality
  * IMPLEMENTED: "View" checkboxes in UI (may add more later)
  * BUGFIX: Checkboxes now activate on mousedown instead of mouseup
  * FEATURE: Modified the colour scheme a bit to make it less depressing.
  * FEATURE: Status bar now has sundry information.
  * BUGFIX: Could use tools while slider was being dragged

Screenshot of Modeller v0.7

Another screenshot, here showing only the sprites. Bone list is also visible.

More on Modeller.

So I'm finally back on the Character Modeller since I have spare time. So far I've implemented a few things and fixed a few bugs. I'm working on getting this functional to a level where you can actually use it to create a decent animation. That means "remove keyframe" needs to actually do something, and a nifty little feature called "Frame Lock" now works too. It won't be long until I'm making a test subject in Modeller to make sure all the required features are there and working properly.

Modeller is now version 0.6.

Technical Doco Update

Today I got around to revising some sections of the tech doc to make it clearer so we were all on the same page with the classes. The fighting engine's event manager events needed clarification, as did the IController interface; and the Fighter, Human, AI classes needed to be documented entirely. I also added in documentation for various information-holding structs, such as ControlInstructions, and some state-information structs such as WorldState. All of this new documentation is basically related to the fighting engine, where most of the progress in the project is focused on at present.

Holiday mode

Alright so we're almost out of holiday mode-- which for us was pretty much work (part-time jobs, hobbies, other commitments etc.) and games...not much time for project work sadly, but we did have a good think about all the stuff we are working on and we're immediately back on track this week and straight into work (coding.)

More stuff as it happens, folks!