Tech Doc & Progress

I did another diagram in Visio, this time describing the data flow relationships between the two types of computer-controlled fighter systems and the fighting engine itself (below.) I also wrote more on how these two systems work.

Data flow diagram representing the interaction between the fighting engine and the two computer fighter controllers

This week we'll hopefully be starting to implement our designs and realise our concepts. Fun stuff! Of course, we'll be meticulously gluing the tech doc together in the background, too.

More as it comes.

Animation engine fundaments

I've been implementing the animation engine today in the character modelling program and also working up various parts of the bone animation system as required. There is now a rudimentary keyframe-based animation system that uses Catmull-Rom interpolation. As nothing can be saved or loaded I haven't done much playing around with it with more than two bones but it seems to be working fine. Some time before next week hopefully I can have it saving and loading stuff for a neat demonstration. Optional: tie in sprites too so we can see a character moving rather than just a skeleton.

Diagrams and project plan update

Visio... yay! Ryan and I have worked together on the Visio side of things to create some diagrams for our tech manual. They look pretty snazzy and hopefully they are actually good at conveying architectural design information too. I updated the project plan document to include a "# hours worked per week" row to keep track of workloads. I plan to work more on the Character Editor today.

Context Diagram showing the data flow between subsystems

Tech Manual Progress

Okay so by now we're really delving into the details of the technical manual. I've written most of my parts so far, including about the game engine, the program architecture and the AI system. The other guys will be working on their designated sections and we will combine it and evaluate it every step of the way. We aim to have a semi-complete (as much complete as is known, to a level of detail that is sufficient) technical manual to present for the preliminary technical manual due date.

Project Plan

Okay, so now I've started to put together an official "Project Plan" which is basically an in-depth version of the Project Outline (it's based on that.) It details who is doing what on each task. It's still incomplete at this stage but you can see roughly what we have in store for the next couple weeks.

https://sites.google.com/site/tgfcoder/ProjectPlan.pdf

More on the Character Editor

I've been fairly busy this week, but tonight I've had a few hours to put into our project's Character Editor. While the others have done their part for the user manual (including myself) Ryan is preparing the preliminary user manual and I'm working on the editor. Now in the "Edit Skeleton" mode, bones can be seen and manipulated, through basic tools: transform, rotate, scale, etc., and bones can be added and deleted. Next to do for the editor is implementing the animation engine (which has at its heart the MotionController.) Other changes include slight tweaks and improvements here and there but that's what the SVN log is for :P

The break, and our character editor

We're now officially on our Mid-Session Recess (woohoo!) and this week we're working on the user manual. I've done my part already (although I should help out more since I didn't take the biggest slice of work) so I'm starting to develop our character creator/editor/animator program which as a whole is being named "Modeller"--because a character, including their name, skeletal structure, sprites, animation definitions and etc., are called "Character Models" in this project. This way we can drag and drop these models into our game and have everything ready rather than loading up a skeleton from here, motion data from here, applying sprites from this file, etc., which is just ugly and unnecessary.

Modeller, in its early stages.

So far I've designed a bunch of UI widgets as you can see from the screenshot which are all done entirely in XNA with draw calls (object oriented, of course.) So far there is little functionality but the next step forward will be to make the skeleton editor which allows the user to create the skeletal structure of the character.

The reason I'm creating this editor is to make it infinitely easier for us later to create and customise our characters: no need to create every value by hand. And because we plan on having at least three different characters with different fighting styles and different body structures, a visual editor will make it possible to faithfully recreate the characters movements from our mind's eye.

That it from me for now!

Today's meeting and increasing workload

So yesterday we did a neat little bit of work in the 2 hour block we had allocated, getting through everything that we needed to:

• Evaluating and finalising functional requirements
• Discussing the non-functional requirements and completing them
• Evaluating the project timeline as a group to make sure we all agree on the work load and work scheduling

Out of this we have decided a number of useful things:

• We are all happy to work during the holidays on this project, from 1 week after our last exam onwards. This means we can push work into the holidays and reduce our overall levels of stress later on ;)
• Some additional functional requirements include an extension to our bone-based animation system, the arena scrolling system (they cannot walk further apart than a screen width, to scroll they must both move together) and we added entries for the other screens that we had missed out.
• We completely missed Audio in the functional requirements so we put a few points for that in as well.
• For the non-functional requirements we decided on a theme, talked about our characters' designs, what kinds of special effects/shaders we would like (with some helpful YouTube research) and what kind of control scheme we were looking for. Our non-functional requirements basically go through the feel of the game we want so we all know that we're on the same track in terms of the end product of the game side of the project.

And today we had our weekly meeting and basically collected work from last week to consolidate into the project and designated new tasks for the coming weeks.

I've had a fairly large workload lately so there hasn't been much time for anything outside of uni work and bit of hobby work on the side.

Churning on with the work

This week we've got a block of 2 hours dedicated to doing group work for the project on Tuesday. We'll be finalising our requirements and doing some final evaluation of the designed interfaces and the project timeline. In the meeting the following day we'll be working on dividing up the user manual content into sections and each working on particular parts.

Project planning and timeline

Last night I polished up our functional requirements as per the evaluation we did in the meeting on 30th March. I have passed it around to the group to hear their opinions of it. I have a feeling we'll all pretty much be in agreement about them since we came up with most of them as a group. So with the new knowledge of our project's functional requirements, I updated the project's timeline to include a draft outline for session 2. Session 2 includes a lot of implementation, planning and heavy development of the project, as expected.
In session 2's timeline, I have planned to have everything complete and wrapped up by about Week 11 (to give us an extra bit of leeway if necessary) however this may require us to get a bit of a head start on the project during the mid-session recess (which is probably a good idea nonetheless) so that we're not pushed too far when the deadline draws nearer as these things generally take longer than expected.

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You can read the current timeline here (PDF, 61 KB) Please note that this file will be kept current as per the updated timeline and may or may not reflect the post above depending on how far in the future you are reading this. Items in green are newly added/modified.