Minor update on the character modeller

Just a small update for the character modeller I'm working on, sprites are now linkable to bones and they draw. Next will be implementing the bone start/end positions to line up the sprite properly and sprite selection per bone...then we'll be able to create a little smiley face! There are a couple other things I want to implement shortly as well:

• Reording of draw order of bones so the sprites draw properly
• Being able to manipulate keyframes better, deleting keyframes, adding keyframes in different places, that sort of thing.

Modeller progress

Today I worked on the character modeller from home, starting to implement the sprite/spritesheet stuff in. I've so far got an interface set up that allows the user to define sprite rectangles:

Here's my test spritesheet which I will be using to make a smiley face and he will have some animations like bounce and roll.

Character Modeller

Did some more work on the character modeller in the last hour or so. The number of frames in the current animation can now be changed and a number of improvements have been made to the program in general, including implementing more keyboard shortcuts, removing bugs in some tools, etc. Here's a video of me mucking around in it.

Design, documenting, meeting up

Ryan and Vince popped around to the project lab for about an hour or so and we worked together on a couple of things. We discussed some of the more fine-grained details about the fighting move system, such as impact types, hit area categories, etc., while they were writing up the documentation for the Move structure. I wrote some small placeholders for these bits of information in Move.cs. I explained the relationships between the bone animation system, the character models and the moves since Vince wanted a clearer understanding of what exactly will be required (code-wise and content-wise.)

Apparently Adam is meant to show up some time soon. I'll stick around to say hi and get a bit of work done then probably head off at around 4:45 for food and go home.

More work in the project lab

So I've been here for about an hour. I installed Visio onto my computer here so we could edit and create UML diagrams. I've been sort of picking at the tech doc, adding things here and there and editing a few things. I also moved all the diagrams into their own sections, to keep things organised. I created a use case diagram to show the range of interactions between the player and the game system. I will also do one of the Character Modeller. Haven't touched code today, probably won't (until I get bored :P)

More stubs

Just spend the last hour or so writing up more stub functions in AI and Fighter, as well as setting up some more specialised datatypes. Building from the ground up here, or "top-down", I guess. I created a base abstract Controller class which the three fighter controller types (Human, AI, COM) inherit from in order to store some controller-common information such as which player (one or two) the controller is controlling. This sort of information needs to be made available to the decision-making processes of AI/COM to determine who is who in the world state information.

AI programming

Right now I'm in the project lab working on implementing stubs for AI data structures, specifically KnowledgeBank, MemoryBank and PolicyMemory. Putting together the building blocks of the AI engine is both exciting and a learning experience. I've always wanted to do a machine-learning system like this, hopefully it isn't too ambitious. Realistically, I know I can produce something. Something that functions. But I'm going to strive to achieve something really impressive.