Game Development Techniques

I finally got round to uploading the video of my Unreal Tournament Famous Five Total Conversion....


Edit: Third time is a charm I think. I have several other problems with thsi video.

AGD Week 8 Beginning 16/3/09

Well we our now into crunch time! With the Alpha deadline looming at the end of next week, we picked up the pace again after last weeks slow week. I took on the job at trying to implement states into the game. But, this proved a little problematic as we could not use everything from our framework in the states and passing them in did not work either. So Lead Programmer Dan took this off me as he had a better understanding of the framework it would be best he managed the states and got them set up. Instead this week I implemented an Input handler. I was supposed to do this back in week 2 but then deemed it unnecessary at the time, but since then I have re-thought this and decided it was necessary. This took some time as I had to implement any action or test that can be carried out on the controller, but by implementing this handler it takes away some of the traversing to get to the right section of the game pad that is needed at that point; making the rest of the programmers jobs a little bit easier.

We are getting more and more models from the artists and Tom, who made the team USA ship, has made us a little splash screen video that we can use. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8idV4XLcn4

I am hoping that we have a complete demo ready for the alpha. Most bugs are being left in at this stage as it is not important and we can get rid of the bugs after this deadline.

AGD Week 7 Beginning 9/3/09

This past week has been a very slow week. At the beginning of the week 3 of my team including myself had an interview at Monumental Studios in Nottingham. This got us a little lost as to what we were doing this week. Apart from doing a little debugging and working with the artists.

We sorted out the shading problem with the map track. Before hand the shadows that were being exported with the map were large polygonal shadows and had large lines going in one direction. At the export stage from 3DS Max, the wrong type of shadows to be exported with the model were selected. But now that they had been changed to the new smooth shadows, Gamebryo automatically creates new shaders to render the map properly but this then causes memory leaks and makes the game crash when closing due to the shades being deleted after the renderer has ben deleted; which it needs to complete the deletion of the shaders. At the moment this is not important to get an Alpha game ready for Friday in week 9 and can be sorted out after that point.

Before getting the new map in I also had to get rid of 1128 memory leaks. The debugger says that its to do with strings but it tuned out to b with every mesh that is created using the game base object. For som reason Gamebryo does not like you just deleting them so you have to just set them to NULL. This is due to the mesh having more than one pointer pointing to it so by setting it to null it can be deleted when the program closes.