Pulp Friction

Karl in a comment asked what I'm doing for collision, so here's a brief run down.

I export the levels from Max as a simple XML file with triangles, load that and parse them into a friendly structure. I store all the parsed triangles in a balanced binary tree, subdividing cells on longest axis. I would use an octree, but that requires subdiving for effect, and I haven't yet invested in writing a triangle splitter.

My movable physical objects are all spheres.

After I move any of the physical entities, I do a constraint pass against the level, i.e. for each triangle, check to see if my sphere is intersecting with it. If it is, move me out of the triangle, using the direction I'm coming from, i.e. the direction from where I currently am, to where the intersection happened. This works just fine as long as none of the entities can move farther than their diameter in a single frame.

I do the same thing with any other dynamic physical barriers, but they are represented by boxes.

I also provide ray-tracing onto the level mesh, which allows for queries like, "find the closest point on the level beneath me".

Entity to entity collision is straightforward sphere to sphere intersection tests. Again, works just fine if no one can travel faster than their diameter in a single frame.

To avoid noise, separation between entities isn't direct collision response as it is with the level, rather it is applied as a separating force over time.
In effect, the wolves are flocking away from each other rather than strictly colliding. The thinking here is that it's better to have two wolves intersect briefly rather than bounce back and forth as they're corrected violently each frame. This also means that by and large they can't get each other stuck.

Let There Be Cowbell

As promised, here's a look at a few pretties. We have a level segment with a new palette, and a new badguy, the froggy. These are the entry level badguys, so they don't put up much of a fight. Still blow up nice though.

I've also snuck in the healing item in the game: mushrooms.

So, coming on from last time's discussion of mesh animation, this update shows more examples of it. All the effects and character animations are done in the mesh animation manner, and hopefully to a consistent style. I still like it, still planning on writing a more efficient Content Pipeline plugin to pack them for me.

The art style is still holding together, I think. There's enough range in it, that I think I can cover all the locales I'm thinking of, and the gradient in the character of the environments I hope to depict over the story. I wish I had some time to sit down and concept out, but honestly at this point it's more profitable to just plow along. It takes an hour or so to model a new badguy. Bouncing back and forth between code and art (ignoring the vertigo), it was about 5 hours to get the frogs up and running from scratch. It's still a discovery process though, so I'm not too hung up on polishing yet. Getting everything working is first priority.

I have the design for the first level laid out now. It happens entirely underground, in a Zelda like dungeon configuration, complete with boss character. I'll stay focused on getting that done before moving on with any other portion of the game. I'm considering putting it up for public download at that point, to get a little feedback on how it feels.

Depends, really, on how embarrassing the whole thing is by then.

Before anyone asks, there's nothing clever about the cave scene. Reflections are the good old fashioned "render everything upside down", and the caustics are nothing more than a bit of fancy texture scrolling, where the x component is a sin wave on the y component. Sometimes, you just don't need clever to be fancy.

I'll be moving home for the next few weeks, so this might be my last post for a while. On the bright side: I'll be getting some new gear when I get to my new place, so perhaps I'll get around to trying some of those clever bits. At present, this PC is pretty much nipping at the limits of its little NVidia Ti4400 graphics card!