Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Competition Entry







Central TAFE is running a "Make a Game" competition at Go3, and we intend to enter MiniTanks. As such Jordan and I have been working on getting MiniTanks into a better shape.



The first major change we have made is to remove the terrain randomisation functionality since we have been unable to get this feature to work correctly across a network (i.e. we couldn't get clients to get their terrain from the server). However whilst looking for a way to randomise terrain consistently for networked multiplayer I came across a resource for a terrain deformer object. So now instead of random terrain we have terrain which deforms from projectile impacts.

Monday, April 6, 2009

A very late development

Yesterday Jordan and I fixed the multiplayer issue in the presentation build. A wee bit late but it got done. It could have been fixed much sooner had we realised that at the presentation Alan actually fixed the problem in the version he was trying out; sadly we misheard what he said and thought he had only told us how to fix the problem, and his fixed version was lost forever when the computer was ghosted.
Nonetheless we finally got around to fixing the issue, in remarkably little time; after we rediscovered what it was (yes, we also forgot what Alan said the problem was).

Any which way we do intend to continue work on Minitanks, as our schedules permit, and have started a list of what needs doing.
Currently the list is as follows:
  • Fix the issue with players own projectiles killing their invisible player object: by offsetting it's mount position.
  • Fix the faulty terrain collision that occurs when a tank moves too fast: by placing a second duplicate terrain object just a little below the original, and having a bogged/broken down effect occur when a tank collides with the second terrain object.
  • Add a debris object for destroyed tanks: a suitable test debris object already exists within Torque.
  • Fix the animation of the Tank Treads: ?
  • Make the minefield visible: textures?
  • Add the Hover Tank: export/import DTS and create new datablock
  • Add custom projectile for the missile rack: create new DTS and import it.
  • Adjust datablocks for each type of tank: balance the tank types.
Finally we would like to make different versions of the game for the server and client. To do this the following would have to be removed from the client version:
  • Terrain randomisation
  • Random environmentaly object placement

Most likely we won't get all of this done but we will end up with a more complete version of Minitanks.