3D Mesh Collision!

I've come back to Tunnel Flyer now that the controls work. I added randomly generated tunnels using small segments (simple ones for now). Currently I am working on the collision detection between the player's ship and the tunnel walls. I can't see a nice way of using primitives to detect the collisions so I figure this is a good time to learn how to use the model geometry for collision detection.

What I have so far is: when a player is close enough a segment, it checks how far the player is from each triangle in the model. Given that the models are rather simple I was hoping it wouldn't be too intense. I didn't want to attempt optimizing too early on but right off the bat I'm at what looks like ~10 frames per second! I'll need to make improvements to when I do the checking and maybe spread it across a few frames.

The collision detection itself is an algorithm I got from a book I'm still reading; "Real-Time Collision Detection" by Christer Ericson. Before I even consider improving that (which I'm sure they little to nothing I could do) I'm going to fix the code around it first. Hopefully by the end of the week I'll have the collision detection working correctly and I can see to what limit I can push it.

Taking a short break from Tunnel Flyer

Until Tuesday, I won't be working on Tunnel Flyer. This is because I signed up for a design3 webinar showing how to use the Unity Shuriken Particle Engine! Problem is I don't know how to use Unity! So that is what I will be doing until the webinar is complete. I've got plenty of resources to learn from so it should go pretty quickly.

Second Developer Movement Game Certified!

Just got the email today that my second developer movement game for Windows Phone 7, "Keep Running!", has passed certification! :) I may need to make it easier though given the initial reactions when my friends played it for the first time. Either way, its certified and will be published shortly! :)

Tunnel Flyer 3D Flight Controls Complete!

I just completed the 3D flight controls for Tunnel Flyer. The ship is controlled using the accelerometer. Riemers XNA Tutorial on quaternion rotations and flight kinematics were extremely useful for quickly wrapping my head around a nice easy way to rotate vectors. When using the accelerometer data for inputs, the movements were very choppy. I looked into using a filter of some kind, I quickly came across a low-pass filter but that wasn't what I was looking for. So I resorted to making my own smoothing algorithm that uses two previous input values to smooth out the current value. Overall the controls need a bit of tweaking but for now I'm quite happy with the result as now the ship moves around mostly fluidly. :-)

Slime Jumper Certified!

I just got the email informing me that my first Windows Phone 7 game "Slime Jumper" has passed certification and will be automatically published after 24 hours!!! No better motivation to continue developing video games!!

Tunnel Flyer Revisited

Yesterday I went back to my old Tunnel Flyer game that I had been having problems with. I've decided that I will change the game so that I may proceed along with development rather then be stuck surfing the internet trying to figure out how to properly export .fbx models that have holes in them.

So the way the game is going to play NOW is basically you control a flying vessel and you have to navigate your way through tunnels of various types. Control of the ship is done using the accelerometer and there will be a brake and a boost button on either side of the screen. The tunnels will be complex enough having twists and turns, going up and down and likely to have obstacles floating around in them. I've chosen this idea because I can learn more technical skills rather than how to properly use a 3D modelling program. Those techniques I will need to learn are proper 3D flight controls, some kind of mesh collision and I'm hoping to have a choice of level designs. The levels either being from a preset list with varying ranges of difficulty, or a tunnel that is generated on the fly, making it different each time its played. The latter being the more difficult one.

Second Developer Movement Game Completed!

I just finished submitting my second developer movement game on the Windows Phone 7 MarketPlace!! This one is called "Keep Running!" The game is basically a side scrolling platformer where the player's position is fixed and the world comes at her/him. The player must avoid obstacles that come in from the right side of the screen, while trying to grab coins and purses to maximize their score. The levels are generated using predetermined "segments" that get loaded in piece by piece.

Now that both of my submissions are completed, I can start working on perfecting them to what I have in mind. Slime Jumper will have more items, special power-ups and maybe a few other things. Keep Running will have a more dynamic collision response system where the player can trip over obstacles (slowing them down but not dying), a more dynamic level creation procedure so that each player is different from the last, and maybe some power-ups as well.

So that's all for today! Both games are submitted! Yay!! Oh and I can't forget to complete my 3D Tunnel Flyer game that has caused me a few headaches. Haha.