Day 18: Triple Nothing

Totally unrelated to game dev, but I've been making diagrams for my mum. So it's still nothing, but with a neat picture.

Day 17: Nothing

Nothing to report today. I know I could just not write anything but eh, at least I'll have a day to day track of what I've been doing I guess.

Day 16: Nothing

I am pursuing other projects at the moment. No progress relative to any previous work here.

Day 15: Git Woes

So the project I'm working on has decided to use Git for it's source control solution.

I was like, alright, it's cool I guess, I've never tried Git, but I've worked with Tortoise SVN and Dropbox, maybe it'll be as simple and friendly to use as those?

Nope, the more I read the more it seams that it wants to be a console only application where you have to explicitly type everything to get anything done. Yes, there is a GUI version, but all the main tutorials totally ignore it and focus solely on using the console version.

<begin entitled rant> Man it's 2012 already, what's with using console applications to do stuff, it's not very user friendly and just creates a barrier to entry because people have to actually dig through docs to figure out how to accomplish simple tasks instead of experimenting in a GUI environment.</end rant>

Alright, off to figure out how to get a simple text file to commit to the damn online repository.

Day 14: Reading up on A*

Well I've worked on implementing the A* algorithm back when I was in high school, in the Turing language, but  it didn't end up working. So here I am, looking into A* again, hopefully 5 years the wiser.

Guess I can put up my implementation of it up later, if it works, and if it ain't a terrible pos. Anyways off to do more reading, figuring out both A* and now how to use Github too.

Day 13: What am I doing again?

So not much coding progress.

I should be working on something, probably the character controller that makes the avatar walk from one node to another, or any specified node. I don't know what I'm doing, but hey thanks Wikipedia and Dijkstra's algorithm - I should be able to get something that works if I can concentrate. Put it together with the animation stuff and hopefully it'll all play nice together.

I'd like to think that if I knew what I was doing, I'd be done by now.

One thing at a time, but there is just so many things to do.

Day 12: First Patch Job

Well basically I blew all of yesterday playing Beyond Good & Evil, but I did talk with the animator about some issues that came up about the animations because of late changes in the design.

Basically because the original specifications never included facial animations, the rig maker never included any sort of facial controls in the animation rigs. So now that the design calls for some eye blinking and minor facial expressions the rig must be redone in order to properly animate it. This complicates a lot of things because if the animation rig is changed, then the models will no longer be able to share animations between versions. Basically every animation would have to be redone in order to get the same effect.

So in order to skip the large amount of misery that it would bring to everyone involved (redoing every animation, me having to reexport/import every animation, and blowing a bunch more weeks doing this) I suggested that the animator only use the new rig for animations that call for facial expressions, and then they would be used in the game as a special case that would replace the regular model with the newer model & rig. This loses compatibility and creates some duplication, and if more animations need facial expressions then it becomes less and less worth it, but for now it'll be the quickest way to get things done.

As for me, I figure I'll get back to making the animation controller which I think will probably just be an extension / wrapper for the regular animation component. After that I think I'm back to the art side of things -> exporting and importing the apartment models.