Game Idea
Open world (GTA style) game where player plays as
a robot who thinks he is a boy fighting crime in the hood. We’ll call it “Roboy
in da Hood”. This is a direct sequel to our first year GDW game “Roboy”. In
this post I will talk about some of the core engine features we need to
implement to make this game happen.
AI
There are going to me many entity types in the game; cars,
pedestrians, enemies etc. All entities will need to select the appropriate
action for based on what’s going on around it. Then it will need to be able to
determine where it needs to go to accomplish the action selected and finally it
needs to figure out how it’s going to get there.
Physics
To my limited knowledge of physics engine (hopefully that
changes after this course) a physics engines only jobs are: applying kinematic
forces and collision detection. Those are two hefty jobs which are vital to
Roboy in Da Hood (and just about every game ever). We are using Havok as our
physics engine which is used by many commercial games. Hopefully with a little
elbow grease we can use it to its full potential.
Audio
Based on the first lecture slides, 2LOC, the engine we are
using has support for FMOD and OpenAL which are two libraries that handle
audio. I’ve only ever worked with FMOD and it gets the job done. Not sure why
it has both FMOD and OpenAL but then again I don’t know a whole lot about audio
programming.
We will use audio to help set the mood and theme of the
game. There will be ambient audio and music which just plays over top
everything and there will be audio which will be played from collision call
back functions such as:
onCollisionEnter(), onCollision(), onCollisionExit();
I don’t know if 2LOC has these functions (or some variation
of) implemented or not but I expect to use those three functions a lot
throughout the development of this game.
Rendering
Ahh rendering. What could be said about rendering? Rendering
is the cat’s meow. The bee’s knees. Needless to say, rendering is my cup of
tea. This year we are using Ogre as our rendering engine. I've never actually
worked with Ogre but I heard things about its architecture which leaves me kind
of skeptical. But looking at the 4 images in the Ogre gallery (click), they
look pretty good. I can see bloom, depth of field and shadow mapping effects in
all their glory which leaves me kind of confused because if the guy who made
that demo can pull off those effects with Ogre then surely with a little perseverance,
passion and time with the Ogre documentation I can pull off those same effects
in Ogre…right? Right??
It says we need to draw a picture...well okay:
