NURBS Model

This week's assignment was to make a NURBS model of anything we wanted. Prof Sanders said that nurbs models work best when used to model common household objects, so I decided to make a champagne glass.

 It wasn't too difficult to model. I started with the top bit, which is a sphere with a 180 degree start sweep, and then rotated so the "closed half sits on the origin. Then I stretched the half-sphere to make it resemble a champagne glass.

For the neck I used a cylinder and made it taller and skinnier than the default. I lined it up with the bottom of the sphere.

The base of the glass is just a flatted cone with the tip slightly inside of the cylinder so it's hidden from view.

Project Update - Almost Done

So I've made lots of progress on my game. It's pretty much completed with very few bugs, and no game-breaking bugs. Crashes are very rare and are fixed with a simple restart. There are two things I'd like to go into in this post: the way I used collision detection, and the audio I used for this project.

There were a couple resources for collision detection posted in Piazza (I even posted one of them) but in the end I decided to go with a method I have used in the past. In my IMM 120 class, I was taught a method to check if a point is inside of a rectangle. This is useful, in most cases, for checking to see if the cursor is inside of a shape, but I changed it to work for my use case, It resulted in this gigantic, poorly-coded, bad practice if statement:

It's not pretty, but it works. I haven't found a case yet where the squares touch without triggering the gameOver variable. I'm sure there's a better way to do this, in fact I'm positive there is, but this method worked for me.

My game's a little bare, graphics wise. I felt that I didn't really need too many distractions, since the game is all about the two players. I did however want to add in some audio. I found a pretty cherry playground-y song that I thought works well for tag (in fact, the song is called Tag Game Song). It fits the game perfectly in my opinion. 

Give it a listen: https://musescore.com/user/912161/scores/1498441

Networked Games - Project #1 Programming Outline

So I've decided to go with Tag for my first project. I haven't started actually coding (will start that after this post and throughout the week), but I've laid out the roadmap for how my code will be organized.

I'll have the main class where setup() and draw() are called, which will contain the networking logic and the logic for players colliding with each other and with stationary objects.

My program will have two classes outside of the main class: Player and Obstacle. Player will contain the logic for player movement and starting location, and Obstacle will generate objects at random points.

I hope that planning out my programming ahead of time will help make the process smoother. More updates to come as I start coding.

Networked Games - Best Example of Networked Game (so far)

Of the games we’ve played so far, I think At a Distance uses networking most effectively. I get that the idea is to have the two computers side by side, but if they weren’t, I’m not sure if I would have ever figured out how the two players are connected. Even being able to see both computers next to each other it still took me a while to figure out how the game worked. I’m not sure if that’s a testament to the game’s interesting design or my inability to see the obvious, but it raised the game in my eyes.

 

Images from the At a Distance Website

The interesting thing about At a Distance is that the networked element of the game wasn’t revealed at the start (besides joining a server’s game) like it was in Joust and Sleep is Death. Nor was it too difficult (after a bit of thinking) to see how it worked, unlike Between, which I’m still not sure I understand.

I’m not sure I liked At a Distance from a pure gameplay perspective, since platforming and puzzles aren’t really my thing - but I enjoyed how the two players had to work together to move further in the game. You could say the same about Sleep is Death, or any number of cooperative games, but I think something about At a Distance sets it apart, at least from the other games we’ve played so far. One player being the “key” and the other being a sort of “world master” was a really interesting concept to me that I personally haven’t seen explored in a game before.

At a Distance is the most interesting game we’ve played so far. Joust was similar to other party games I’ve played before, and Sleep is Death was a cool concept but was also a pretty simple example of networking, since it was literally sending all of the data back and forth. Between’s networking element was too hard to discern, which kind of turned me off from the game.

Networked Games - Proposal and First Thoughts

Originally posted on 2/13/16, moved to a post instead of a page on 2/21/16:

I finished my proposal for the first game project - multi-screened networked game. I've narrowed it down to two games, and I'm not sure which one I want to pursue further. They are a game of tag and a text adventure. Both projects interest me, but I think I'm leaning more towards going with the tag game. I think it will be easier to get a working prototype going, which will give me more time to debug and add more features before the project is due. I'd like to work on the text adventure, especially since I enjoy those types of games, but I'm worried that I would take to long to make a functioning game that wouldn't leave me enough time to debug and make it the best I can.

More updates to come as I continue working later this week.

Animation I - Bouncing Ball Textures

I worked on adding textures to the ball, ring, and floor. I didn't have too much trouble doing this, but I had a bit of trouble adding the face texture to the ball. I finally got it to work after some fiddling. I also didn't have too hard of a time adding the squash and stretch.

Final result after rendering:

Animation I - Bouncing Ball

So I've started making my bouncing ball animation. I haven't had too much trouble since I'm really just following the tutorial, but there were a couple sports where the numbers for object placement were off so I had to improvise.

Here's the graph of the balls animation.

I tried to make each of the bounces smooth and natural.

Next, I added squash and stretch, and bend, to the ball. This was a little difficult as it required doing some things the tutorial had different instructions for.

Animation I - First Model

This is my first model. It's a basketball court. I used planes, cubes, squares, and circles. The markings on the court are the 2D shapes, and the stanchions, backboards, and rims are 3D objects.