Vehicles and Physics

I've added the Farseer Physics Engine to our game. I have to say, it's very impressive and a lot of fun to play with. I spent hours tweaking various physics values and trying different functionality. For now, my goal was to get the engine integrated into our game and create a vehicle that can ride around our maps with a mounted turret gun that fires. To do this, I first had to make our map ledges "collidable" with Farseer's Physics Simulator. I changed the map loading routine to automatically create polygon "Geoms" with which objects can collide with when creating the ledges. Then, I went to work with building a prototype vehicle that I (very) roughly modeled after the Warthog from the Halo series. One interesting thing I discovered during this whole process is that most popular platformers don't actually use realistic physics like this. It makes the character difficult to control and the movement just doesn't feel "right" for a human (or human like being). For this reason, I decided to keep the original, simple, physics system I already had developed and include Farseer as an additional physics system to use only for specific entities that require more complex and realistic physics such as vehicles and grenades. Because we don't have art yet for sloped ground or any vehicles, I just draw simple shapes to demonstrate the physics and vehicle.

A Brave New World

It's been a long time since my last update to the blog. It's not because I took a break from the game, but rather that I've tackled my toughest challenge yet. I decided to design my own system for map linking and mini-maps. Instead of looking for help and examples in books, forums, or blogs, I sat down with a pen and paper and planned things out myself. It took me quite awhile to come up with answers to all the problems I faced, but I think I ended up with something decent that works and I'm happy with it. I call a collection of maps a "world", hence the title of this post. I needed to make a new editor to create worlds with, but I'm bored to tears with the UI code so I just put together something super ugly but super quick, copying a lot of code from my previous editors. The video below shows Chris' new shark, which I think is super cool, running through our first test world.







Next up on my TODO list is to fix up a few map transition issues and then experiment with the Farseer 2D physics engine to see if I can get it working with our game.

Shark Attack

We added a new character yesterday, the so far unnamed shark warrior. I've been working on the art for this character on and off over the last two weeks. The shark is going to act as our strength character. While the blind warrior will be our DPS and the Bargle is going to fill the intelligence/tech role. At least, that's our thinking so far, the game is ever changing.



I put some time in after I finished the sprite work and got a pretty decent run sequence going. Since I've been working on this game I've been using the book Cartoon Animation by Preston Blair as a reference. The book is very old school and at first glance looks a bit cheesy but it's actually packed with tons of good information ranging from character creation to animation sequences. It's also very easy to find online for free.



I based the shark's run sequence off of the sequence below. It translated pretty well but I did have to add one more frame to the sequence to get it looking right.