Update #4

Hello there!

This is the last update. Boohoo... So to make up for this terrible loss we'll mostly talk about fun stuff. (That and the serious updates mostly consist of dotting the i's and crossing the t's.)

Let’s first talk about the updates on the models and such. Apart for some promotional material and the bottom of the abyss Mario will fall into when he walks off a ledge everything is done. The models for the enemies, the blocks for the level structure, some decorative models for the background and sprites for the overlay, it’s all there, done and ready for use. Telling you what went right wouldn’t be as much fun as telling you what went wrong, so enjoy!

In the past few weeks the artists worked hard on finishing the models and animating them. The latter seemed to be the biggest pain in the butt. It took us about one and a half week to get the animations properly exported and imported into XNA. According to many forums this seemed to be a huge problem for most 3D Studio Max users but less for Blender users. For us this was the complete opposite. Max' animated models in 3D Studio eventually worked, but my (Deborah’s) models made in Blender still had a problem with the weight painting.

At some point I tried to fix this problem by giving literally every single point (vertex) a weight for every bone in the armature. This resulted in a very funny animation that made me think of the song Whip My Hair by Willow Smith. And for that reason I spent 10 minutes creating a video of that. So here it is: "Whip My Goomba". (Don’t mind the watermark please, I didn’t feel like starting up my Mac with proper video editing software…)

Anyway, the real fix of this problem is quite odd. Considering what I said earlier about the difference between Blender and 3DS, that is. Turned out that the animations (and therefor bone weighting) weren’t actually that bad. Because when Max imported my models into 3D Studio and exported them again (without changing a single thing) they suddenly worked!

Another occurring problem was the not loading of the textures, which was easily fixed in the end but it took us long enough to find that out. The not loading (or incorrectly loading, for that matter,) of the textures gave us images like these:

The first being a full on black Goomba, he probably wants to be the next Darth Vader. The second image shows what the Koopa should have looked like, as it was in 3DS but in Visual Studio with XNA it turned out completely different. Until this point we still don’t really understand where the red came from but it’s fixed now.

Following up on that, the texture of the Koopa had more than that one problem. Something else was the scrambled up UV map. At some point it turned out like:


If someone can make sense out this, as to which shape is connected to one another and where every part belongs to on the Koopa itself, congratulations!!

One last thing about the models and their animations, but not yet the last thing about the Koopa. His walking animation. 3D Studio had an option to create a walking animation. Without editing of the animation, this is what it turned into:



Now, on to the code related updates. During every process you write a few lines of code, more lines of code, and some more and then you go back to the first lines because you figured out something you wrote in the first place didn’t work out the way you wanted it to with the code you wrote later on or planned to write next. A common problem with this process that you rewrite a method under a new name, don’t delete the old one and forget to change the name within other methods so that it still uses the old one and doesn’t do what you want it to do anymore.

Another thing is that you write code that when you scroll through it manually it all makes sense and even after adding breakpoints it still seems like it should do just fine. But when you run the game it turns out that a single method keeps activating again and again.

These two things happened on the Thursday we spent a day from 10 in the morning to 9 in the evening working on the project (including eating dinner at the university). It made Joep and Thomas so desperate they almost went to talk to the conductor on the train to ask him if he may be a programmer in his “spare time” and if he knew a way to fix this.

The error that when we tried to load the models was… Big. I’ll just show you:



Something that happened a little before I uploaded this blog was a problem with the spawnpoint of the Koopa. (I swear, this is the last time I use the word Koopa on this blog, for like forever!) Basically the coordinates entered weren’t the coordinates it spawned at, making it look like this:



The red circle indicates where it should have spawned. But as you can see that’s not where it ended up being. Scumbag spawnpoint…

Last few things: besides a few last bug fixes like the one mentioned above, the code to support a controller AND keyboard and commenting, lots of commenting and some more commenting the code is done. After that we still have some level design to do, because we don’t have enough levels to show what is all in the game yet, but that shouldn’t be too much work.

All things together the deadline on Monday won’t really be a problem for the progress we made. The game will be “done” (for as far a game is ever done) and ready to be played. We are really proud of what we've achieved so far.

Some last picture material of progress and problems:


This isn’t the final box art yet, but this is close to what it will eventually look like. Made by Giannina.



Happy Bullet Bill because I accidentally drew his eyes upside-down. (Silly me.)



Uhm, yeah… Don’t even ask. All I’ll say is that I found out a simple way to make a drum. (Though it will cost you lots and lots of memory to load it.) If only I remembered which exact click I did when this happened, but in all honesty I don’t even know.



I’m not sure if I want to talk about this one either. I spent so much time on fixing the texture but then I found out that I had been working in orthographic mode all this time. And when I switched back to perspective mode this is what happened and I wanted to delete all the progress I made, I’m not even kidding.

That’s it for this update. You just reached the end of this blog. So I’m just going to leave this here:

See ya!

Update #3

Hello again!

First off, we wish you all the best in this new year!

In this new update we mostly have fun stuff to talk about. The main reason: We had Christmas break and haven’t done the amount of work we should have done in those days. Shall we put the fun stuff before the serious again?

Let’s face it, Christmas break is the time to spend a lot of time with your family and friends. And that’s exactly what we did. We had planned seeing the Star Wars movie together, but we had some... Substantial hiccups concerning trains, train stations and the occasional mistake in the use of both of these caused said problems, however, we did see the movie! So let’s just stick with Thomas and I went to see it with another friend on the first Wednesday of the break and then Max, Joep, me and 3 other friends again the past Wednesday. Without giving spoilers, the film is better the less you know about the previous six films.

After the break we scheduled two meetings, one on Tuesday, one of Thursday. Tuesday was with the complete team for a change and this resulted in a socket crisis. Those rooms have only three sockets and with six laptops that’s not enough. On Thursday Christina and Giannina stayed home to work on the project there.

Max spent this week modeling the Koopa Troopa and when he was working on the foot on Thursday something happened that wasn’t supposed to in the first place. Every vertex in the object was pulled outwards and the foot looked like a big sea urchin. In case you don’t know what that looks like:

Koopa Troopa, a work in progress.

And I had to delete the fist of the Bullet Bill multiple times because for some reason it kept getting all messed up to the point of no return. Even CTRL+Z didn’t do the trick anymore.

But this is what that looks like right now (unfortunately still without textures):



And the said Goomba without textures, because those are still messed up:



Of course we have a fireflower as well, to help our plumbing friend defeating said above foes.

Distractions were a major thing this week. Big and small. A bird hopping around on the roof of the neighbour building, text messages, hunger and funny bugs(the computer type not the insects).

Enough chit chatting, let’s give you a heads up on where we stand at the project. Giannina has finished her models and the other 3 artists are working on the last models.

With the code we’re kind of stuck until the collision works the way it has to. After the collision works properly the code can be finished and tested, because to test the level implemented we need to have the collision working. How else will we know that jumping on a Goomba actually kills it and not Mario? Or check if the Koopa shells don’t slide through the wall instead of bounce off of them.

The collision is priority number one as of now. In the meantime we are also working on creating and loading three dimensional levels through a simple text file. Mario’s opponents are given some basic brain function by adding the AI to these foes, making the game just that little harder than it would be without AI.

Giannina has finished her work as an artist and has joined Joep and Thomas as a programmer. She is currently working on the code for the player and enemies and help is much appreciated!

We’ve had a meeting with Maarten, our tutor, today. It was a short meeting where we analyzed what promotional work needs to be done before the symposium. We will need posters, flyers, a trailer and a dvd box cover. Max had a good idea for the trailer, but you will get to see that when it’s all ready and pretty. But, to give you some sort of idea of what it’s going to be like: it will involve, and I am in fact authorized to say this, Mario. And that's all you're getting for this update, but tune in again in two weeks for more!