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.
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:
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!
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