bAAAAAAttlezone

The final project for my game development course is roughly done now. Here's a screenshot for postarity.



The real nasty part was integrating physics into a real project for the first time. I used JigLibX at first but it had several problems. The most severe being a poor selection of constraints, no forcefield support built in, buggy/broken body de-activation and poor performance (especially on the X-Box). I ended up fixing the body de-activation by hacking in a simple iteration through all of the bodies in the system to do the deactivation. No, I'm not submitting this as a patch since it circumvents what should be a superior method... eventually. I doubt JigLibX is going to see much work however since I remember seeing a post from its author about the creation/release of a new .NET physics library.

Anyway, I ended up switching to BEPU physics instead. I very strongly reccommend this engine for both its performance, which was quite decent on PC in my project, and its ease of use. I found the integration of BEPU was very simple to carry out and that tasks such as creating composite bodies, constraints etc. was very simple. This is actually somewhat inspiring since I might be able to use this for a future project I've been meaining to do. Sadly, I still have performance issues on the X-Box 360 though the game is playable if I keep the number of objects low.

AAAAAA 'Splosions!

AAAAAAZone is proceeding nicely. The first project milestone is due tomorrow and what's left to do is implementing enemy AI, which is fun, and force feedback on the gamepad.

I'm currently using JigLibX to provide physics and collision detection in the game. This is working quite well right now though the lack of documentation is rather irritating. The biggest issue currently is the amount of jittering that occurs with the tank's suspension. That's going to be a pain to work out but that's for later... What's more important is EXPLOSIONS!

Yes, EXPLOSIONS! the staple of Michael Bay. They're really simple too. What I do is apply a force to any object within a certain distance of the EXPLOSION!'s position. The force gets weaker as the distance from the EXPLOSION! increases. This is great for sending tanks flying around when shooting them.

The other trick is applying blast damage. If an EXPLOSION! force is applied to a tank then the tank will take damage. The more force the more damage. Once enough damage is done all of the tank's parts, wheels, axels, guns and such, are detached from eachother.

Another Project

I haven't decided how much I'll talk about this one but it is fun. For our Game Development course in my program (Software Engineering at Conestoga College) we have to make a clone of Battlezone using XNA.

The prof has given a decent amount of leeway in the project to have some fun with it. So, finally I have a chance to try out a physics engine without trying to shoehorn it into a partially completed project.

I'll probably just update in shorter posts like this one for Battlezone (for now titled AAAAAA Zone due to a naming theme I've been using for the other projects in the Gamedev course)

Cheers!