So I'm having a break through and a set back all at the same time with this animation stuff so i figure now would be a good time for a post. Maybe That will help me sort out my thoughts here.

I've been following the example code provided to us by Keenan. It's been a bit of a life saver as the fbx sdk can be a tough one to get through alive.  I did discover a flaw with Keenan's code however in that it essentially zeroes out anything that doesn't have an animation curve. For all intents and purposes this seems aimed at nuking out the dummy nodes. The problem with this is that a large number of the dummy nodes seem to contain some pre and post rotations that throw everything off a bit. when you zero this out it means your animations turn out wrong.

So now that I've figured this out I've run into a new problem. Every so often during the animation my guy decides to just flail his arm or twist his torso in a weird way. I can't exactly figure out why this is happening and I think It'll take a bit of digging to get it all figured out. I do recall one of my classmates mentioned a possible problem with the quaternions. I'll have to investigate.

So I've been taking a look at what needs to be done before the due date and I'm having second thoughts about my complete revamp.  I'm thinking at this point I'm going to just get the animation up and running so I can hand it in. There's a lot involved here and just not enough time.

I'm continuing to follow Keenan's refactoring path.  It's not so hard to follow but as well saw in class the other day it shouldn't be necessary to actually code a lot of this because I'll likely just end up abandoning it in the end. I'll probably do some quick and dirty work just so that I can understand what is going on here a little bit better. I also think I'm going to have to hijack Keenan's math library, because I'm not so sure mine is working right. Maybe I'll do a few tests just to confirm things.

Lots to do. Lots to do. Hopefully my studying for Algorithms doesn't take too long.

Looking Ahead

So I've officially completed PA1-3 and uploaded all of the necessary files to perforce which means It's time to look ahead to PA4 and the end of game engines. The main focus here is to get some animation data working and it's a tall task. I could focus completely on just getting the animation to work from here on but I think I may be better served if I do a little bit of refactoring first. The engine is feeling pretty bulky right now and it would be nice to clean a few things up.  I also still have yet to add in the game loop like we did in class.

I'm begining to become unhappy with how my objects are being managed by the object manager and I think i'd like to revamp that quickly as well. For some reason i'm not a huge fan of having to create space frigate and then space frigate object. then also adding in warbear and warbear object.  They do exactly the same things except they just have different names and load different data. I feel like getting the PCS tree structure set us is going to be the way to go here. At that point I should be able to set up a more generic object class so I won't have to copy and paste the whole thing with every model I load.

There is a large amount of work to be done in the coming weeks and it's a good thing I've made myself a lot of free time. Time to get started on the big push.

PA1 - PA3. DONE.

So it's probably a little premature to actually call it a wrap, but I've just finished quaternions (all my tests pass at least. I won't be sure they work right till I use them) and as I posted a few minutes ago the archiver and the converter are basically finished. I might do a little tweaking here and there but I think that means it's on to animation. (but first a video game break!) Feels good to be done.

A Quick Diagnostic

So it's about time I get back to working on my engine.  I think now is a good time to review what is left to be done.

I haven;t looked in a little while, but I'm pretty sure my archiver is all done. As I recall all of the unit tests passed and I think it looked pretty good. I'll be sure to double check that before the deadline.

Next up is the FBX model converter. This is looking decent enough. I've been able to take three different models, convert them to my desired binary format and then get them to display on the screen in my engine. I'm pretty happy with this in that that's basically all there is to the assignment, but If there's time I'd like to see if I can clean this up a little bit. I'm using a lot of vertex data in the engine, and I know I can make them a little leaner. Spacefrigate, Warbear, and Astro boy are up an running. I'm also considering throwing a couple of other models in there just for kicks.

Finally is quaternions. This went smoothly enough and I've got the majority of the tests passing just fine. The only thing I'm having trouble wrapping my head around is the direction of flight. I'm just not quite understanding what exactly it is I'm supposed to be returning. I've re-watched Keenan do this from class but I think I'm just going to have to rack my brain and figure it out. I may need to put a forum post up real soon.

That does it for the near deadline and then it's on to animation. There isn't a whole lot of time to get animation flowing so I'll probably try to get a head start on that.

I'm also going to need to make a few edits to my original game engine. I'll get the game loop up and running and just clean things up a bit. Hopefully I can make it easy enough to use when creating games in my spare time.

QUATERNIONS!

So I'm plugging my way through quaternions and I think I'm getting to the point where I should put up a good post.

This Sucks.  I'm glad that this is the type of thing you can do once and then as long as you've done it right you won't really need to come back to it for a long time.   There are a couple of problems I'm having right now.  For one I think my conversion from a matrix to a quaternion isn't correct. I'm not sure why as the math doesn't really seem to be present in the documentation.

Secondly, Keenan has a large number of constructors and set functions with rotations about x, y, and z and here again I'm just not sure how to translate or what exactly he's looking for. I'm getting close to finishing the function's I'm able to and I'm thinking I might need to go see Keenan soon before the deadline so I can sort all of this out.

I moved away from The converter for now.  I have a pretty clear picture in my mind on what needs to be done there, but I just wanted to get as far as possible on quaternions before I jump back in. hopefully I'm not wasting too much time.

-A

MOAR Converter problems.

OK. so now I'm able to get all the right data to print to the screen.  Theoretically it should've meant smooth sailing form there. Not the case. It seems I'm having problems writing the data to the file. It could also be a problem with the data itself but I'm not entirely sure.

Originally I had been allocating structures dynamically  and writing the vert data to these structures, then writing the structures out to file. The dynamic calls were causing problems with my use of sizeof() so in order to get it just to work I hard coded a couple of things in so I can get the structures up there.  I've written this data to file and even been able to parse it on the other side in my graphics manager. I had to create the object in the graphics manager which required a bit of copy and paste work from the pyramid structures. When I compile my graphics engine I can only see half of the frigate and parts of the polys I can see are a bit off. I'm still not sure what's causing the problems. I'll have to keep debugging.

-A