Thursday Tea Party

And Then They Came

For today's progress report I invite a few friends to the development tea party in the form of some new assets from the department of Mark.  I added them to ensure they comply with my physics universe, but aside from some physics object centering, all went well.

As you can see, they live happily in the scene and represent the dynamic and static entities of our little drama.  They will require some unique shader to oblige them with pixel perfection, but they sit nicely on the floor and the player responds to them properly by pushing the dynamic ones and stopping at the static ones, and climbing over the small static and dynamic ones thanks to the kinematic character controller.

I knew some of you might not like this one, so I brought in a few visual friends, and added a bush too. This one might be more to your liking:

You may notice the blue barrel in the water, in the distance, bobbing about having accidently rolled down the hill when I started the prototype :) Such is the nature of live experiments, and the source of great fun when it's your turn!

Also, this scene is being rendered without any sort of shadow or shader cleverness which would bring out the materials available to me. This shot is from the physics prototype which attempts to assess object sizes, physical behavior and to some degree game speed.

Signing Off

Unfortunately, I went for a walk today to get some fitness back in my frame and came across a hedgehog caught in some fish netting. So entangled the little creature was that I lacerated myself attempting to pull apart the plastic cord that constituted the material of the offending object. Eventually, a pair of scissors materialized that made the whole rescue much simpler, but not before I was bleeding all over the place.  Hedgehog 1 Lee's Hands 0.

The Hedgehog Made A Full Recovery - Lee's Hands Didn't!

Still have the dilemma of ragdoll to think about, but thanks for the comments so far!  Understand I will always be adding ragdoll, it's just a question of when. I believe a complete game engine that runs fast precedes the ragdoll feature, but that probably goes without saying and expected. The issue is whether I should get the 'game engine' but running first, or the 'ragdoll' bit first :)  As you can imagine, I am anxious to see what the in-game play-ability looks like before I fiddle with the specific details of each module.

I had hoped to get the weapon system incorporated to the physics in-game proto, which I am warming to the idea will become the main in-game loop for everything, but my pre-occupation with importing the various entity objects and 'playing with the physics world' side tracked my ceaseless march forward.  
Hopefully I can make up some ground on Friday now I am pretty certain any entity, whether static or dynamic can sit happily in the universe without misbehaving.  Whether that can be said for the player controller or ragdoll enemies remains to be seen :)