Our Senior Project is divided into two parts. Each part having a duration of eight weeks. We have just completed the first part of our Senior Project and I am fairly happy with the progress we’ve made. We got almost all of the basic core elements into the game and really only have Game Play features left.
For this first part of Senior Project I was tasked with implementing my HDR shader into the new engine we built for our Engine Class and creating the Level Designer tool for the game. I got the HDR shader implemented within the first week and was able to spend the rest of the time focusing on the Level Designer.
The Level Designer consisted of two parts, the terrain editor and the object placement tool. The Terrain Editor consisted of the terrain morphing and terrain texture painting. The morphing of the terrain mesh took about a week and started with basic button presses that switched the state/type of brush that the mouse would use. It took about another week to get the exporting and importing of the mesh to a custom “.obj” file.
Then I started on the next part of the Level Designer, the terrain texture painting. I started with creating an empty texture using DirectX 9 that would act as a blend texture mapped over the terrain. It took me about a week to get the terrain texture painting tool, texture loader, and texture saver to work well.
The object placement tool was a fairly simple part of the project. The only challenge was switching all of the object movement to be relative to the view space. So that when you selected an object and moved the mouse to the right, it would move towards the right of the screen and not just down the x-axis. I used TinyXML for the saving and loading of the objects which only took a day to implement into the current system.
Finally, once all of the Level Designer tools were done. I helped Jonathan in getting the Havok Physics engine to read our terrain mesh so that we will have realistic physics against the terrain. Once Ray was finished with the UI API he created, I used his API to create the onscreen controls for the Level Designer and the menu for the game. The rest of the time I spent helping others with their part of the project or fixing any bugs that popped up.