Wednesday, February 23, 2011

I love it when a physical simulation comes together

Last night I got Bullet Physics implemented again. It actually was not all that difficult, considering I didn't have to change much from the previous iteration of Rustbot, leaving me able to copy/paste the majority of it from pre-existing source. From there, some small tweaks to accommodate the current methods and organization served to complete its integration.

I also managed to fix a little bug that would cause the game to crash if I hit "escape" to close the in-game menu. Clicking "Resume Game" worked fine, but hitting escape caused a crash. I found the bug in the way that I was testing for a condition, and hooray now it's fixed (essentially I was testing a boolean in an object that hadn't been constructed - stupid!).

I downloaded the Dragon Age 2 demo for PS3 last night but haven't gotten around to playing it yet on account of needing to get Rustbot in decent enough shape for PAX East. Ugh deadlines booooo. The optimist in me is glad that I have two and a half weeks remaining and not much work left, while the pessimist in me fears being unable to get constraints working properly, as well as a rudimentary website / forum by deadline. I figure if I keep doing what I'm doing (baby steps,  Bob ― baby steps) then I'll be in the clear.

Tonight the plan is to enable real-time object addition. I'm going to implement this through the pause menu whereby the player can select from "Add Box", "Add Sphere", or "Add Cylinder". After that, the player will be presented with slider controls to determine the object's dimensions (with caps, obviously). Note that this is only for the alpha version of Rustbot. In the same vein as Minecraft Classic, this version will allot the player infinite resources just as a freeplay sandbox mode. The post-alpha version of Rustbot will have the player collecting resources like any good skinner box game.

Well that's enough for now, I suppose. Back to real work.

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