Deviations

Sorry, nothing to exciting today, just gritty details of game development.  :)
Today was kind of all over the place.  I started off with a good push towards doing some level editing, but got sidetracked on some pipeline bugs and miscellaneous other things.

I made some progress getting the nav point editor started.  At least it displays the nav points now.  :)  I then went to make some placeholder art for a broken object in the scene.  After taking a few minutes to patch it up properly, because the cell fracturing tool does not get along with non-manifold meshes, I finally got it into the game and quickly discovered that the collision mesh and render meshes were not at all aligned.

I had discovered this problem earlier with some other models, but didn't really take the time to look into it.  Today it was severe enough to call for another look.  It turns out to have been a problem with the way I'm converting from the right-handed to left-handed coordinate system in the pipeline.  The Bullet importer doesn't really support this, so I have to go in and manually transform everything.  There was a bug when the pivot for the object was not at the origin, and basically everything was getting doubly-offset on the Y-axis, for mathematical reasons too tedious to explain right now.

Then I encountered a problem with binding the rigid body to the render mesh, which is done by name.  The COLLADA exporter replaces all periods in names with an underscore.  The Bullet exporter does not.  Not a really big deal, but took some time to track down and fix.

So, at last, I actually got a little work done on adding some new components to the engine.  The one thing I really wanted to add was the ability to script various operations on models.  In particular, I wanted to give every individual piece of an "exploded" model some random angular velocity when it is spawned, so I'm looking into a ModifyPhysicsComponent that will spin over all of the rigid bodies in a model and use a script/expression to modify them.  We'll see how it goes, looks fairly good so far.


So, overall, progress, but I really need to get past all of the expository bits in the first few levels of the game and get to the blowy-up bits.  :)