PhysX In

From the plans I last wrote, this is what I got done: I have all my PhysX in place, collisions are working, the wall is moving towards the player and if you collide with it it "breaks." What I need to do now is have multiple walls coming at you, have the wall's PhysX turned of when the wall is moving and turn the on when there is a collision. I worked a little bit on the character but it still seems off.

Here is the game plan: I will have the collision reporter so the PhysX for the walls only turn on when there is a collision. Why is this important? Well, if I have the PhysX on all the time my fractured wall will break before it gets to the player, gravity, and that would be no fun. Another thing I plan on doing is testing the collisions with my Sphere Character. Right now I've been doing it with a cube, not very interesting but useful for making sure the basics are in. Hopefully at the end of this week I will be able to have that and then I'll upload a video showing the progress.

FSM and Character

First this week's progress:
I was having a little bit of trouble when I was trying to make my Sphere man move. It would go crazy. I realized that the problem was that I had my skeleton hierarchy correctly setup in Maya but once I exported it to a NIF file it would mess it up. After Aline showed me how to prevent Gamebryo of doing this my skeleton looks how it should. I was also able to load a .amc file with a motion and play it. It looks correct, I just need to make sure that the character is not floating in space.
I also setup my Finite State Machine. I took the one Ted and I had for the CIS 564 Bowling game and modified it for what I need. So the game logic is in place and ready to be filled in.
The last thing I did was add PhysX to my scene, my scene has the character, floor, and a wall with a hole, and a cube which I will be using to test for collisions. Every object but the character have Physx. (Below an image of the scene)



For now my plan is to get on one side the character working 100% and on the other get the game mechanics working (collision, moving walls, response to collisions, etc) 100%. Once they are both working I will integrate them. For next week I will start moving the wall forward and will start testing for collisions. Most likely I will have the PhysX turned off while the wall is moving and will turn them on if there is a collision. If there is a collision the wall will break. Once I have this working with the cube I will put a capsule around the character and try that out. On the side of the character I just need to make sure it is moving how it should and not floating and that the rotations are applied appropriately.

Setting up

This last week I wasn't able to make a lot of progress because I spent a lot of time setting everything up. It always takes more than expected but I am up and ready to go. This is what I set up: (I reformatted my computer so had to start from square 0)
- Visual Studio
- Gamebryo + PhysX
- DirectX
- Fmod
- SVN
- Git and my repository. I'll be hosting it with github since I've found Git to be very efficient.

I also started working with gamebryo. I am using the libraries in the EMG project to load an .asf file.

My goals for the next few day will be to have it properly working (I have a coupe of bugs). Right now I only have spheres for the skeleton so I need to make a real skeleton with spheres and cylinders. And I will start playing with the PhysX. What this means is that I will add physX to my skeleton and will test for collisions with a wall. I will initially test with a hole-less wall and then with a very simple hole.