Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Final Results

I will summarize the last couple of weeks of work:

Shadows
After testing the game several times, shadows were added to the character to give a better sense of depth and the distance from the wall.

Lag
Most of the lag problems were resolved when the game was running on Release mode. And the Vicon Data was streamed and through Ethernet cable instead of wireless.
More lag problems arose when I added more walls (went from 5 to 10) and the lag was extremely high. Aline and I tried to figure it out and it just didn't seem logical that adding walls would cause this terrible lag. On my way home something came to mind: The problem was that when you set a collision pair on PhysX it test collisions for that pair on every update adding 5 add-ed about 5,000 collision pair which would account for the lag. To solve this problem I am now inactivating collisions for all walls except for the active wall. That is the wall closest to the player.

Reduced Marker Set
Luckily there was enough time to get into one of the Fu-ture Tasks which was creating a reduced marker set. The game is now being played with 16 markers.

Final Results
The Game at this stage is a fully playable game with a new game menu. It was really important for me to have this polished, the looks can always be improved but it is crucial to have a game that will not brake when you transition from one state to another. The game has two play modes:
1) Survivor (the player only has 3 lives)
2) Continuous (the game goes on forever)
Each game mode has its own scoring system and the high scores are saved and can be viewed by the player at any moment. (believe it or not this gave me a couple of really bad headaches)
The game also features a bonus wall, this is a solid wall with one colored area. If the player hits this area bonus points are awarded.
The overall look of the game was kept very simple.

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