Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Truckin' along

Intro:

For the month of December 2007, I focused on getting pathing to work. I have already proven the humans can follow paths and wait, and appear to do jobs. So now I have done a proof of concept for the vehicles.

Paths:
Based on my previous blog I want to have trucks leave from a depot and resupply a weapons bay or ferry crew to the rocket. What they do is follow a path and on certain nodes a special instruction is place to make them wait. They receive crew or get fueled up by crew at the depot and generate crew at the drop-off points.

I implemented the two main AIWheeledVehicle resources and found that the second one was much better because I could set speeds for the vehicles, making it easier for them to turn corners, slow to drop-off etc.

Simple AI Vehicle AIWheeledVehicle

AIWheeledVehicle2

I had issues with the turning. It seems there is a limit on the steering for any vehicle and so to get the trucks to turn sharp corners they had to slide out to do it. I will post on the forums later to see if anyone know why this occurs.


Here's a video of what I have so far with regard to truck paths...

Truck Paths in BRAVE on YouTube


Aircraft Carrier:

I've done a bit more modelling of the USS KittyHawk as a part of modernising (or contemporising) the human arsenal. Here's a couple of snap shots. I've also designed what will happen aboard ship but I'll post that when the sketch is easier to understand.






Joystick:

I fixed up this resource for people when Ed Johnson who runs TorqueSchool discovered it didn't compile. I found the same thing, so I WinMerged the code to get it to work, rather than blindly copy it, and uploaded it back to the resource for people to use in TGE 1.5.2

Racing Wheel, Flight Stick and Gamepad Support for Torque (Windows)

I'm having a go with this code to see if I can fly the plane with a gamepad which is what I want the main control to be in the future. It's only because Ed contacted me that this came about.

Sign Off:

I'll be finalising the truck paths next and then getting the humans and trucks to work together. I will continue working on the aircraft carrier and progress toward completing the first level so I can release an alpha for people to try.