Well, Friday before a long holiday. I was hoping to get more done today. Started out working with Scott to get the new graphics for the political machine map. We sat down and worked out step by step (with some help from Alex) the procedure to make the map. We’ve got to come up with some automated way of doing this. Every little tweak is going to require some manual editing.

Scott also showed us some HalfLife2 movies. Is that game going to be awesome or what?! The really did a good job with the physics. I know they’re really pushing that too because one movie was all about the physics engine. Are they using Havok?

I then got into a futures discussion with Alex and George about the cool effects we can do in GalCiv2.

We took a break for lunch, and in the middle of lunch, we got into our weekly meeting. Man, that was a long meeting. We spent about an hour discussing the merits of “m_ulVar” versus “this->ulVar”. Really, I’m used to using the “m_” notation. I think it’s what you see nowadays in all the code books. Other peoples code etc. This kind of standardized variable naming makes reading other peoples code much simpler.

[queue violins]

But, alas, I fall prey to legacy systems. We’re not doing that here anytime in the near future. For consistency sake, I fall on my sword. My member variables will be naked in the world. They will fight with other local variables for name space. At least our globals still use “g_”.

[end violins]

Enough of that talk. Let’s move onto something positive that happened today. We got an explosion animation from MAX!!! Woo hoo! Now we can blow up our ships with style. It didn’t come easy though. Our first try didn’t work. We couldn’t export a space warp as an animation that DX9 would understand. Kris and Alex had to do some fancy things to get this to work. Our savior, MaxScript. I love that you can do that in max. Kris came up with the initial script to move the objects and I tweaked it a little bit to get the rotations in. Now we can get random animations with a little script.

for i = 1 to selection.count do

(

   move selection[i] [random -20 20,random -20 20,random -20 20];

   rot = eulerangles (random -180 180) (random -180 180) (random -180 180);

   rotate selection[i] rot;

)

Well, so much for getting in the TRON blurs today. I also promised my home life that I wouldn’t work too hard this weekend. Backburner time anyways. I’ve got more important things to get done. I’m sure Alex will understand J

So for next week, I’ll be doing the following:

1)      Help Scott on PolMachine whenever he needs it.

2)