This week we continued to work on fixing glitches that we found while testing in VR as well as other individual tasks. I finished the last of the chicken animations and plan to start working on boning the pig model next week. In coding I helped I little bit to try and debug the chicken. Right now the chicken can't seem to figure out how to go back to it's patrol points after chasing the character. I'm confident we can figure out what's happening next week however with some more intense debugging.
The full map of our school building is almost done being modeled and I hope we can get that imported into our scene soon so we can make sure it won't lag our game too badly. If it does I plan to work on a script that would help us load different areas of the game separately. This would solve some of the lag issues if it worked. Next week I will: -Help debug the chicken -At least start to bone the pig
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First I would like to say that I don't want to sound ungrateful in this blog post. There are many schools both in Durham County and elsewhere that don't have as nice computers as we do. We are lucky to even have a game design program at DSA. However before working on a school computer there are certain survival tips one must master. These machines are completely inadequate for running the programs they are expected to run and thus must be led through the process gently. Here are a few tips on how to use a piece of public, educational machinery.
The most important thing you need to know is that you will never be able to do research on these things for games. Between the tight security network banning any forum where questions could be found to the lovely tendency for all tutorials to be restricted, there is no lack of lack of research material. If you can't find the answer to a coding question on the programs main site, (some of which are banned under the shopping category) you might as well give up until you have time at home to look. Youtube videos are banned willy-nilly with almost no seeming regard to their content. You can expect to be able to watch an episode of Bob Ross or even a do-it-yourself make-up tutorial, but anything that you might need to learn how to code is assuredly completely shut down. Beyond this you may not even need the internet to find the limitations of these machines. The graphics cards and RAM on the computers here are laughable. When we use programs that are known for needing good graphics processing and that leak RAM all over the place (looking at you 3ds Max), There's simply no way these poor machines can keep up. Even if I wanted to manage my RAM usage while I work, I find that i'm blocked from the task manager by admin privileges. All this while my computer is practically giving off smoke trying to figure out how to bend the knee of a 3d chicken. Therefore you must always remember to save every two to three seconds. That way as the computer tries to force shut a non-responsive program you can at least show your teacher that you have gained a little ground during the roughly hour-long period. I hope these tips helped. I hope these hints were taken. -A quick disclaimer -Internet "security" -General computer specs This past week I got back to the grind of making our VR game work. I created a chicken animation for when the chicken attacks the player. This was much easier to make than my past animation as 3ds Max seems to have magically fixed its issues overnight and figured out how to bend chicken knees. Now that it's working better (knock on wood) I should be able to finish the remainder of the animations quickly and get them imported into the game.
We also put our game into actual VR test mode for the first time in a while. It worked relatively well. The game looks and sounds good and the chicken monster is very scary when it chases you around. We did find a couple glitches that we'll continue to work on in the future but I continue to be optimistic about the turnout of this project. Next week I will: -Create the rest of the chicken animations -Start to do pig research and come up with ideas for the pig animations Recently the main thing I've been focused on is creating sound for our upcoming production of Dead Man's Cell Phone. One of my responsibilities in doing this is to find the program we will use to run ques during the show. I have used QLab in the past and was pleased with the results but I knew this show would require a lot more our of the software. I would need to learn how to cue cross fades as well as run and stop multiple ques at once. There isn't any starting tutorial when you boot up QLab so I was unsure if I would be able to figure out everything on time.
A brief word on excellent customer service. Even if your program isn't super intuitive (not many pieces of software that deal with sound are) a lot of this can be overcome with a good network of customer support. We emailed QLab late on Sunday evening and received an email back within the hour which had shortcut suggestions and tutorials to watch. I was so impressed in fact I decided to write a blog post just to commend this software. Beyond just that customer service feat we have found that this program does everything we could want and more. You can even edit cues minimally within the program to set them to start and end at certain places so you don't have to go back and forth between audio editing software and QLab. The full program is quite expensive but we've found that the free items included with the basic download gives you everything you need to run a basic show. I'm actually looking forward to running the show because of the ease I'll now be able to navigate with. I fully recommend this program for anyone who wants to run a sound for a show. -What is QLab? -Customer service goals -Should you use it for your show? This week I mostly worked on finishing up the sound cues for Dead Man's Cell Phone. With the tech rehearsal for the production coming up next week I wanted to spend one last full week devoting all my attention to it. I spent my time researching songs that the director specifically asked for. One example of a song is the music that plays in the background of the Friday night dinners in Gilmore Girls. This cue was particularly hard to find as I had to search multiple forums for one that had a reference to the song. Even then I only got that the song was written by Mozart and went into the music credits for an episode to find the exact song that played. Other sounds I found were mostly noir songs on YouTube and options for a washing machine noise to play in the background during hell.
Next Week I will: -Finish any last minute Dead Man's Cell Phone Cues -Start working on more chicken animations |
AuthorSamuel Henry is a Senior at DSA in NC. He has 3 years of prior experience in the game design pathway and he's looking forward to becoming a great game designer. The views and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not represent those of Durham School of the Arts or Durham Public Schools Categories
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