Progress of Second Sprint

For Tuesday's class, I was able to implement a basic framework for the collision of objects. For our purposes, when we debug the program, I also render the bounding spheres so we can tell when we are colliding into objects. Conveniently, XNA actually automatically create bounding spheres for each mesh of our model. By using these meshes, no extra code will be required to build bounding spheres. However, since a bounding sphere encapsulates a mesh, a single model will require numerous meshes for bounding spheres to be accurate. Therefore, each model will be split into smaller meshes such as a mesh that contains a wing, a mesh containing the body of the spaceship, etc. Next time I intend to generalize the collision framework so that collision between any objects will be applied. Since the last time, James found out that artists can put locators onto certain bone areas and name them. These locators can be accessed through xna and will make our ideas of attaching pods much easier. We can give locator for where to attach cameras, where to place pods, where to emit engine particles, where to shoot weapons, etc. We are also applying these locators into our level design. We can use these locators to place mission specific objects and certain story triggers. As a result, we can use maya as a level editor. Each level will be represented as a model which contains a series of locators which the programmers will use to place mission objects. This is solve our previous concern of hardcoding every single level.