Wednesday....

On Wednesday Pete and I started dissecting the game into classes, so we could possibly start putting together a class diagram, and a get a better picture of the structure the game will take. Because the game is supposed to be extensible, and available for other developers to use the engine to create their own games, we need to modulate everything well enough so the developers can just pick and choose objects they want in the game, with the least amount of actual technical coding like OpenGL (a lot of developers might not be able to understand or use OpenGL, so by having our engine handle all of that is definitely the way to go).

The notes Pete and I took down include:

Indestructible Objects
- Modal Object
- Background
- Moving Objects (Bullets, Lasers, etc)

Types of Physics
- Gravity
- Wind
- etc

A utility class/package | This package will contain a lot of the utilities a developer might make use of to help build their own game.
- Vector class
- Rectangle class
- Sphere class
- etc

Bounding Boxes (for collision detection) | If we have enough time, it would be a good idea to make this up, that way it wont have to be hard coded.
- Editor or Tool to build bounding boxes for different shapes or objects.

Networking
- Player feedback (Doom / Duke Nukem Faces to represent the status/health of your opponent.
- Measure of other players progress
- Winning Conditions
- Events
- Simple chat binds (example: Hello, LOL Take that!, etc)

Profile
- Name
- Statistics | Things like, how many times you have won, what level you reach, averages, etc
- Handicap | This is made up of your statistics and make it a little more even when playing against opponents who might not be very good.
- Chat Bindings

Input
- Keyboard (KeyListener)
- Mouse (MouseListener, MouseMotionListener)
- Joystick ?
- Gamepad ?

Well, most of this information was set in our proposal, but some of these things weren't like in the Networking part having a Player feedback that makes use of a face icon is a pretty cool idea, even though it has been done before, players should be able to instantly recognise this and its purpose, if not we can provide some sort of tutorial in some documentation.

So next week our proposal should have been marked, I hope all the printing problems we had don't effect the overall mark. I'm also a little worried about Pete's grammar and writing since I didn't have enough time to read over it all, and I'm not sure if Pete did a lot of proof reading. But he did write a lot of filler, I think I might have to work on my writing skills more.

I think the progress I've made so far, is pretty good. I am trying to get back into the swing of coding and OpenGL more importantly (which isn't an easy task) after four months of being off and not doing any coding over that time it sure does make it hard. The more coding I do, the more it comes flooding back, so I will just persist.