Presented by Lewis Chen Senior Design CS491ab Winter-Spring 2009

1. Presented by Lewis Chen Senior Design CS491ab Winter-Spring 2009

2. Concept • LEGO-themed Real-Time Strategy Game • Command a fleet of ships and attack enemy fleets in 3D. • Construct custom models for the game.

3. Background • Inspired by Homeworld • Game plot developed years ago. • Models were already being built prior to project.

4. Objective • To create a plastic construction toy-themed 3D Real-Time Strategy Game based on the Homeworld series RTS game. • Implement an orbiting camera • User input to control player’s ships. • Convey an outer space environment for the player to play in. • (Optionally) Implement special effects to make the basic game enjoyable.

5. Demonstration

6. Implementation Issues • Orbiting Camera • Difficult to write from scratch. Does not move smoothly nor to correctly. • Solution: Utilized Dhpoware.com demo source code

7. Implementation Issues (cont) • Model conversion • Multiple ways of converting an ldr file to an fbx file. • Given: Ldraw models are converted to .3ds format via LeoCAD and imported to Blender. • Exported directly to .fbx or .x. • All the meshes joined as one object, export to .3ds, imported to Carrara, exported to .fbx • Export to .obj, converted by FBX converter to .fbx • Solution: Use Ldraw importer plugin for Blender to import Ldraw models directly w/o conversion, export to .obj, converted by FBX converter to .fbx

8. Implementation Issues (cont) • Selection Pick ray • How to project a ray from near plane to far plane of a perspective camera view. • Solution found from tutorials and examples • Was not able to implement Selection box

9. Implementation Issues (cont) • Floating Health bar • Health bar is to appear floating above a ships relative to the camera’s perspective. • Had a completely implemented health bar that would update when attacked and not attacked. • Code lost when doing system restore. • Most of original implementation recovered, but does not update as originally desired.

10. Implementation Issues (cont) • Particle Systems • Immediately decided to use off-the-shelf code. • Studied user manual to understand how to modify particle system parameters.

11. Implementation Issues (cont) • Matrix Decomposition • Extracting the position and rotation of a ship is very important • Be able to compare positions of two units and their orientation.

12. Implementation Issues (cont) • Ship class • Creating a class containing ship parameters • Model • Allegiance (boolean) • Selected (boolean) • Modelworld (Matrix) • Maximum Health (float) • Current Health (float) • Shield (float) • Attack points(float) • Maximum Velocity (float) • Angular Velocity (float) • Alive (boolean) • Ship name (String) • Ships added to the game via a Generic List.

13. Implementation Issues (cont) • Collision Detection • Collision detection came from tutorials. • Creating event handlers for Collision detection was difficult

14. Future Plans • Abandon XNA and explore other game engines, perhaps commercial level. • It is a huge disadvantage to work on a game project alone. • May end up just creating an animation series with the game plot. • I have created test animations • Develop other game ideas and see where it goes. • I have gained experience from using XNA and many lessons have been learned.

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