This week, i finally got a monkey off my back by getting the AS3 version of the smartfoxserver working. Check that out here It wasn’t as insanely hard as it use to be apparently i wasn’t looking in the parameters of the connection component. The next step was to just empty out all the old AS2 connection code.

That wasn’t even the bulk of my week. I spent the most time this week going through the Lynda Tutorials as per Jervis’s Request. They actually are extremely useful. I started with the AS3 Basic tutorial went to the AS3 Beyond Basics tutorial, and then finished off with the Flash CS4 tutorial for good measure.
Now that me and Lynda are on first name bases, I started working on separating and identifying the user connection class in SmartFox so that when 2 or more people connect they will be given different screens. Unfortunately, I don’t believe i can get a sample of that up by tonight. But there is always hope!

This week, the group sat down in its entirety to talk about the level. We decided that the first 2 sequences didn’t rely heavily enough on the head tracking. So, in light of this, we made a new level sequence. We haven’t completely scrapped all the old stuff, but rather “rearranged” things for this new sequence. There are still a few small holes that I will be plugging for this week, but the main idea is all finished. Here is what we got all worked out:

Side A: Urban Environment, Crank item

Side B: Forest Environment, Axe item

Side C: Castle Environment, Shovel item

Side D: Desert Environment, Bomb item

Side A has an urban setting with buildings and streets, there is also a station where they have the means to use their crank. This station will operate a crane on side D (desert), however, side A’s first task is to load batteries into the crane power station to get it operational. Side D has remote control bombs, however they first have to be gathered then passed to side C. Side D can contol these bombs from their side. The bombs will blow a path allowing side C to dig dirt and transport it to a catapult. Side C will have to aim the catapult (with crossairs) on side B to try and fill in the holes of side B. Filling in these holes will provide a path for B to cut down trees on their side. Once the trees are cut, they can move them to side A. They then can place them on side A as a bridge access for side A to move from building to building.

Also, the characters are finished in their final stages. Here is a picture of them looking nice in Maya:

http://thefourmation.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/character_render1.jpg

The last thing I posted up is the papervision cube with all the characters on their own faces. This was pretty easy to do using Collada, which is a program that can export 3D models from Maya into DAE files, which can then be brought into flash. This Collada program also can bring in animations, but I didn’t get to dive into that for this week. However, next week, I would love to have them walking around on the faces of the cube. Anyways, here is the link to the swf of the guys on the cube:

http://thefourmation.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/cube_v3.swf

So, in summation, for next week I would like to have the level completely finished and in a lovely word document. I would also really like to have some animations working in the papervision file. My fingers are crossed.

Per Jervo’s suggestion I am resubmitting last week’s work. Again, you can find it here. This week I animated the other assets on the menu.

Otherwise, I have been brainstorming game play and functionality of the themes we’ve decided on.

As I said in my Building Fourmation post, I spent a lot of time this week coding the actual game. There’s a lot of different parts to the game, and a lot of code to go with it. The new menu design utilizes the 3D engine in a much better way than my previous examples.

Other things I did this week…

I met with Deimler for about a half hour after Thursday’s meeting and helped him with the color schemes of our Fourmation characters.

Kyle came over Friday afternoon and we figured out a lot of the WiiFlash functionality. We ended up building the Monitor class that reads all of the information from peripherals, servers, and wiiflash.

So this week me and Jared accomplished a lot of work within a short amount of time. I was messing with the headtracking all week and managed to get some cool effects (which ill show you kids on Tuesday) but the real genius of our code appeared Friday afternoon.

Despite the free beer at the academic bistro me and Jared had a good 3.5hr code party and got a lot of stuff done.

We managed to get all the rollovers working exactly as we want them, and created our own custom methods for pretty much any WiiMote event. Jared’s Mac was being stupid so we couldn’t ‘test’ it, but logically it all worked out. Once I got home I ran all the code on my computer and confirmed that it legit worked. Overall we got a bunch of code working and I learned a lot about Actionscipt 3…even just watching Jared type code was a learning experience…

I’m sure Jared posted up the example we made…but I’m pretty stoked we actually got what we wanted working. Overall I’d say this was an extremely productive week. This upcoming week me and Jared are going to focus on the head tracking extensively…