Too Much Time Off

Originally I had planned to take the weekend off in order to relax as I had felt that the Cut Scene with all its failures took a toll on me and I needed to chill before the next leg of work. However what was meant to be a weekend turned into two weeks and I definitely suffered for it. I literally had a how week of failure where everything I did failed and then when I managed to fix that problem the fix then turned into another problem and this happened for the most the week.

It all started with the characters as they wouldn't import and originally I had thought it had something to do with the version of 3DS MAX and that being that is wasn't a 2012 version. However this would turn out to be wrong a long the way and after discussing with fellow students David and Sean we found out that it was something to do with my rigging which would soon come to be known as Blue Bones disease and as a result I had to re-rig my characters and weight them, which I thought was the end of the world at this point.

None the less I managed to do this over the space of one night and then I thought you had to create a texture map for the characters in order to get them textured which then proved to be useless as when I did it made the textures on the character to be all over the place and not as good as they once were. So in the end I decided to make a last minute decision and make 2 new characters which in the end failed because they didn't want to import into UDK and they didn't even have the Blue Bones disease. 

At this point I was on the brink of madness, luckily I had gone back and looked at my old characters and noticed that the normal map images had made it into UDK but not the diffuse and then realised that if I changed them to a format suited for UDK which I had to do anyway everything will be OK and luckily enough it did and I was back on cloud 9 again.

Due to some errors in the environment I made for the Cut Scene I was unable to use it and extend from it for the use in my 3D game so I had to make a whole new environment which I made completely in max. However using models from the environment such as the pillar's and caldron's.

I would come across my final hurdle at this point when trying to import my environment, now it would go into the content browser but it wouldn't allow me to drag and drop it into the viewport within UDK. This as a result required me to re-download UDK and luckily enough that solved my problem and after that I had to re-import everything and it all went it like a charm and I was finally relieved as something was finally going well without any issues.

Sadly because I took too much time off the 2D game had to moved back and I will try and add what I can to it at the end of the week if there is enough time, if not then I am hoping that what I submitted for the interim deadline will get me a pass as for now I'm currently focusing on the 3D.

Milestones:

• Research and practise Rigging and Skin Weighting for 3DS MAX (On Going)
• Watch tutorials on XNA and begin working on the Basics for the 2D Game
• Add screen bounds, scrolling background and enemy spawns
• Weight characters (On Going)
• Start work on second Character
• Book out the motion capture and record animations
• Book out motion capture to obtain the animations
• Create the environment 
• Render animation
• Complete 2D Game in the first week of the Holiday - sort out enemy spawning, add colission and add scoring system (On Going)
• Work on 3D Game - add characters in, environment and weapon
• Add Ai and add fire