Breaking through barriers and buffers

I just noticed I've been writing in English recently even when the first entries are in Finnish. My thoughts just flow more naturally this way. Funny. Anyways, sorting all objects in the scene so that things further away are rendered first solved the issue with rendering. Then I realized that the problem is actually caused by the fps counter that is rendered on top of the final scene; rendering that string apparently likes to screw around with render states and turns off the z-buffer even when I do turn it on in the beginning of the game. This can be solved by simply enabling z-buffer in the beginning of each frame instead of just once in the beginning of the game. Now we are also rendering the arena the characters are standing on as a simple flat plane along with a skybox. Currently I'm trying to make the camera to be able to rotate around the player character around it's horizontal axis too, at the moment the camera can only be rotated around the y-axis.

What's on the menu?

Now we actually have a partially functioning menu in the beginning of the game instead of just a screen displaying some text. I say partially because at the moment no matter what option you select from the menu you will always end up in the same place: the gameplay screen. Also now you can rotate the camera around the player character and look at it from different directions. There is something funny going on with rendering the scene though. Sometimes things that are further away are rendered on top of things that are closer to the camera. I have some ideas in my mind for that, I'll start working on the issue next.

In addition to having the screen split in four parts, now the objects on the screen can be controlled with X-Box 360 controllers and each of the four cameras follows one object assigned to it. The objects of course are placeholders for player characters. So far one cannot rotate the objects or the cameras, only move the objects on a flat plane. We also have a primitive game state management system in place, meaning we can change between different game states such as opening splash screen, menus, victory screen and the gameplay screen. Currently the game starts with a simple screen with some text on it and moves to the gameplay state when a player presses start button on any controller.

Split screenin tesmausta.

Aikataulutusta

Aikataulua tehdessäni mieleen hiipii ajatus että projekti saattaa jopa tulla valmiiksi ajoissa. Jos saan tämän aikataulun pitämään niin viimeistelyyn ja hiomiseen jäisi vielä ihan kivasti aikaa projektin lopussa. Tosielämässä tietysti venytään ja paukutaan kun asiat osoittautuvat arvioitua vaikeammiksi ja enemmän aikaa vieviksi kuin osasin odottaa, puhumattakaan elintärkeistä ominaisuuksista joita vain ei muistanut listata ja aikatauluttaa. Odotan jo innolla viimeisten viikkojen yöllisiä koodaussessioita ja vähiä yöunia.