Now the characters have melee attacks and hitpoints, so they can run around rampaging and destroying each other. There is also a win condition in place, the player who first reaches a certain amount of kills wins the game and a new round can begin. Ranged and special attacks are well under way and should be implemented soon too.

Ooooh, shiny!

Since the last update the support for a varying number of players has been increased. Now there is a "Press start button" screen in the beginning of the game, and the menus only take input from the controller that presses start on that screen. This way it doesn't matter which controller you grab from the floor, it can be attached to any port be it number 1 or number 4, any controller can use the menus. Also the gameplay screen starts with only one player now, controlled by the same controller that made it through the menus, other players can join the game on the fly by taking a controller and pressing start button. The camera controls were also fine tuned to work better and some problems with rotating the camera were fixed.

Currently we only have 3 controllers to test the game with, we need to ask for one more so we can make sure the game actually works with 4 players.

From matrices to a quaternion

The camera controls turned out to be quite tricky actually. I spent a lot of time trying to make it work by storing yaw and pitch angles separately and calculating rotation matrices out of those. This caused all kinds of problems and funky behaviour. Finally I settled down with using a single quaternion that is used to store all rotations around all three axises. We won't probably need roll (rotation around z-axis) though, so we are currently using only yaw and pitch (rotations around y- and x-axises respectively). Now the game has the possibility for less than 4 players based on the number of attached controllers, whereas previously the screen was always split in four parts no matter what.