AI
Also, why are they dressed in green?

My AI demo was finished and handed in. My extension task was behaviour trees and there is a video of the demo below, all in HD and powered by the Insimnax Framework.

Insimnax Framework
The Insimnax Framework has finally been released. It is cut down from what I had originally planned since I decided to move the integration of things like physics, GUI, audio etc to the games that use it so that developers could be more flexible. You can grab the full source code (licensed under the MIT license) along with the code for the Insimnax Common Framework (ICL) from here.

I’m currently in the early stages of working on a level editor for it.

So what I have been doing since my last update. Well, I have played through Batman: Arkham Asylum, AND YOU SHOULD TOO! It’s a great game (given, the boss fights aren’t up to much) but I love the sneaky, pick people off one a time, parts (the Batclaw has to be my favourite weapon for doing this, just catch someone unaware and yank them over the side of a fence for an instant incapacitation).

I have also been back at Uni, so have been working on a variety of game programming related tasks. My modules for this semester are Artificial Intelligence Techniques, Advanced 3D Graphics, Network Programming and my Applied Research Project (my dissertation - which is actually a year long module).

AI
AI has been interesting so far. We started by looking into State Machines, and then Behaviour Layering before moving onto Steering Systems and Path-finding. The culmination of this is that I currently have a demo application that uses a state machine to drive the steering behaviours of a steering system following a path calculated by an A* path-finding algorithm.

AI path-finding demo, using the Insimnax Framework

A3D
Advanced 3D Graphics has three “mini-assessments”, one of which I have already completed (Shaders), and the second of which I am currently half way through (Animation). The final one will be large-scene rendering.

The shaders assignment took the form of a report looking into a particular field. This was a partner exercise and we worked on Post-processing effects.

The animation assignment is looking at skeletal animation with blending, as well as being able to influence particular bones in a mesh to make them perform certain things (like look at a point of interest). Being able to attach objects to a mesh is also another desired feature. All this is being done in DirectX 9 and I currently have instanced skinned meshes (software and HLSL) with animation event callbacks.

Instanced, animated, Tiny’s

Network Programming
Network programming involves making a game (I am using C# and XNA) which can have 4 or more players playing over a network. I am making a 4-player version of Asteroids and currently have the “player-chat” lobby part of this working, as well as a nice framework for handling application layer packets.


Main lobby

ARP
My dissertation is on the topic of “Visual Scripting Systems for Games”. Not much to report on this yet since it has been mostly research based so far.

Insimnax Framework
The Insimnax Framework is a game framework I am currently working on which makes heavy use of OGRE 3D. The framework itself is currently a wrapper to make getting started and using OGRE 3D easier, although I have plans to extend it by adding “systems” such as GUI, Physics and Audio. I am currently using this framework for my AI project and hope to use it for my dissertation too. I plan to release it under an MIT license once it has reached a decent (and somewhat stable) stage of its development.

… and finally
Oh yeah, did you hear about Epic releasing the UDK for free?! Crazy!

I’ve taken to using Twitter to post updates on since I can do it more informally and whenever I feel like it.

Firstly, I’ve been using a program called Fences to help sort out my desktop icons and so far I’m finding it really handy to be able to group up my icons and not have Windows randomly decide to re-arrange them for me… bliss. You can see my desktop here.

Secondly, BlitzTech (where I work) has released a video of some of the features of the BlitzTech SDK, including the Scripting and Behaviour (State Machine) system which I am currently responsible for developing and maintaining. If you want to see what I work on on a day to day basis then you can find the video here (it’s the “Tools Demo” one).