Weekly Blog Update 3 (11th November - 17th November)

Introduction

It's been another busy week at University, and its not going to get any easier anytime soon as we draw closer to unit deadlines! This week I will discuss whats been going on, with the blog and my course. I will also give a quick update to Project Emperion including, a few basic plot/story details which will tie into the games mechanics. Also a possible name for the game that the group has agreed on.

Whats been posted over the week?

Once again there has only been one update to the blog over the week, which was about the coursework section of the 3D Modeling unit on my course titled, 3D Modeling Proposed Artefact. This will be the first of many updates about my coursework progress to be posted on the blog since as mentioned in the post, I have to submit a reflective report with all of the problems etc.. I encountered during the creation of the model, which by the way is the ever popular, Boeing AH-64 Apache Attack Helicopter. In short post I introduced the unit, and the artefact I want to make, including some blueprints and reference images that I will be using extensively throughout the academic year, to make the model as realistic as possible. After the modeling process is complete, I will look at animating the rotor blades which I can include in the scene fly through video, that is part of the assessment.   

What have I learnt in this weeks lectures?

In this weeks programming lecture and seminar we covered what pointers are in C++ and how they are fundamental in games programming, especially console programming (which is a optional unit in the second year) because of extreme memory limitations. Pointers are used in C++ to store temporary data in memory known as the 'free space', and once that data has outlived its usage, such as an integer variable (typically 4 bytes in memory, doesn't look like much but mounts up when building a game!) it can be deleted and the memory will be returned to the 'free space' so that it can be used later in the program. The important thing to know and understand is that to declare, lets say a integer variable, a * symbol must be used to tell the compiler that this new variable is a pointer. This then pulls memory from the free space, exactly the right size for the data type and puts a virtual bookmark where this data begins. This bookmark/pointer can then be referenced anywhere in the program just like a normal variable. We can also use the & symbol with a pointer to assign another variable to use the data from that bookmark/pointer.

Project Emperion Update

This week the group has spent the majority of the time during group meetings, developing the plot and revolving game mechanics around it. Also we have decide give our game a official name, Soulbound. This will become clear when I update the blog in the future when the plot has been fully discussed and confirmed.