Friday, July 5, 2013

Animating (sort of) Tanks (sort of) as far as the (virtual) Eye can See


Over the past 12 hours, I got the Jaws.js framework and the WebGL sample code to mostly talk together. I think they were fighting over who got to control the canvas.

As mentioned in the previous post, I like the 2.35:1 aspect ratio of old CinemaScope movies, so that's what we have here, at least for now. It gives a certain epic grandeur to the window, I think.

What you can't see here, but you can take my word for, is that the camera is doing a slow pan, orbiting the origin, so there are 360 degrees of tanks stretching out to the horizon. Each of those tanks is, itself, rotating at its own angular speed - some to the left, some to the right. So, it looks like a whole bunch of movement. Since I've just been posting screenshots, perhaps the significance there ought to be underscored - up until this update, I had been drawing a single frame. I've now begun actually drawing multiple frames. No problem.

But that has nothing to do with the game I intend to make - I'm just doing tech demos for myself along the way to making... a tank pursuit game? An arcade shooter? A kart racer? Still haven't decided.

TODO:
  • player control - give the player a tank to drive around. Steering, throttle, shooting.
  • AI control - steering, throttle, shooting. Pursuit?
  • skycube - distant stuff to look at, but never get close to.
  • obstacles - closer stuff to drive up to and around. Maybe they block projectiles.
  • projectiles - something for those gun barrels to launch
  • better lighting - I can be smarter about the normals of faces. I want to have dynamic lights, too.
  • HUD - score, map
  • tank object refactor - object orient that stuff all up in a class, yo.
  • deployment work - I don't think that the current stuff compiles for deployment properly. That may require some work. I want to give you a link that works.
  • game design - oh yeah, that.

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