torsdag 20 mars 2014

Escape - Group 4 - Week 9 - Level Editing - Part 2

3rd week working on the level design. With two weeks left on the project, I was supposed to spend the rest of the time to finish the last, largest and most complex level in the game. Instead, I spent most of the week to fix a mistake I missed last week.

When using the level editor, I sett the walls and outside boundaries by them dividing it into rectangles. I sett these rectangles by choosing coordinates for the upper left corner and the lower right corner. It is imperative when setting the rectangles, that I choose the upper left corner first.
Here is where I made a mistake. At one point, I did the opposite and chose the lower right corner first instead.


The reason why the walls are set like this, is because of the lighting- and collision system in our game. They works best and is most bug free when the objects are square shaped. So when I sett the rectangles, they're divided into a number of squares side by side with each other. The level editor is programmed to calculate the distance in width and height between the upper left and lower right corner and fill the space in between with equally sized squares.
So when I chose the lower right corner first, the level editor started to calculate infinitely in vain to find the upper left corner. This resulted in a oversized (366 MB) and corrupted TXT-file.

I didn't realise this mishap until the week after and so I had to start work on the walls in the earlier level all over again. Luckily, I had saved the TXT's in intervals and I didn't have to start everything from scratch.

As mentioned earlier, I'm now working on the last level of the game. The earlier levels took one week each to finish, but in comparison the last level has double if not triple amount of objects and triggers to place. In order to finish the last level as well as have enough time for the reports, I will have to work more intensively than I've ever done in the university line so far.

For 3 weeks have I focused on the level design and not so much on programming per say. It's what I get for volunteering to do this monotonous job. I just hope it doesn't effect my results as a programming student when it's time to write the reports.

1 kommentar:

  1. Hello Gustav

    I'm also working on the level design part in my group, but i had at least no problem to do it. I don't know how your editor are constructed, but if you have had more time on this projekt you should fixed the editor so that you can't make such misakes. Right now i'm also building levels through an editor. In our editor it's very easy to bulid levels and you can't mess up things. One of my group member did spend a lot of time working on the editor, so we lost his time working on the editor, but we then saved a lot of time on creating levels. So overall we saved more time by making a better editor. It may be something to keep in mind, but as i said i don't know how you editor was constracted or if you even needed a more advanced editor than the one you already had.

    All groups have probably been working hard this week to make it in time, because there is so much stuff to do this week. Hopefully you have time to finish all your tasks before deadline.

    I dont real have that much more to say so good luck with creating the last level and your reports :)

    //Viktor N

    SvaraRadera