Spacehogs
Spacehogs was an Xbox 360 XNA School Project for my CSE 682 Procedural Animations Class at The Ohio State University, in 2007. The class was a survey of computer animation algorithms and techniques; interpolation, path following, quaternions, object deformations, forward/inverse kinematics, rigid body dynamics, particle systems flocking, autonomous behavior, and L-systems. I was on a team of 5 people total, my responsibilities were: Player Control and Movement, Enemy Monsters, Weapons (Laser and Tractor Beam), and Boss Monster.
Full Source Download Here: Spacehogs!
School Website: http://accad.osu.edu/~jkim/
Procedural Aspects:
Spherical Linear Interpolation
For the player ship orientation in our game, it was represented as a Quaternion matrix, and we used Spherical Linear Interpolation to animate our ship tilting left and right and up and down. Using XNA’s built in Quaternion objects and SLERP we were able to accomplish our goal of procedurally animating the player spaceship for moving. I was responsible for implementing the player controls, movement, and making sure they “felt” good.
An Example Video: http://j1n.org/classes/682/quaternion.wmv
Monster AI
Boss Monster AI
The Monster AI is a simple follow prey-predator algorithm that uses the player’s position and simply allows the enemies to follow the player. The regular enemies were programmed to try and crash “kamikaze” style into the player ship causing damage, while the boss monster shoots homing fireballs at the player. I was responsible for implementing the Enemy AI for the game.
Example Video http://j1n.org/classes/682/monsterchase.wmv
Laser Beam
Tractor Beam
The Laser and Tractor beam were some of the weapons we created for our XNA game. We fired a ray into 3d space and used spherical collision to detect if the ray fired from the position of the player intersects with a target object. I was responsible for the implementation of the Laser and Tractor beam. The Laser would destroy objects such as asteroids/enemies, while the Tractor beam could push/pull objects towards the player.
Example Video: http://j1n.org/classes/682/lastertractorbeams.wmv
