It’s time for some housekeeping before the New Year! We’re going to change the design of our code completely in this Issue to support us as we venture forwards in 2011. We’ll also take some time to explain the water we added in Issue 4 and add some sounds effects along with a basic HUD.
Issue 4 already? Time flies! In this one we’re going to do a bit of housekeeping. As a project grows you often need to refactor (rewrite) parts of your code to keep the code scalable and readable. Our approach is what you might consider ‘rapid application development’ (RAD). An alternative approach would have been to sit down and work out the whole game in advance – before writing any code – but the MGF aim is “results, fast” so the more traditional ‘waterfall’ approach is out the window! We want fun while we learn. You’ll also be adding collisions to your game, explosions, gravity, water effects and a bit of camera trickery. As promised in Issue 3 we will also explain and improve the fog, lighting and sky.
Welcome back! In this issue you will learn how to add a sky to your game, add some lighting and some fog. You will create controls for your player and be able to fly around your 3D world, barrel roll, loop-the-loop and more! We’ll also dip into how the camera works and how to control it while also explaining how positioning and transformations work. With a further snippet on performance tuning there’s a lot to cover, so away we go…!
In Issue 2 we will focus on getting your game’s main character (player) into the world you created in Issue 1! In order to do this, we do need to cover some tricky concepts. Issue 2 will be one of the most difficult issues for new developers but we encourage you to persevere, once you have understood the concepts in this Issue life will get easier!