The main thing to worry about is definitely the lag, although we have some ideas on how to get rid of some of it. There were some fun physics glitches that caused objects to go flying off into oblivion which single handeldly destroyed the music code aswell as the camera tracking code. And then there was a slew of other minor things like being able to shoot oneself and having a controller that would vibrate until the end of time. Like I said, minor things.

Despite the upsetting amount of lag and the barrage of glitches and bugs, it was a fun day and definitely a step in the right direction.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The audio is tied loosely to the visual effects going on in the video, but I didn’t make the link easy to see. It might be easier to see the awesomeness of the audio system if you look at this video from Introversion’s audio.

This is the same song but with no visual and different effect changing. Audio Testing

Next on the line up is working the kinematics of the physics testing back into the nice graphics. With the new SAT Collision I think the process will go over better than before. The first problem I’ve run into is SAT’s inability to return a point of collision which is important for the correct physics response. I think I found a way around it, but I shall have to report back later on this matter.

In writing our own engine, I think we will have a nice little special nitch to work out of. And that’s not to say that collaboration is bad or unoriginal, I just want our own set of tools to work with.

But what is an ‘engine’, really? No one really knows, but we can take a good guess. An ‘engine’ is a system of tools that you can fit together to make some truly splendid, like cake, or a space ship. The engine usually handles all sorts of components of a game, such as the physics, the core graphics, the lighting techniques, the scripting systems, and a whole bunch of other crap that I wish I didn’t have to think about. Pretty much, if you want to make a sweet awesome-tastic video game, you need all these things, and since we are all super busy people, we dont want to spend the time to write these systems ourselves, so we just mosey on over to FarseerPhysics.com, or AwesomeEngine.org and then were set! But, instead of doing that, Small Group is going to get their OWN engine, and it is going to suit our purposes just fine.

So to start with, physics.

Yes, its a daunting word, but it so prevalent in games that there is no avoiding it, and so the first part of writing the Small Engine, is writing a basic physics dynamics simulation. And looky looky, its mostly all done! You can even see in the video below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Its still a work in progress, but I think its coming along quite nicely. More on this LATER.

Edit: I feel as though I should say that XNA is a framework for graphics within C# and a stepping stone to the Xbox 360 platform. Its sort of an engine in that way, and I have no intention of re-writing that just because.

Thanks!