Second weekly report

So now the airplane glides, thank goodness. I figured the game would just be too boring if the airplane can't increase its altitude, so there's an industrial fan on the floor that blows the plane up, assuming you fly into it. It'll be quite a challenge to fly over the fan, though, since the fan's quite small and the airplane flies quite fast.
In any case, here's a summary of what's been done and will be done:

• Scrapped GLUT in favor of SDL (audio support, yay!)
• Composed 2 background music tracks, with more to come (hopefully)
• Still need to figure out how to blit text onto the game window
• Created some decent looking 3D stars for the airplane to collect to gain points
• Tweak the toon shader so it draws object outlines
• Trying to figure out an efficient way of doing particle effects
• Successfully implemented simple collision detection so the game can determine if the airplane hit a star or not
• Dropped the idea of glow effect. Too hard to figure out the altitude difference between the airplane and stars when the surroundings are dark.

Workplan for the upcoming week:

• Complete homework for other classes ASAP
• Finish tweaking the toon shader in the beginning of the week
• Since a toon shader and collision detection are implemented already, particle effects will have a lower priority
• The ground looks very flat and boring, so maybe bump mapping or displacement mapping will be implemented if there's enough time
• Find a musician and ask for his/her opinion on the background music

A sample image of the minigame in 800 x 600 (windowed) resolution. Fullscreen mode is not used due to blitting text not yet implemented, i.e. the console needs to be visible for debugging:

Final Project information

Project name: Glide

Team name: Freefall
Members:

• Hoang Tran
• Nonexistent imaginary mascot for emotional support (yes, this is a team of 1)

Blurb

Have you ever thrown a paper airplane and thought to yourself, "Gee, I wonder how long it'll stay airborne?" Well, now you can answer that question yourself, by taking control of your own paper airplane! Gather as many collectibles as possible, and explore as much of the world as you can before you make your crash landing!

Technical features <TBD>

• [Possible feature] Particle effects: Watch the collectibles burst when you gather them!
• [Possible feature] Glow effect: Clearly you can't attach a heavy flashlight to your paper airplane, so objects will glow in the dark instead!
• [Possible feature] Toon shading
• [Possible feature] Bezier patches: Maybe there'll be an ocean level. Or a tornado. Just maybe.

Workplan <TBD>

• Week 8 - Create basic features of the world, including the paper airplane, randomly spawning collectibles, camera that chases the plane, etc.; and panicking about a Humanities essay that's due
• Week 9 - Implement technical features
• Week 10 - Consider implementing Bezier patches. Maybe add new playable objects, like a balloon, or a leaf.
• Finals week - Review for final exams, and some final testing in preparation for the presentation.