Second Week of January

This week I began work on the actual map, several times I encountered complications and difficulties and had to revert to a previous save and work through the new section again. Several times the skylight which should provide ambient lighting to the entire map glitched and instead cast the entire map into absolute darkness.

So I decided not to use a skylight and instead opted for a very bright light with a large radius and fall off around the area where the sun is positioned on the sky-dome, this provides reasonably realistic lighting and does not have the same problems that the skylight was presenting.

I've had much difficulty creating the canyon for the flight stage, creating it both deep enough to look realistic, but shaped so that the light can reach the base and there are no areas where the player could get stuck, has proven difficult.

First Week of January

New Year, New Task

This week I began work on the 3D unreal map, I began simply by covering several tutorials on using the Unreal 3 Editor, I hadn't used this version before and was unfamiliar with many of the tools.

The first noticable change is that the newest version of the Unreal Editor uses additive level design, where the versions I was familiar with had all used subtractive.

This however was a welcome change, because additive building allows for MUCH easier constuction of outdoor levels, which in this example will be the case.

I focused the attention of my tutorials on terrain building, editing and manipulation as well as looking at sky-domes and how to customise them. This was neccessary as the terrain for my level requires a vast array of environments, including a reasonably flat area for the track, a large bowl for the lake, a severe valley for the flight stage and rough, but not impassable terrain for the off-road section.

Fourth Week of December

This week I began bug fixing the game so that it was more playable and players couldn't easily cheat, one problem I found was that during the flying stage players could by-pass the rally stage and stay in the extremely fast plane form until the final track section.

I removed this possibility to cheat by adding a second hit test to each transformation stage, which if the player is in the correct form does nothing, however should the player be in an unexpected form it becomes an inpassable collision forcing the player to go back and aqcuire the form they bypassed.

Another minor bug was that when a player stopped moving in plane form, the plane was able to stop and hover in mid-air and even worse, reverse as well. I adjusted the values of the speed degredation and maximum reverse speed to remove the option for the plane to stop or even slow down much, this is more accurate considering planes need to maintain reasonably high speed to keep their altitude.

Second Week of December

This week I began working on improving the textures of the game to make it a greater playing experience. This included texturing the grass, the track and the sand, as well as adding gravel traps to the corners with tyre walls and details on the track surface itself.