Updates of 4-30-99 Meeting

The meeting notes distributed at the meeting are available here: Zipped Word Files.

The Frog Engine Site

There have been a list of updates made at the meeting. Particularly, We have decided to add an array to hold characters that have passed through a particular LevelElement to the LevelElement object, in order to give an alien more intelligence in the future.
We also decided that the DePaul ID tool that a player has at the start of a game should be used to hold all types of key information about the player. Particularly, we will use it to store a player's level of completion in the game, current abilities, and I believe it would make a nice storage device for when a user wants to save a level.
We also decided that we need another type of FTThing called an Event to hold all the game's events and triggers.
As for artificial intelligence, we decided that the ADS (Alien Decision System) needs to act more as a question answering and time-splicing device than a supreme decision maker for how the aliens will move. Now, the ADS alerts an alien object that it has the current time slice and the alien queries the ADS for available options. Then, the alien chooses its motion based on "individual personality."

Now we set some immediate goals (actually I'd like to give the credit to Tom for forcing my hand) that need to be met in order to keep the project moving:

     
  1. Create a single room with wall, floor, and ceiling for the player to walk around in. This requires the creation of the LevelElement, WalkableLE, NonWalkableLE, Wall, Floor, Character object, and a LocalPlayer.
  2. Add some enemies to the room
  3. Get the enemies to attack and attack them.
  4. Create doors and switches
  5. ...
We are currently working on the first goal. Assigments are based on this, and on designing to meet the future goals.

New Assignments