Vest 2
Although the original vestigium was ridiculously cool ( minus the name ), it was decided that it could be remade that much cooler! so I'm back in this years graphics class as a 700 level student doing a full remake of the intensely glorious tank battle game. Things have changed a lot though, so read up.
PLEASE! PLEASE someone figure out a better name for this and send it to me.
Lots of new features
1) life is full 3d now. No longer is anything constrained to 2 dimensions.
2) much improved physics, with many extensive models of all the in game entities.(Go quaternion's).
3) Built on a professional game engine. The graphics are through a serious scene graph. This allows me to do many things above and beyond what I could do before, from environment mapping to multi pass texturing and advanced lighting and shadows.
4) Less futuristic, these tanks fire slower, move much more cumbersomely (damn anti grav technology made life very very easy).
5) No networking as of yet, this will hopefully get added as things continue, there is no time for it right now.
6) Advanced AI interfaces.
The real researchy part of this is designed a flexible ai that can be bound onto the tank. The ai would be determined in some simple language (scriptish) that anyone could right. It would also provide easy modules for machine based learning. All so you can program intelligent ai's to drive the tanks for you.
Brian Westphal is in charge of the ai, he is working on a language + parser etc. As well as all the convenient functions you would want to manipulate the tank.
Our hope is to develop this to the level that we can distribute to classes like the AI class here in order to give them a fun and motivating place for there students to experiment in all kinds of ai.
7) Better art
To everyone's joy I'm sure i am no longer the only artist working on this, Brian is bringing his considerable creative skills to work creating the models and textures used in the games. I still do a lot of work here but mostly in adapting his work into the engine.
