After some highly technical (and frankly, baffling) talks with a highly intelligent colleague, I've decided it might not be a great idea to use PhysX for the in-game projectile movement. This makes LOADS more work for me because now I need to code some sort of physics engine in software to allow for gravity and the ballistic properties of the projectile, but the reasoning is sound - if this game is to be played multiplayer - which is the eventual aim - and some players have nVidia cards (with a PhysX GPU) and others have ATi cards (software only PhysX) then there might be some discrepancy with the projectile placement co-ordinates, thus giving nVidia users an unfair advantage. Presuming the hardware GPU is more accurate than a software one, which one would expect.
Aaaanyway... Tank now has a turret. It is movable by design only along the x-axis (it can only be raised and lowered, not swivelled left to right). I did this for two main reasons, (1) to control a turret independently of the main Tank body would mean having an extra set of controls. While this wouldn't be too hard to code, I want this to be an arcade game not a Tank simulator. And (2) after playing around with the game model, it's too easy to turn the turret to 90°, pop out from behind a building, fire off a shell, then reverse back behind the building. At least if the turret is fixed (along the z-axis) then the player will be forced to drive out, physically align his Tank with the target, then fire off the shell. This will hopefully force the gameplay along and not turn it into a pop-out-and-shoot-then-hide turn based game of chance.
Talking of the projectile, the Tank can actually fire one now! OK, at the moment it's just a White sphere, but just pretend it's a Quazar Pulse*. Or something. I have incorporated a reload cycle to stop spam-shelling, and an ammo counter which depletes with each shot. The plan is to eventually have ammo crates dotted about at strategic positions. Of course during development I can re-arm the Tank without an ammo crate.
The projectile also incorporates collision detection. I'm still working on this subroutine at the moment because it's not entirely accurate (or it can be very accurate but slows the game down too much for my liking). My next job is to optimise this collision detection routine. Also, I need to write something that signifies the shell has hit a building or something.
The Tank also has a very primitive health system which I am still tweaking, more of that in my next post.
UPDATE: Here is a small youtube video showing the engine in action. As you can see, I have written an explosion routine, but the projectile doesn't disappear just yet.
Onwards and upwards...
(*The term "Quazar Pulse" is copyright ©petethesparky 2011).
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