Joy. Progress made. I have successfully extended some of the classes needed for Carnage. Focus has been on creating functioning pawns with a proper (temporary) mesh along with movement and some very basic game-rules.
Above is an in-game image showing a simple track used for testing code. The individual tiles can be seen as separated by the dark lines. The cars are un-textured meshes that are still being worked on and the text seen is used to debug, along with an editor-log not shown with a lot more detailed info. At the moment of this image I am testing out the navigation using track-nodes.
The small grey icons placed on the track are track nodes. These are used by the cars to navigate around the track, checking where to go, how fast and if other cars are currently occupying a node. The rules of Carnage allow two cars occupying each tile at the end of each turn. With four cars racing we need a system checking if the tile the car will move to is currently occupied, by whom and if it is the destination of the moving car who to ram out of the way to the next tile. I figured this could be done with a system of navigation nodes placed on the track. Each car stores info about what node they are placed on and uses that combined with current speed (decided by inputs from the player during action-phase) to decide where to go next. It works fine as a stand-alone and it should not be any issues connecting this to the player input/main game info.
The amount of work to be done is huge and what worries me most is that I cannot set up a reliable time-plan as I would need to do a lot more research and gain more experience in UDK for it to be even close to realistic. This creates a risk of the project not functioning fully or even lacking vital features at deadline. The often used option of delaying the presentation of this game is non-existent as our deadline is set in solid stone, with the 27th of May as the date of Gotland Game Conference. Cutting features is a valid option but downsizing the game too much will create a less than impressive (and most important, less fun) product. Just going along with it and hoping for the best is insanity as we would then risk having nothing at all to show.
We need to sit down as a group, re-evaluate the risks and rewards of the project and see what is to be done.
