First WIP video !

Sentinels

As can be seen in the Tiled screenshot in my previous post, some new aliens were placed in the maps, ready to be implemented. I made these to guard some areas where I'll be able to place more objectives later on. So I called those Sentinels.

So the idea is to have them move around, as if they were guarding the area. When the player enters the area, they turn on some laser, pivot toward the player and start tracking him down. Then their reaction is based on that laser sighting that triggers a blast when the player crosses the laser.

I needed to have the laser to follow walls so the player could hide behind a wall and not being touch by the laser. I use a ray that is casts against the environment and allows me to compute a scale factor for the laser mesh so that it scales to the exact distance to the wall. Here's my Sentinel setup:

The lower collision sphere is used for the Sentinel navigation (collision with the environment) while the upper sphere is a trigger that is used when the Sentinel is being shot at. There's also a cylinder trigger inside the laser mesh.

Video, yay !

I thought it would be nice for you to see the thing actually running (at last), so here it goes ! This first video has been grabbed on PC (using FRAPS). You can see the latest enhancements added to the project, mainly the shadows now integrated on PC as well. This helps a lot in feeling the height of objects. This also includes a quick Cg shader that I wrote to display basic textures and lighting, just for the sake of testing.

The game (and the video) is actually running at 60 Hz but YouTube is unfortunately unable to handle that for now. Please watch the video in 720p.

Hope you enjoyed this post, feel free to comment.