PS2 Development

This week I started on PS2 development. I've only been doing the controls so far but I'm really enjoying it. I've covered all the all the buttons, analogue sticks pressure and vibration, but what I really want to do is make a small framework with all the controller features mapped so I can use it for my project. I have to wait until the room is free though. I don’t like not having the equipment available for me to do it at my desk or at home, I'm not use to it. There is one thing now ingrained in my memory though. At the end of the program the controllers don’t automatically unlock from the mode they've been set in (analogue/digital). So you have to remember to unlock it at the end of the code. Whilst implementing the vibration controls I hadn't yet found this out. I ran the program and the controller started to vibrate. But because the controller was locked in analogue mode when I closed the program it carried on vibrating. There was an awkward 15 mins involving 3 people working out how to stop it vibrating and me constantly holding the controller in the air to stop it making a noise against the desk. 

DirectX Framework

I also got given the new framework the PC and Xbox module. I’ve gone through half of it to make sure I understand what’s going on and made my own comments etc. I noticed the controls were, at least to me, very counter intuitive. So I’ve started converting them over to a more FPS look-move style control. Putting mouse control in was easier than I expected. The camera now points at the mouse curser but now I have to get forward to go in the direction that the camera is facing. There are two tutorials I’ve found but they look really complicated. It looks like I’d have to modify and add a lot of code to make it work. I think I might have under estimated the task and it might never actually get implemented. This means I could end up taking the camera look controls out too.

DirectX Randomized Terrain Generation

Started implementing procedurally generated terrain when the space bar is pressed for my directX module. I wrongly assumed that the code to procedurally generating stuff would be long and complicated. But you can produce basic mountains with only 2 functions. Randomly generating the terrain was literally as obvious as using a random number generator on the y axis.  Mine are really spikey/ridged mountains so I want to add some smoothing to make them look more realistic.