Weekly Assesment 11/13

What I've done:
Well this week I did allot of code again. Since theirs quite allot I did I'll list what I did in point form.
- Using soopahs open source .dll and bogas tutorial, class wrapper I've added support for pc game pads.

- Allot of memory optimizations, mainly by loading level background and character animation textures on entering level, and unloading previous level textures at the same time. (This was quite complicated, and also involved fixing crashes, although the memory saved is quite significant)

- Placed more art into the game, including color variations, such that as the player kills more enemies the color from each level will disappear in phases.

- Added main menu, (still missing some art screens)

- Updated modifications to Battle system (still in progress)

- Wrote up effects class/ added jump effects, such that theres an effect whenever the character jumps

- did some research into pixel shader effects, although due to the complexity of this I may not be able to implement this into our game. Based on tutorials and sample code, these effects look quite impressive, although I don't really understand High Level Shader Language (HLSL), or the weird calculations/code required to implement them myself.

- also did some research into implementing sounds, and it looks like I'm suppose to use the xact converter which comes with xna not the latest version in the latest (augaust 2007) direct x sdk, which causes version conflicts.


When and Where I've met with group:
- met in lab on Tuesday, and again on Wednesday, and again on Thursday. During these three meetings, we intended to be ready to prototype an alpha version on Thursday, however we decided due to some interface issues, and newly discovered holes in our current system, we should postpone our user testing to next week, and we also decided on further tasks to do for next week.

What you are going to do for next week:
- This week I'll most likely be putting in more art, attempting to put in sounds, and code up any loose holes in our system.