This is a card battle engine that I wrote in 2008. It is a completely functional game with limited opponent AI. The game gives the player the ability to select a card deck to use, but the actual deck builder was never implemented. Sound effects are played as the player places cards and attacks their opponent. This game was implemented as a Java applet. The Java Image libraries were used to draw the cards in different rotated positions. All of the opponents cards are drawn inverted.
The camera in the 3D game world can now be moved and rotated.
Since I’ve had a few days off from work, I tried to make as much progress as I could with development of the Blasting Bits game. I was able to get the new model processor working, and now the player model is animated in the game. In Blender I can make multiple animations/clips, but unfortunately XNA will only allow one animation to be imported as noted in this article by Shawn Hargreaves. So for now the player model continuously runs. There doesn’t appear to be any elegant solutions for having multiple animations in an FBX file.
I added camera controls to the game, so when the player holds the right trigger the left thumbstick will zoom and rotate the game world. Zoom is basically just the distance the camera is away from the game world. Initially, I had the camera changes in set increments which appeared jarring when changed. To fix this, I added three variables which are increment, speed, and target for both rotation and zoom. When the player changes the camera, the increment value is added (or subtracted) from the target value. Then for each update, the increment value is added to the current position until it reaches the target value. This gives a much more smoother effect when rotating or zooming.
Installed two new cases fans because the other ones were getting so loud that it was bothering my hearing. These two new fans are much quieter and take up less space in my computer case. The loudness rating on the box is 15 dBA. Thankfully, I measured the size of the fans before I ordered them. Most fans these days are 120mm, but my requires 80mm fans which is measured across the square frame of the fan. The previous fans had an unneeded wires and a metal plate for switching the light off and on. The lights on the new fans are very bright and has just one wire for plugging into the power supply.
Below are the components that I used to rebuild the system that I originally put together in 2005. I had originally just intended to replace the broken IDE DVD drive, but all of the current DVD drives for sale are SATA. My motherboard did have SATA connectors, but my power supply did not have SATA power cables. I changed the power supply to a new one with SATA power cables, and I went ahead and installed a new SATA hard drive since the IDE hard drive was nearly out of space. My motherboard and BIOS could not detect the new DVD and hard drives, I’m assuming because it uses a old SATA specification. This led me to install a new motherboard and CPU, so that I could use the new drives. Since the old graphics card was AGP8X, I went ahead and installed a new graphics card since the motherboard only has PCI Express. The memory was upgraded as well, since the new motherboard uses DDR3. After wiring the power and reset switches, the rebuilt system booted up successfully.
