First Presentation!

As Senan said, we are enlarging our steps and speeding up the development process. Irrlicht is really useful, whereas other tools we integrated to each other also look perfectly synchronized so that we are fully motivated to enter the kitchen for the project.

But as we have shared the subjects to be told between the team, I will not mentioned the development part, but the presentation we prepared for whole seniors, professors and all those who are curious about TRASTRAPS! "The chosen one" of our team is me, so I am the one to introduce us and the project. Of course, as most of the phases we have been passing, we have been preparing the presentation altogether too, but the style belongs to me :)

First I will start to our presentation with an introducing video, taken from a trailer of the game Battlefield 1942. Of course it is not a sole video, we have added (actually we have chosen the style and Serkan added) our project logo with visual and sound effects. After that, I will give an outline of the next 13.5 minutes and let the audience meet with our team. Then the part I like the most in our presentation will appear: Virtual Impact Trailer(!). Again, with team contribution, Serkan, After Effects Master of our team, prepared this too. Then I will introduce team members, and project. As TRASTRAPS sounds like troops are coming, we believe that even the name makes you "feel the real battlefield" (one of the sentences I like to say most at the presentation :) ). Then I will mention about the market analysis we have conducted and explain the differences of these projects from us, what we will do as extra. Then our motivations will be discussed, followed by project details. I will not give the whole presentation here, as details can be found in the link provided to the audiovisuals of our presentation.

After providing information about Units, Scenario, Missions, Systems and Modes; features and requirements of the project will be told too. Then some template and example GUIs will also be shown and then lastly design details will be given. You can also inspect the overall architecture, the federate communications (since HLA based) and tools to be used from the slides too. Lastly I will present the work done and work that will be done, and finish the presentation.

We are planning to finish the visuals and presentation text today and then work on it in the place I will be giving the presentation. I hope it will be a really good presentation because I believe that our motivation will reflect to the presentation and prove all our energy to the audience. We will be glad if any of you who follow us from our blog wants to join us in our presentation day :)

Thanks for your attention again, and here is the link for our presentation:
http://ceng.metu.edu.tr/~e1560044/sunum/VirtualImpact.pdf

Ilke (The Presenter?)

Going Into Irrlicht

As more day passes, we need to give more interest to our term project and Irrlicht is one of the most important component of it. All the graphics of our simulation will be drawn by Irrlicht. So it is important to learn its usage as soon as possible.

I started this process by simply drawing a terrain and adding military objects to the environment. Doing it was an easy job thanks to the tutorials of Irrlicht.

First of all, it is so amazing that, there are lots of methods for specific usages. For example there is a specific function to draw just terrains and lots of similar metohds. For all the rendering process you have to just get a reference to 3 important objects initially: your device driver, scene manager and gui environemnt. All the process will be realized by this 3 important references.

to draw a terrain by using just a greyscale image file, it is enough to call scene managers addTerrainSceneNode method with appropriate arguments, and that' is. Later on, you can apply some texture mappings and etc. to make your enivornment look very realistic.

Another thing that I did was adding external 3D models into the environment. It was also an easy job. Irrlicht provides a mechanism to load a wide range of models and set texture of them. Just calling addAnimatedMeshSceneNode adds a specific model in to the environment: So amazing!

You can also add a FPS (first person shooter) camera, therefore you can walk around anywhere in the terrain by just using the arrow keys. The one of the most important feature of Irrlicht that I should definitely mention is that Irrlicht also provides a collision handling mechanism for your camera. So you can not run into an object.

It is really exciting to work with Irrlicht and I am so glad to meet with it.

Şenan Postacı