Test 1: Action system

Posted by Michael on July 14th, 2006, in Development

Drama Princess Action System test 1: press a key to move the pink cone to another spot: the black actor will walk towards the cone, stop when he arrives and start displaying idle behaviour.

This may look like a simplistic test but it is structured to accomodate for the whole Drama Princess system. This structure consists of two main parts: data and engine.

The data part contains the mesh and texture of the actor, animations and Behaviours described as conditional lists of actions. These Behaviours are mini-applications that can contain any form of logic. They communicate with the engine through Interface systems.

The engine part is more elaborate. It consists of a logic system and a draw system.

The Logic System consists of four Manager systems that are applied to each actor in a loop.

• The Decision Manager will contain the decision making logic and starts new Behaviours.
• The Behaviour Manager calls the currently active Behaviour.
• The Motion Manager prepares the animation system for the next frame.
• And the Movement Manager calculates the position and rotation of the actor based on animation speed and target location.

Interface systems provide for the communication between Managers and Behaviours and each other.

• The Behaviour Interface takes care of loading Behaviours.
• The Motion Interface adds and removes animations and contains “shortcut” logic for starting and stopping the walking of an actor.
• The Actor Interface contains routines for storing Actors’ parameters.

The Draw System consists of the Appearance Manager which draws the actor in 3D space at the correct position with the correct animation.

Download the test executable (3 MB, requires Windows and DirectX 9.0c).

4 Comments »