YSU's ACM

PART II - THE COURSES

This way, the dragon was never just in one mood. She was almost always a little bit of one mood and not just always in another. On top of the mood system, was a Fondness variable. The Fondness variable was a long-term variable that kept track of the how much the dragon liked the player. If the player made her angry, she would be less likely to attack the player if she liked them a lot. If she is not fond of the player, she would be more likely to attack. This helps simulate how people deal with other people in our own lives. If a random stranger (or someone you don't like) makes you angry, aren't you more like to get violent with them than you would with a good friend?

One of the courses was 3D Animation with Dr. Sullins. There, I spent time working with the Blender 3D Animation Package. It can be found at www.blender.org and is completely freeware. There I worked on perfecting a 3D model of Cartman from South Park and for my final project, a dragon, with animated tail and head. I took a course in Game Design with Dr. Zhang. There we worked with Microsoft Visual Studio and Direct X. My final project in that course was a simple shooter game, but was a great challenge to me. It was a simple concept that dealt with bouncing colored balls and using the same color laser to destroy them. You had four different lasers. There was a red laser, blue laser, green laser and a gray laser. The gray laser could not destroy the balls. It would just simply repel them from you when you ran out of ammo for the other lasers, for it was infinite and the others were not. My familiarity with both Visual Studio and DirectX was very minimal at the time.

The last class I had was, to me at least, the most important. It was a computer projects course with Dr. Sullins. For that class, I spent my time working on a modification of a Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion by Betheseda Softworks. The project was an extension of my original Sariah project. This time, I wanted to create a dragon character to interact with the player in a 3D environment. I started by dumbing down the AI concept and just used Oblivion's AI system called Radiant AI. This just gives the character a value of how much they like/dislike another character, including the player. It allows you to adjust how aggressive a character is, for example, if they get their disposition below a certain value, say 20, they will attack the other character/player. This system has a myriad of options, but in reality it is much simpler than my original concept, so I stuck to what they had already in place. Getting Oblivion's systems to work with my ideas was a challenge and in the end I did a few things that I did not think the system was even able to do. For example, if the player eats before they feed the dragon for the day, she would know and it would negatively effect her disposition to the player. This was done through some clever scripting using some obscure values found within the game.

Other difficulties dealt with the Elder Scrolls Construction Set. Oblivion was obviously not built from the ground up and its modding tools seemed to prove this. It seemed to be built upon the previous Elder Scrolls games and thus the Construction Set was somewhat confusing and information on it was basically confined the community wiki, which was not the easiest source to work with. My original concept was to create an actual mod for the game, but in the end, it ended up being more of a tech demo of what is possible with the Radiant AI and my concepts. I felt it worked well, but as with all things, it could be much better. Maybe one day I will continue work on the project and release it to the community at large when it is in a state I feel is acceptable.

The Future

As for now, I'm working on other aspects of my education, such as the Theater and Writing components. I have courses in lighting and fictional writing. I feel these pieces of my education will make me a well-rounded individual, which makes me more desirable when it comes to finding work in the industry. The path I have chosen is not an easy one and I hopefully will find it beneficial to my future. I may not be the coding prodigy that can write sophisticated systems with ease or the great 3D artist that can create characters that look life-like, but what I do have is creative vision and maybe I'll be the one telling those guys what do to!

For more information on the ICP, contact Teresa Riley at (330) 941-1517 For more information on Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and the Elder Scrolls Construction Set go to cs.elderscrolls.com and elderscrolls.com .

Look for more of James blog soon!