Thursday

Today began with trying to fix the objects we exported from Max to torque. The problem with the objects was that the objects would appear but the collision detection would not work. This problem kept us busy for many hours. We finally fixed it by instead of making one object we had to make 1. the object 2. a collision detail( not object) that was invisible but collison detection worked 3. a col-1 object that also created the collision detection then they all had to be linked with the "Embed Button" in the utilitilties section which we did not have so we had to import a second plugin into max which had an Embed button.
Now that we are able to import basic model from Max to Torque we attempted to export a Simple "sofa" model from Max. Straight away we relised we were going to have a problem with all the models from any resource. The models all come in high resolution for CGI videos not games. The poly count is too high to be run inside any game.
Fiona told us about a program called Vizup that decreases the poly count on any .obj model so now we must:
>Open a .max model in 3ds max
>Export the model in .obj format
>Open the .obj model in vizup
>Decrease the poly count
>Export the model in .obj
>Open the .obj in Max
>Create a collison detail, a col -1 and embed them to the model
> Export the bounded model as a .dts
>Import into Torque

As of now Vizup is not fully functional but its pretty close.

Over the Christmas holidays David and I went through as many Torque Script tutorials as we could find.
Today we decided to put the theory into practice but building a basic game.
All started out well but we soon hit snags. The main one was with the input device. We are able to move W,S,A,D but Yaw and Pitch using the mouse has become a problem as the mouse cursor needs to be used for selecting options on our In-game GUI.
We also had a problem launching our basic prototype as Torque manually names all saved .gui files in Capital form but in lowercase in its scripts. This problem caught us for a while but after looking through the correct Torque script code we relised this problem existed and were able to move on.

As of now we still have input device issues but we have isolated the probelm to the playGui.gui code. This code has issues with understanding if the Gui info needs to be clickable or not. Once we figure out the code to overwrite the programs want to use the cursor to selecet options in the Gui we think that we can code the movement of the mouse to correspond to the yaw and pitch movement of the player.