After being at the stage of having a doctor built in max and being able to get him across to torque only as a static object we began working on the naming conventions of of the biped.
In order to understand the naming concepts of the bones we had to try and find a preboned max model that would export correctly.
After finally finding a correctly biped "test" model we focused our time on trying to get him fully functional in torque. So we set up the test model to export and then exported it. Unfortunately the test model would not export correctly so we began thinking the probelm lay outside max. This is when we relised we had problems in our cfg file. We updated the cfg file and finally our test model exported correctly. In order to get our doctor fully compatable with the animation(DSQ) files we stripped our test model just keeping the bone structure and adding our doctor on top of the bone structure. Unfortunatly this would not work as the test model was made from individual limbs (action figure) and our doctor model was made as a single mesh model. The one good thing that came form this attempt was the schematic view of each model became more understandable to use through comparison. The next step was to try and locate a new test dummy with a one mesh figure. This was not possible as any model that was made as one mesh is protected to stop people duplcating them and selling them on. We finally found a resource that enabled us to import a bone structure to max. This helped us greatly as we were then able to attach our model to a bone stucture. This was a slow process as for every bone movement in an animation we had to define how much each corresponding pixel on our model was to move. For example if the character was to swing his arm up in the air all the pixels in the arm would have to follow the arm biped but pixels in the back and the neck would have to move slightly. When our model was ready we exported him expecting him to fully work but he didnt. He exported and would attach to an animation but when he was programmed into torque his animations played 90 degrees to the right and he floated three feet off the ground. Straight away we assumed we had messed up something in torque and began moving nodes and bounding boxes, everytime exporting but to no avail. So we then moved our attentions to the to see if the problem lay in the coding side which brought us to the cfg file. It was here we finally relised that we were exporting a node in our model that was not in our animations. We attempted to delete this node in max but it would not export so we moved back into the cfg and coded in to leave the node in the model but not to export it into the .dts file. Finally we had a fully functional doctor although a bit rough around the edges.
Now we had the ability to create charaters we felt we should attempt to give the user the option of which sex the user wishes to play as. This would be very difficult but we feel there is a need as there is as many female junior doctors in our targeted (people we want to use the game). The problem arises as ingame changes can be done by trigger events etc but this would be a dynamic pregame change. We have a few ideas using the pre start gui to display the user with the option and then use variable selection in initiate which model and animations to use as the main character. This is all still hypothectical and we are going to work on it for the next few days.
The second main section we are working on is the decisoin tree for the treatment of each patient. We have this decision tree on paper from our last meeting with Deborah. We also hope to have different decision trees depending on the difficulty level the user wishes to use.
We have begun building this decision tree within the game using triggers, timers and basic variables to record the user's input. This is a part of the game that we will spend alot of time on as it is the focal point of our training simulator.