Roller Coaster
Howdy. You’re probably wondering where I’ve been for the last month. Well, I survived those three midterms I mentioned. I received a good grade on the image editor I had to write. Also, I was assigned a project to create a roller coaster that could be built in “real-time.” I used OpenGL and fltk to build the program. I had to do everything from scratch. So, I had to define a curve for the track and figure out how to orient cars of the roller coaster to the track. I spent over 90 hours in about a week’s time. It was a ton of work, and I guess I don’t mind the punishment because I’m signing up for a games class next semester.
My final project for this semester will be to build a city. It’s meant to be an experiment with both texturing and modeling. However, we are supposed to have multiple “entities” moving about. The professor will hopefully be nice and provide the base code that was given the last time the class was taught. It already has some very simple cars moving about on the roads of a little residential district. Although, the texturing sucks for the base code.
January 11th, 2008 at 1:41 pm
how do you make a roller coaster
January 16th, 2008 at 9:43 am
You can describe a an entire roller coaster with a single closed cubic b spline. The tracks are laid parallel to the curve in the middle and they rotate according to the orientation of the average the two nearest control points of the cubic curve. In this program the track could be altered on the fly while the coaster train continued to travel around the track.