CS 4803B
Electronic Game Programming

Winter 1998
Assignment 2
Due: February 9, 1998

For this assignment, you will complete the tutorial for the Motivate software. The documentation for the tutorial is provided at the bookstore as class notes for CS4803B. There will also be two copies of the Motivate User's Guide in the Intel Lab. The tutorial will provide hands-on experience with the system and will introduce you to most of the basic skills necessary to produce a game with Motivate.

I also encourage you to browse the examples that are supplied with Motivate. The end of the tutorial describes how to use the examples (pg. 5-1). These examples contain useful ideas/code for your projects.

Your completion of the tutorial will vary slightly from the manual. There are three parts to the tutorial- Creating Actors, Creating Skills , and Programming Behaviors.

For the first part of the tutorial, you will perform the steps as outlined but you will substitute our model for the given model. Replace "Tutorial/3DModels/MyMoustafa" with the "manZScaled2.dxf" model which can be downloaded from the class web page(Use Save As and save into your directory). NOTE: YOU WILL HAVE TO ORGANIZE THE HIERARCHY AND SET PIVOT POINTS AND JOINTS LIMITS AS I SHOWED IN THE CLASS TUTORIAL.

Because this is a fair amount of tedious work, I have placed an actor with some of the hierarchy and joints already set up. It can be found on acme in ~gt7816d/manZScaledHands. In order to use this actor, you must do the following. First, if it does not already exist, create a directory named Actors in your Motivate data directory. Next, create a directory named manZScaledHands in your Actors directory. Now, ftp the following two files to your manZScaledHands directory: manZScaledHands.act and manZScaledHands.hfsm. Finally, create the following directories in your manZScaledHands directory: Behaviors, Skills, Sounds, Textures. I've supplied the pivots and limits for the hands, you must do the rest. If you choose to use this actor, you will use the "load actor" option in Motivate instead of the "import actor" option.

When you reach pg 2-12 of the tutorial, Save Your Actor, follow the directions, but save the actor with a new name such as "myActor". Upon completion of this first part of the tutorial, save the space with a new name such as "myActorSpace".

For the second part, you will again follow the tutorial, but you will use your actor from part one as a replacement for the actor in the CreatingSkills.env space. Follow the tutorial directions for opening CreatingSkills.env, delete the actor named Moustafa and load the actor you saved in part one("myActor").
After completing the Creating Skills section, save the space as with a descriptive name such as "myActorWithSkillsSpace" and save the actor with a descriptive name such as "myActorWithSkills". This will be the first space and actor you will turn in.

For the third part, follow the tutorial instructions exactly. When finished, save this space and the Moustafa actor with new names, such as "myMoustafaActor" and "myMoustafaSpace".

You will turn in the two actors and spaces that you saved above. Please turn inyour motivate folder on a floppy disk labeled with your name.

You will also turn in a one page paper describing your experience with the Motivate software. In particular, provide answers to the following questions. Any other comments on your first impressions of the software are also welcome.

• Comment on the User Interface design. Is it intuitive? Which parts are difficult to use and which are straightforward? How can the less intuitive parts be improved?
• What is the most difficult part of creating an intelligent digital actor and why? Suggest ways of improving character design in general. For example, keyframing skills may be difficult. How would you improve this part of the design of characters as well as any other difficult part.
• Did you encounter any apparent bugs in the software? If so, give a detailed description of the bug.
• Motivate is obviously suited for 3D games, but could it be used successfully for other game genres? For example, could you create compelling puzzles with Motivate? Could you create new and interesting ways of interacting with puzzles? What other genres would Motivate be applicable to?

Grading: This assignment is worth 15% of your final grade.