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steady on a new course

Adam made a good case for the feasibility of using pyODE for 2d physics, so we agreed to go for it. Dillon and I investigated how to get pyODE and PGU talking to each other, and realized we didn't need tiles anymore. Real physics opens the door to a world of hills and slopes and funny angles. Instead of a tile editor, we're just going to draw our levels in inkscape, with a special layer of simple rectangles to describe the room to pyODE.

So Dillon and I shared a scren for a few hours (along with various helpers) and worked out the code for parsing rectangles from an svg file and the plan for turning them into 3D boxes for pyODE. Once we could see how things were going to fit together, Dillon went off to work on the next step: displaying the screen in pygame.

Sean drew our main character: a slick looking kiwi bird - see the concept art in the gallery on blazeofglory.org. Last I heard he was off to do some animation.

David disappeared for a few hours, only to surprise us all later with a working version of the metabolism engine!

Meanwhile, fellow entrant Rene Dudfield (illume on here) found himself with too much client work on his hands, and too little time to complete his entry this week, so with Richard's approval he's now the sound and audio lead for team trailblazer. Welcome, Rene!

As for me, I think I've finished the room loader - I had some major confusion when it came to mapping svg's 2d rotation matrices to pyODE's 3d world. In any case, we've got a Room object now with some ode objects for Adam to work with.

So: a lot of progress today. With luck we'll be moving things around the screen tomorrow. :)

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