Space ship in 3D maze

Due Date: Friday November 17th 2006

Idea: A space ship trapped in a giant space station must navigate a maze of tunnels to escape before the space station explodes.

Physics:

• Ship is a rigid body with volume and mass
• Ship moves at constant velocity when not using thruster (i.e. Newton's law of inertia holds)
• Ship has a rear thruster to boost speed; thruster, when activated, gives a constant acceleration.
• Ship uses thrusters to steer ship. These thrusters also give constant acceleration for a short duration. You may place up to 12 lateral thrusters on your ship, in locations of your choice. You may also pre-program thruster combinations.
• The rear thruster is expected to be much more powerful than the lateral thrusters
• Ship responds elastically when it collides with maze walls (i.e. Like a billiard ball)

Collision Detection:

• Ship's collision model is a cylinder
• Collision detection is done with GJK

Rendering:

• View from ship's cockpit as main interface
• Walls of maze are textured

Core:

• Take user input from keyboard (or mouse) to steer ship and enable ship boosters
• Save user input to a file
• Replay user input from file to get same results
• In other words, there are 2 input methods, direct-human or a 'replay' file
• Must detect when ship has gotten to exit
• Must count down time before space station explodes
• Must announce win or loss

Scenarios: You need to create 2 scenarios.

• The scenario consists of the maze geometry,count down time,ship start position,maze end position

Submission Requirements:

• README file containing notes on what libraries you used and how to get them (if not included)
• README must include instructions on how to use the game
• REFERENCE file containing notes on what references you used. This includes books, web pages, discussion with friends, etc. This is an 'engineering journal'.
• Makefile or build script or detailed instructions on how to compile
• Source code
• Sample user input files for both scenarios
• Must be submitted as a single file (zipped or gziped archive).

Notes:

• Maze geometry must be scaled so that things look/feel 'right'
• Default velocity and thruster speed scaled so that things look/feel 'right'
• Must run on either Linux or MacOSX using OpenGL.
• Each student does own assignment (no group work this time).
• Any programming language can be used
• Recommend using pre-written linear algebra and ordinary differential equation integration libraries

Hints:

• For the human controls, use thruster combinations, not access to single thrusters
• Also, have pre-programmed motion-reversing thruster combinations (ie to rotate for a while, then stop your rotation); doing this manually is very difficult!
• You might consider having a way to decelerate too

Bonus: (implementing any/all of these features will be worth extra marks)

• 3rd person camera view
• Add force fields which switch on and off at various frequencies. When force field is on the ship can't pass through them. Force field is rendered as a translucent maze wall with different texture
• Optionally randomly generate start and finish points for maze geometry.
• Top down (2D) view (animation and 'complete path')
• More complex ship geometry than just a cylinder
• Implement gravity; in other words give the station a (large!) mass. However, since you are inside this mass, gravity will change depending on your location
• Huge bonus: implement other computer-controlled ships in the same environment and weapons-systems on your ship. Lasers are easy, but if you have gravity then all sorts of interesting things can be done (mine fields, projectile weapons, etc, etc).