Welcome to SnowKing Palace! 
David Westrom

This is a Descent style ship flying game where you can move in 3D and
are charged with the task of infiltrating the evil SnowKing's palace
and assassinating him. Recently the SnowKing has gained power over the
weather, and of course has produced a never-ending snow over the land. 
The towns in the area have hired you to enter his palace and remove
the SnowKing so that the land might be returned to its former state. 
Be careful however, the SnowKing has been informed you are on the
premises and has rallied his troops and is prepared for you. You must
fight your way through the entrance hall, dark passageways, a battle
in the courtyard, a dungeon, and eventually meet the SnowKing himself
for a showdown. Get ready for a snowball fight!

Keyboard Controls:
e - move forward
d - move backwards
s - strafe left
f - strafe right
w - move downwards
r - move upwards
x - roll left
v - roll right
y - toggle explosion particle interaction with cyclone
u - restart level at last checkpoint
spacebar - use to open gates

Mouse Controls:

Left mouse click shoots and explosive snowball, a drag with left
button pressed will produce a roll left or right (also available on
the keyboard). A drag with the right mouse button produces a pitch up
or down, and a yaw left or right.



Now a description of what is implemented:

This is an interactive, 3D game that makes use of the OpenGL smooth
shading model using normals for almost all object and materials for a
few. The game uses limited texturing to decorate walls, floors, the
night sky, and the SnowKing himself. It also uses one case of picking,
necessary to open gates to move on to the next stage. My hidden
surface removal method is to keep track of which room you are in and
simply not draw rooms that I have judged are out of sight, all objects
in those rooms are also not drawn. This pretty much covers all the
required functionality.

My ship uses a slightly different navigation system than project 2. 
Instead of holding the mouse down for movement, you can produce and
acceleration with the keyboard that will carry your ship in the
direction you are facing, you can also strafe left or right, up or
down, and the mouse is used for looking around (pitch, yaw, roll as in
project 2).

One of the two main new functionalities I implemented is Collision
Detection. The ship you are flying fires explosive snowballs which
detonate upon intersecting another object's space, be it a wall, tree,
snow demon, evil Snowman, or evil Snowman's snowball. The bad guys
also fire snowballs at you and these are checked against local
boundaries and expire when intersecting another structure's space
(walls, floors or trees only, snowmen cannot kill each other, but this
is intentional). They can also intersect with YOUR space, which is
something you want to avoid, and this will produce a realistic jiggle
in your ships view. Also your ship will bounce off walls, floors,
trees, etc. Some more uses of collision detection are tied in with the
next new functionality.

The second main new functionality is Particle Systems. They include
modeling snowflakes falling in a room and landing on the floor and
sticking around for a while. Also when your snowball explodes I've
modeled the explosion using a particle system that scatters particles
in all directions. These particles also obey collision rules with
other structures, such as an explosion near the mouth of a tunnel down
into the dungeon will have some particles left on or near the edge of
the tunnel, while the rest will fall into the room below, bouncing
around in the walls of the tunnel as they fall. So explosion particles
will also bounce off walls, as well as the floor, and the height of
the bounce depends upon their velocity when they hit. Also, I've
modeled a snowy cyclone using a particle system, which adversely
affects your ships orientation when encountered (more collision
detection), but the real kicker is when you explode a snowball in
range of a cyclone the explosion particles are detected and caught up
in the draft and spun around until they expire (maybe this is almost
like simulated dynamics), this part is slightly buggy, but works
almost all of the time (which is why I included a toggle for this
particular effect).

I also have text displayed while you are flying displaying the armor
you have left, and will inform you if you have been hit, or have hit
an enemy object such as an enemy snowball or snowman. Info on how to
do the output was found at http://home.clara.net/paulyg/prog9.htm

And that's it, the rest is modeling the bad guys by hand (I didn't use
a modeling program), defining the rules for the world and the room
system, building the level, and lots of debugging :-). I wrote the
game using VC++ on my computer at home so it won't run on the lab
machines, but I've included the .exe file in my handin and will bring
my own computer to the demo.