I've not really added much to my squash game for a while as I have been playing around on my MacBook. I have implemented a pretty simple swing functionality to the game though, this features the first main piece of interaction between multiple entities and their components. It was a bit of a test for my component system but it seems to have come together quite nicely. 

There is still plenty more to do, currently you can only have one type of shot, it simply chooses the wall on the side that the racquet is facing and aims for the back corner of that wall. This will eventually be split up into different shots like the drive shot which aims to hit the ball straight down the wall nearest the player. Other shots are the cross court shot which aims for the other back corner and the drop shot which plays the ball fairly soft to force the opponent to rush forward.

The Z axis dilemma I had was that I made the mistake of forgetting the difference between openGL and DirectX when it comes to the camera, i.e. the camera looks down the -Z axis rather than the +Z axis. This meant that for a long time my x axis were flipped over and that caused a bit of confusion when I was trying to implement the swing component. Luckily I sorted this out and all is well. Apart from I now have to rotate all my models 180 degrees to get them in the correct orientation.

Keep it easy :)

After Creating the basic Component structure for my Squash game ( or any game I plan to make in the future ) I started implementing as much of it as I could without implementing physics. When it came to that point I was pretty bewildered as to how to do it. Ideally I wanted something that could simulate the collisions and report back to me that a collision had occurred and the effect it should have ( i.e. the new velocity of the ball ). I had a look at a few free libraries out there such as Havok and nVidia Physx but they all seemed to want to do too much of the work and wouldn't fit at all with the component design I had in mind. Which brought me to the conclusion, maybe I should write my own after all it is fairly simple collisions in a squash game apart from the racquet. I soon forgot about this notion as I'm not a massive fan of reinventing a square wheel. I still had a dilemma as to what library to use and how it would fit with my design though. 

After a lot of searching about and reading a lot of Physics Libraries Documentation I ended up settling with Bullet Physics, It is fairly lightweight, the documentation was fairly easy to read and setting it up wasn't much of a hassle. I did have to make the physics work alongside the component system rather than within it but that I think was inevitable. Anyway after playing around with it a bit I have managed to get working physics into the game: 

That is where things are at with my game but the big news is that I have just bought a MacBook Pro so I will now be taking a leap into the world of Apple and developing some iOS games and applications which I will hopefully be showing on here. This is a pretty exciting prospect for me as I have been wanting to buy one for a few months now. 

Hopefully a lot more to come 
Cheers :)