Project: TIE Fighter Scene
Author: Chris Lee

Description:
This project models a TIE fighter from the Star Wars movies. The TIE fighter can
be rotated and it can also fire lasers.

The most difficult 
part of the project was obviously to create the shapes and position them in a way
that resembles an "actual" TIE fighter. Due to the symmetry of the object I broke
it up into several sections that could then be reused. 

The three main objects I drew separates were the center cockpit, the wing and 
the axle that connects the wing to the cockpit. The wings are drawn with 
standard glutSolid objects that were sclaed appropriately. Each wing is also 
comprised of a hexagonal texture map in the middle of the wing that I drew 
in photoshop. The axle is built with several cone like objects but the standard
glut objects were not sufficient so I used parametric equations and loops in a 
algorithm very similar to the prior homework assignment to generate the 
objects and then scaled them all to fit. The central cockpit is a sphere generated
with parametric equations but has the front part cutoff in order to allow for a flat
circular texture map to be placed there.

The lasers are drawn with glutSolid objects that have lights placed in the center
of each one which then shine on the TIE fighter when the lasers are fired. To
implement the animation I created a global frame counter which is incremented
in the main draw function if the fire button was pressed. The frame counter is 
then used to calculate the coordinates of the laser beam and internal light. Once
the frame counter reaches its specified max it resets until the fire button is pressed
again.

Controls:
Up - Up rotation
Down - Down rotation
Left - Left rotation
Right - Right rotation

F - Fire LASERS!!!!

1 - Toggle light 1
2 - Toggle light 2
3 - Toggle light 3
h - Toggle position/directional lights

w - Toggle wireframe mode

Aims:
For this project I wanted to as accurately as possible recreate the TIE fighter from
Star Wars. There wings and surface of the original TIE fighter have many objects
and details on them that I hoped to simulate with texture maps. I also wanted to 
give the TIE fighter a flight path across the screen with lasers firing.

I was able to create the general shape of the TIE fighter but since most of the
objects like the cockpit and axle are spherical it wasn't possible to add a texture
map that wouldn't be distored when applied to the rounded surface. This is a classic
problem in graphics and was not an issue that I was ready to tackle. Due to time 
constraints I also was not able to implement a flight path for the TIE fighter.
A flight path would not be too difficult to implement in the future though. I am
pretty happy with the laser beams but only one set of beams can be fired at a time
so an area for future improvement could be to enable support for multiple beams.