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Marleys Ghost

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  1. Marleys Ghost
    It seems Crytek maybe planning a free CryEngine release.
     
    "The developer behind Crysis 2 and the engine behind it, CryEngine 3, has plans to release a free version of their game engine that will be "up to speed" with CryEngine 3. This should help Crytek to further compete with Epic Games and Unity, both of which offer free versions of their respective game engines, Unreal Engine 3 and Unity. "
     
    http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3178763
     
     
    I suppose it was only a matter of time considering the route both Unity3D and Epic have taken. But will be worth keeping an eye on.
  2. Marleys Ghost
    I started out this morning looking to update a test scene that I used for some first person tests I did in C++ after only having the engine for a few weeks and coding in C++ for even less time. Well, that was the plan. I managed to redesign the layout using 3DWS, and threw a few Dexsoft crates and Barrels in. The plan was then to work on textures but as usual after about an hour I had set sail on the good ship "unrelated" for a voyage across the bay of tangents. Don't you just hate it when that happens?
     
    The scene under modification was for my FPS prototype code in Blitzmax, whilst sorting through my code "archives" I came across my basic code for NPC creation with basic Seek : Pursue : Attack Behaviour (an NPC Type using methods which I wrote about here). Integrating it into my FPS prototype was easy enough and an hour and a few more dozen tweaking "tangents" later I had it all working quite well. The video basically shows 3 "settings" for NPC toughness.
     


     
    Best viewed in HD
     
    Player Control was a bit "twitchy" as I have yet to tweak the Xbox 360 gamepad functions for smoother action, also the screen capture lag did not help
     
    It all still needs a lot of work but I was happy with the results thus far.
     
    I guess tomorrow I will do what I was intending to do today ... or maybe not
  3. Marleys Ghost
    To prevent non Leadwerks Engine specific/Related entries from my Blog being automatically published here via the Blog Feed, I have removed that functionality, and will simply add a new entry title and link here for all Leadwerks Engine specific/Related entries.
     
     
     
     
    Leadwerks Related Blog Entry.
    Leadwerks 3.2 Indie : Proof Of Concepts & Several Tests.
  4. Marleys Ghost
    I started out yesterday morning looking to improve my understanding of types and methods in Blitzmax, and figure out how to use object-oriented programming (OOP) with it. I have only been programming in Blitzmax since the beginning of December last year, and only programming with C++ since the middle of October last year and The Leadwerks Engine since the beginning of October last year. So I am still on a very high learning curve in this regard.
     
    As usual, for me, I started out on one thing and ended up on another. I found a link on the old forum for a small tutorial on Object-Oriented Programming in BlitzMax By John Judnich. But by the time I had got to page 6 of 21, I was already off on a tangent and found myself working on a simple NPC type containing a creation method and simple seek behaviour method, after all I was now an expert after only 6 pages lol.
     
    I had already been "playing" around with some simple AI which showed vague promise, for an Idea for a small project.
     

     
    An hour and a few more "tangents" later I had managed to restructure the basic code for NPC creation and basic seek behaviour into an NPC Type using methods. This now allowed the easy creation of an NPC, in this case a rather nifty bug, created by ‘Psionic’, with its walking animation handled by its Lua script on load.
     


     
    The test scenes buildings are by GIMPY73 and the Freebeast model is by ‘Psionic’.
     


     
    Updated:
    Test of Basic NPC creation : Seek : Pursue : Attack Behaviour using OOP in Blitzmax running the Leadwerks Engine. Extra flags added for behaviour to the NPC Type with extra methods to communicate with the NPC model's Lua scripts for animation control. Although I did manage to hardcode a typo in the "Pursuit" flag.
     
    Of course this basic AI is nothing like the calibre of AI work being done by Chris Paulson or Pixel Perfect, but I had to start somewhere and this seemed the best place, so far I am pleased with my meagre results.
     
    I recall Josh showing interest in integrating Recast into the editor, this would truly be a useful addition. Leadwerks could really use an integrated AI starting point. Thats not a complaint just an observation. Recast integrated into the engine and editor could be that starting point.
  5. Marleys Ghost
    Well, its been almost a week since the release of 2.3 and although I have been working away at it there is still so much new functionality I have not had a chance to fully explore yet. I decided the best approach would be to go back to basics, so to speak. Investigate how the new lua scripting and other features would cross over to C++ and Framewerk, this is still on going for me, and I am mixing that aspect in with getting to grips with the new functions in the editor. All in all I am impressed.
     
    The only real problem I have at the moment is do I continue learning C++, I have after all only been coding in it for about two months, or change to Bmax or just concentrate on scripting. I am trying to decide which would be best for the new functionality of 2.3
     
    For me this is key and the basic building block for any venture, especially an actual game. I am looking forward to the tutorials on lua and how it can be used. I do think we have entered a very exciting time with LE, and patience is still needed.
     
    As I always say " Grant me patience lord .... but hurry up!! "
  6. Marleys Ghost
    I am currently working with EKI One, working through its format and structure, getting to grips with the lua behavioural scripting side and trying to brush up on my c++ skills, actually brushing up on my c++ skills is an overstatement as I don't actually have any to brush up! .. lol, I have also been going through my Blitzmax code and trying to compile all the game mechanic functions and methods into a single .mod, trying to keep things tidy. Whilst going through my **** drive, I mean, my well organised storage drive, I found some DarkBasic/DarkGDK stuff, which included the Dark AI library. I have never really used DarkGDK, although I did start out a few years back with DarkBasic. So I wondered (as you do), could it be utilised in LE2.5? Having never used Dark AI (which came in a bundle, that I have never used either, but it was a bargain lol) I knew that R.T.F.M. would be in order. If it relied solely on DBobjects and inherent DarkBasic functionality then probably not. I spent half an hour looking through the commands, and an hour later had it working in an LE context. So to answer the question, it seems you can.
     



     
    I'd have upped a better quality image but I am told "You can upload up to 7.74K of files "
     
     




     
     
    Its all a work in progress, and probably will remain that way as its certainly nowhere near the solution that EKI One is, but as an exercise it wasn't a bad use of a few hours.
     
    I will post a demo in the showcase later for those interested.
     
    EDIT : Demo posted here : http://www.leadwerks...-ai/#entry45564
  7. Marleys Ghost
    Working on two principles K.I.S.S. (keep it simple stupid!) and more for less.
     
    I spent a lot of time researching (read playing) certain games that have what I call an ambient NPC population. This is specifically those NPC's that reside in the background and generally have no real or very limited interaction with the player. Two such areas of research <coff> included Assassins Creed and Fable 2. Although both of these games have a far more complex general NPC population than what I am setting out to create, but the "research" was most enjoyable.
     
    First Step:
     
    Machine Intelligence "Kinda Almost":
     
    Machine Intelligence "Kinda Almost", simply gives an illusion that there is intelligence at work but there is not, sort of like, the lights are on but no ones home. There are several subsets to this group but the obvious one is simple animation. Also this can include proximity reaction behaviour, a posh and complicated way of saying when the player is near, stop what you are doing, and do this instead. But that's as far as interaction goes for those NPC's in this group. This simple ambient NPC type could also use lua scripts, loaded with the level and be left to attend to themselves.
     
    For example, just two chaps having a chat:
     

     
    Having a chat is basically all they do, its simple per character animation's controlled by lua scripts. The purple block volume is the walkable area that would be utilised by more "advanced" ambient NPC's, typically those that move about, particularly those that would use Pre-Loaded and Pre Calculated path routes for this particular level. The purple block volumes are simply required by the application I wrote to generate the route node data for the pathfinding tools I created and have demonstrated here. Not that this is a level just something thrown together for testing but I think I should unarchive some of my GMF format models and put together a small town/Village for testing this, rather than another simple "BlocksVille".
     
    There are obvious limitations to consider with this approach to the first tier of the Ambient NPC population for a "busy" town/village. The NPC's need animation's, most come with maybe 15 animation's (if you're lucky). My intention is to surmount this by adding animation's to them, primarily Mo-Caps. This will require a little work but will be the bedrock for the construction of this "tier". There are some very good applications on the market for achieving this. For me I prefer Fragmotion, there is also a free alternative that I also use on occasion called Pacemaker. But don't be fooled though, none of these applications will do it all "for you", you will need to skin the mesh to the correct rig for the plethora of free to use Mo-Caps, or indeed ones that can be purchased. It will all depend on budget and or requirement.
     
    This is still only a very basic outline for this "packing" stage, it will still require a lot of work but my goal is to get the impact of it at runtime to an almost negligible effect even when including proximity reaction behaviour.
  8. Marleys Ghost
    Currently I am taking a small break from actual coding right now, give or take the odd few hours now and then I thought it best to start construction of my testing level, or at least get the main parts of it built as the testing scene/areas are blueprints for a project I have had in mind for a while, basically some nasty persons do some nasty things which in turn brings about a whole lot of nasty and the player is the antidote to nasty in general. Yeah, not much of "game description" but radically indepth compared to one by our very own Gordon ... but as usual, I start on one thing and somehow get sidetracked .. not my fault though, honest, it was Epson's! They made my printer, and it got clogged, and if I had not spent 15 mins cleaning it out with A4 paper I'd have never have thought, hey look .. grunge textures. Well, I am no artist that's for sure, and I hate texturing, but I thought might as well make a start. So after the ink had dried I scanned them in and spent a few hours working on a connecting corridor section, heres a few screenshots of how it has progressed so far. Still very much a WIP, but slowly coming together.
     






  9. Marleys Ghost

    Weather or not

    By Marleys Ghost,

    Well nothing much to report, that does not mean nothing much has been going though
     
    I have decided that as and when I make an emitter for a specific purpose, I will now create its own editor entity to save time by not having to create the exact same settings over and over. Also not every setting available needs to be adjusted so I will now re-write the properties to reflect what they effect and remove the ones not requiring adjusting for a particular effect and simply hard code them into the script.
     

     
    This sort of came about when thinking about trying to get weather effects into the editor and eventually into an app. This is one I did for snow. It's a simple emitter used to create a localised snow effect in the Leadwerks Editor, using a custom .dds file for the snow flake created in Paint.NET
     


  11. Marleys Ghost
    To prevent non Leadwerks Engine specific/Related entries from my Blog being automatically published here via the Blog Feed, I have removed that functionality, and will simply add a new entry title and link here for all Leadwerks Engine specific/Related entries.
     
     
     
     
    Leadwerks Related Blog Entry.
    Leadwerks 3.2 Indie : Animated Character Workflow Test
  12. Marleys Ghost
    To prevent non Leadwerks Engine specific/Related entries from my Blog being automatically published here via the Blog Feed, I have removed that functionality, and will simply add a new entry title and link here for all Leadwerks Engine specific/Related entries.
     
     
    Leadwerks Related Blog Entry.
     
     
     
    Revamping A Modular Assets Idea.
  13. Marleys Ghost
    Josh reported Christmas eve that There was a crazy sale on Steam and if you hadn't played STALKER, you could get it for $10.. well I had replaced my damaged copy only two days before that via steam .. and had cost me a whopping £1.39 ($2.22).. well if the $10 (£6.99) was still too steep a price for you, get over to steam now as its now only £2.00 ($3.24).. http://store.steampowered.com/app/4500/
     
     
     
    Ignore the date on this entry it was posted today (Jan 3rd 2010) but the Blog date system only goes up to 2009 for me there must be a switch around here somewhere ..
  14. Marleys Ghost
    To prevent non Leadwerks Engine specific entries from my Blog being automatically published here via the Blog Feed, I have removed that functionality, and will simply add a new entry title and link here for all Leadwerks Engine specific entries.
     
     
    Leadwerks Specific Blog Entry.
     
     
    AI, Waypoints, A* Pathfinding, Lua & Leadwerks.
  15. Marleys Ghost

    Finally

    By Marleys Ghost,

    Well, after much testing I have decided on an actual 3D modelling app to use in my workflow. I already have Blender, and while there are some very skilled users of this on the forum (Niosop and afecelis spring to mind and their tutorials are definitely worth checking out), I still find its user interface awkward and clumsy. So I demo'd a few different ones that would not break the bank. In the end I decided on AC3D. I find it simple to use and has enough features for what I wanted it for. 3DWS is still my main application for creating architecture, but I needed something for what I call redundant decoration, and so far AC3D has proved to be just what I was looking for.
     
     
    Redundant Decoration is simply my term for low poly non functional assets, like in the picture below, filing cabinets, desks, fake PC's ect.
     

     
     
    Filing Cabinet: 12 Polys
    Desk: 192 Polys (currently, still room for "pruning")
    PC Screen & Keyboard: 70 Polys
     
    The textures still need some work, but using a combination of ShaderMap Pro and manual editing on the normal maps has produced some promising results.
     
    So far I am impressed with AC3D, and would recommend to those who were looking for a low priced 3D Modeller to check out its 14 day demo. Combined with 3DWS, Blender and UU3D I think I have this side of development sewn up application wise.
  16. Marleys Ghost
    I have not entirely made my mind up on the new SSDO (screen-space directional occlusion). I liked, in some circumstances, the effect SSAO gave, especially on bump mapped brick textures. But I find SSDO to be quite "fizzy" possibly from the curve on the camera look values. This may well be down to settings but so far try as I might I still get this. Not sure it will be useful in an FPS situation as the HUD model seems to interact.
     

     
    It does however have a very pleasing effect on "organic" assets.
     

     
    I think I will "play" some more with it, see if I can reduce the "fizzing".
  17. Marleys Ghost
    To prevent non Leadwerks Engine specific entries from my Blog being automatically published here via the Blog Feed, I have removed that functionality, and will simply add a new entry title and link here for all Leadwerks Engine specific entries.
     
     
    Leadwerks Specific Blog Entry.
     
     
    Colourful Behaviour.
  18. Marleys Ghost
    I thought I'd spend a little more time on this integration, using the laptop whilst watching the Olympics. The next phase was to automate the routines for NPC update and compacting the code routines. Ultimately, the idea is that after the scene is loaded, it will be parsed and flagged Dark AI objects, NPC's, Paths and Zones will be set up automatically via information taken from the relative lua scripts. Paths and Zones will be later, collision objects are done, so I was working on how to go about NPC's using this method. As some may have noticed I am using the FPSC Model Pack 53 characters.
     
     



     
     
    I converted about 5 or 6 characters to Leadwerks format and all the weapons for this exercise. I will eventually convert them all but I hand "prune" the bones of the rig and that takes longer than I want to spend at any one time on this side project. The FSM is still very basic but the first goal was to derive a current Animation state with each of those states having sub-FSM's to dictate the current behaviour based on the previous state and internal and external inputs. The framework is in place for the animation state which is derived by performing Boolean logic on returned values and strings from the Dark AI runtime and some stubs are in place nested inside for some basic behavioural sub-FSM's. First though I want to able to set up the scene and then place all the Dark AI objects, NPC's, Paths and Zones directly in the editor and then use the load routines to set all that up in an automagic way inside the application. The collisional objects were easy and are done with some simple tick box flagging functionality added to their property scripts. The NPC's a little more in depth , due mainly to the large amount of usable settings! lol. But I wanted to be able to place the model and then assign it some basic attributes to be read on load, this included what weapon to attach.
     
     



     
     



     
     



     
     
    So that was the basic NPC property script setup (wasn't that painful anyway). So using the test scene from Leadwerks 2.5x + DarkBasic's Dark AI [Part 2], and placing a few enemies and some friendly's to look after the player, this is the result of the current stage reached in the integration.
     
     




  19. Marleys Ghost
    To prevent non Leadwerks Engine specific/Related entries from my Blog being automatically published here via the Blog Feed, I have removed that functionality, and will simply add a new entry title and link here for all Leadwerks Engine specific/Related entries.
     
     
     
    Leadwerks Related Blog Entry.
    Leadwerks 3.2 Indie : I hate waiting in for deliveries! [HD]
  20. Marleys Ghost
    Following on from:
     
    On The Right Path, A* Pathfinding In Leadwerks.
     
    The Way Forward ... Making Blitzmax Trax ...
     
    I decided to give the testing a few more hours. First off I wanted to create a new NPC Type which would have its own control flags and most importantly its own path storage buffer.
     
    After a little thinking (a little thinking is what I excel at lol) and a few hours of coding and tweaking, I managed to get 32 new NPC Types all pathfinding their individual way around "BlocksVille".
     


     
    For those interested I will try and get a demo.exe up later onto the showcase thread:
     
    Pathfinding With A*
     
     
    Demo now added: Hide And Seek Demo 2
  22. Marleys Ghost
    The new Indoor Lighting Optimization is truly a fine addition to the Engine. It has taken a little while to get into the habit of automatically setting the lights to Dynamic, Dynamic + Static, Static or Dynamic + Static + Buffered, as well as the needed setting for the objects in the scene. Objects that would normally always be static I have, for the time being, simply added an ini file to set them to static automatically. This will later be set via their scripts but for now it suffices.
     

  23. Marleys Ghost
    Last September I mused about the concept of what I call Ambient NPC populations, I spent a lot of time researching (read playing) certain games that have what I call an ambient NPC population. This is specifically those NPC's that reside in the background and generally have no real or very limited interaction with the player, but may have some limited interaction with each other or the surroundings.
     
    I felt a new approach would be needed to sort through what was and was not required to achieve a similar environment in LE, I decided first to create the environment and to then set about, at different levels, adding in the ambient NPC population, the thought behind this was it would be easier to visualise what I wanted to see taking place, if it took place ... in place ... not the best description but I hope you will understand what I mean.
     
    So the first step is to create a small village environment and then to start adding in the population.
     
    Test/concept scene (test application screenshot): The Village of Swanwyck
     

     
    The important thing with this small test village level will be the roads/paths, as the first tier of the population will basically be simple "walkers".
     
    Even now, I am still formulating the different types required from "walkers" to simple "static actors" and how to implement some of those types to have different interaction levels. I will be utilising several different methods to allow the NPC's to navigate Swanwyck, from a simple "follow node" approach to predefined path data and on the fly A* navigation.
     
    I did have some very good results with A* pathfinding already, which can be read about here:
     
    A* Pathfinding Using Blitzmax And Leadwerks Engine
     
    Hopefully I can find the time to get "Swanwyck" up to a usable standard, and get the first tier of the "walking" population up and running.
  24. Marleys Ghost
    To prevent non Leadwerks Engine specific entries from my Blog being automatically published here via the Blog Feed, I have removed that functionality, and will simply add a new entry title and link here for all Leadwerks Engine specific entries.
     
     
    Leadwerks Specific Blog Entry.
     
     
    3rd Person Movement & Animation Control Rig Test
  25. Marleys Ghost
    To prevent non Leadwerks Engine specific entries from my Blog being automatically published here via the Blog Feed, I have removed that functionality, and will simply add a new entry title and link here for all Leadwerks Engine specific entries.
     
     
    Leadwerks Specific Blog Entry.
     
     
    Quick 3rd Person View Character Test.
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