paramecij
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Posts posted by paramecij
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For simple models you could get away with just CreateBodyHull() command.
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Finally got the chance to see the video - my immediate association: DayZ (yeah you mentioned it, but even if you didn't, the resemblance is strong...)
Some nice features and details on display there, I like the movement and gun handling, the atmosphere and vegetation placement is great (as I said before), the only thing bothering me is the silence. I know it's still a WIP and sounds will eventually be added, but still, with a long video like that the lack of any ambient sound gets really apparent.
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The following also applies to auto-generated specular maps (maybe even more so, as pointed out by Andy).
A brief mini-tut on why you should generate height maps for your textures rather than throw the diffuse into crazybump. Written in response to seeing the latter technique used more and more by new artists who think it's a valid way to get a good normal map.-edit:
forgot to also include this tut:
Creating a Specular Map for Quake 4
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Wow things are really starting to come together now! I followed your progress for many months now, and I'm both inspired and impressed. Good luck with the alpha release and count me in for testing
Some progress update of what has been done last week !
- NavMesh Integration 100% finished and handle everything, terrain and objects geometry
- Base zombie AI
- Zombies hitboxes system to detect shots in zombies bodies parts (head, legs, arm...)
- Zombie steering system
- Dynamic navmesh update according to objects driven by PhysX (some littles bugs to fix here)
- Zombies animations system with multiple animations blending support
- Melee weapons support (still WIP)
That's one hell of a productive week. Are you working on this project full time now ?
@repeating texture patterns - well, that's an easy albeit tedious fix, you can modify each mip level and brush out offending low frequency details. Alternatively you can just blur/color average mip levels automatically (makedds.exe has the 'fade mipmaps' option).
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A couple here people believe the terminal is a failure, I disagree, at least if you're at the level of wanting to develop games on linux, you should be able to uncompress your tarballs and compile your own software, that's often just a necessity if you want the newest versions (although arch has been terrific on this front). The software center would be a lot better if it always had the newest versions of blender and gimp for example on download.
That's the fail right there - why should one have to use the terminal for simple and very frequent task such as uncompressing archives and compiling code?
Don't get me wrong, I love the options and power a command line/terminal offers and often write software with that in mind, but for a normal user and his every day tasks, one should accomplish everything without having to resort to terminal/cmd prompt.
Snapping to vertices and aligning to faces would be a bonus.
Actually that's much more important to me than smooth movement inside the editor. I hate modelling tools that don't offer any kind of snapping/aligning or a way to punch in precise numbers via keyboard.
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@shadmar: lol.
@Josh: Amen.
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As a hobbyist game developer linux can't offer you that much, except give you access to an alternative, free software loving "market". As for gamedev software, you have blender and gimp, a few engines (most notably torque3d and soon leadwerks3). If that's all you need and are buying a new pc then that's great, you can save a few bucks (though you probably still need a copy of windows, as you don't want to loose that market).
My suggestion would be to keep developing on windows with the tools you are already comfortable with, but get yourself a copy of linux to familiarize yourself with the OS, that way you can target a larger audience when Leadwerks 3.1 ships, and make the switch later down the road when you have a better understanding of what linux can offer and what you want from it, this way you'll be able to choose a distro that better suits your needs. Oh, and don't go asking linux people on what linux to get, you'll get 100 different answers and opinions, just start with ubuntu (it's one of the friendliest to new users and easy to install) via VMWare to get a feel for it first.
Viruses are not an issue, because linux community is smaller and made of people who are generally comp savvy power users, software is mainly distributed with source, and linux has a very coherent and robust security policy. That being said, during high school I wrote a lot of malicious software for both linux and windows without much trouble (purely for educational and experimental purposes). Once everyone and their dog starts using and developing for linux, the situation will worsen a bit, but thankfully viruses have generally gone out of style, data mining and user tracking are the trends now. Some of the ads on the web feature super advanced javascripting that track your online behavior and history like a boss, and they don't even need to get into your system.
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@YouGroove I care. I played all the games mentioned here (except fast food ugh..), and can back my claims with valid arguments, the question is can you?
@Rick I agree 100%, very nicely put, that's exactly how I feel and think about the word Indie.
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It has been mentioned several times that Josh doesn't have the time and that it could be better spent on other things - with which I totally agree, Josh should put all his energies and focus into the engine until it's complete. This can sometimes be a signal that the company needs growing but in this case he could just hire a freelancer for the task, or recruit a few willing bodies from the community.
@Aggror, that's why the documentation needs a hub/portal/front page where stuff like a FAQ can have a permanent and visible link. Rastar is right about the avalanche effect, separation can hurt us if we don't have enough momentum, which is very likely since the community isn't THAT big. We can make a prototype of such a system on our own, while Josh fiddles with 3.1, but it would need to be tightly integrated into the official docs eventually or it will be condemned to a slow death.
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True. But some things are hard to search for, or you don't know what to search for, or even that you should be searching for it.
Just a quick illustrative example.. If I post a few tips or an alternative way to do X in LE more efficiently, and you check back to the forums a couple months later, it's unlikely you'll find about it, you won't search for it because it's already working for you and it hasn't occurred that it could be done better or that someone posted about it between your visits, even though such a method would greatly benefit you...
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.. I think it would be best to host your own. Doesn't cost much and mediawiki (and others) are free install-able frameworks.
I don't think this would actually be best, because knowledge needs to congregate not dissipate, and It doesn't have to be a real wiki, so no need to install anything.
We just need a simple and elegant way for the community to contribute new and enrichen old documentation.. without having to go through (of what could quickly be) 50+ pages of http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/page/tutorials/ style articles..
Another thing is that a lot of great knowledge is accumulated in the forums but it quickly gets buried and forgotten, then the cycle repeats itself, a common problem/missed opportunity for which I haven't seen an effortless mechanism for propagating such knowledge.. which is a shame because some of it could be turned into an article with a bit of work and a lot of them could be added at least to a giant FAQ or something..
Current documentation is okay-ish, the layout could do with a better hub page along the lines of portal for the community section, and the whole command reference tree could be a level shallower or at the least provide links to functions from the same category OR ideally, have a collapsable tree list of all the commands in a bar on the left, so one can jump from function to function in a single click.
While one can post additional remarks and sample code to the API docs via comments, I'd personally be much more comfortable and inclined to do so if I knew that other people/editors can correct and tidy it up some more if need be.. that's what the whole point/idea of a wiki is I think - many people editing a single page/entry, having their internal discussions and whatnot, else it's just forum style postings that can quickly bloat the docs..
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A "layer" system might not be such a bad idea. Seems like you already have your buildings separated by floors, right? Each floor is a layer, if you have parented floors from ground to top, you can set alpha=0 to all meshes above the player in one go.. additionally you'd need to have an array (floor layers) of linked lists for enemies and/or other objects. You could build these lists on entering the building or have them prebuilt for each building on level load, of course, for NPCs you'd need to dynamically insert and remove them from the lists as they go up and down each floor.
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@YouGroove you can't be seriously comparing a throw away game like fast food to papers please... The first 3 games you posted are good, but nothing special, papers please got better reviews then all those games you are mentioning..
..did you actually play any of these games or are you just posting for the sake of posting ?
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When indies are original...
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There is some good multiplayer MMO cooperative action games with lot of menus , made on other engines, possible only because it was a complete GUI system and tools.
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They could make a good MMO but couldn't make a few menus? I find that hard to believe..
I integrated Awesomium, GWEN and a bunch of others in the past but mostly ditched them in favor of my own "immediate mode" GUI.
Now I only use AntTweakBar for prototyping, awesomium for it's html awesomeness else it's IM GUIs all the way!
some good WHY and HOW on immediate mode gui's:
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Spam is a very poor excuse ... is there any spam on the forums? (excluding YouGroove) And if there is, shouldn't he close down the forums as well? .. IF it really is such a big problem, then just manually approve contributors, appoint a mod or two, or something. The value wiki style documentation provides is well worth the hassle I believe.
Spam... come on...
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Great atmosphere, your procedural placement always looked very natural to me. I managed to get good results with terrain generation but not so with vegetation placement, so I was always impressed with that.
Can you perhaps give a few hints or details on how you go about implementing your ballistics with physics? (i'm also playing with PhysX3)
I must say the original Operation Flashpoint was one of my favorites back in the day, tried the first ArmA demo, it was good, but somehow just didn't have the same feeling and wasn't quite for me.. the new one looks impressive as hell though
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I'd argue that knowledge has only value when applied correctly while wealth has value when shared with others.
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I don't remember being able to do any of that in Sculptris years ago when I stumbled upon it? ... Was I just not thorough enough in testing it or has Sculptris been updated along the years?
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Good work Chris, I'm glad you decided to take this step and don't worry, soon you'll be a real master of rock
I'll try to put them to good use, you just keep 'em coming!
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Well you almost wrote the full answer to the problem yourself
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Caus you add torque forces each time, and it becomes to turn to much for example.
instead you should be setting them each time.
There, fixed
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...or you didn't see the usefulness of blender in your workflow because of your Ultimate Unwrap license.
Actually, It's the other way around
You don't see the usefulness of UU3D because of your superior modelling skills. You don't have to pay some shady but affordable anonymous modeler on the web for a pair of animated fps hands, the result of which is a single .fbx file which insta crashes blender upon import and results in a vomit of triangles in 3dsmax. In those situations UU3D + fragmotion are irreplaceable tools for saving the day (and your investments), a real must have if you source your models from thegamecreators, arteria3d, dexsoft, turbosquid or MrRandomAsian3DModellerGuy and the likes..I see it more as a specialists tool rather then a major workflow component, like a heavy hammer you bring out when you need to bash some naughty 3d files into submission.. I doubt many people use UU to do any real work with it (ie, unwraping models), mainly just for format conversion, reliable mesh with skeleton/animation scaling and "bug fixing".
Anyway, I'm already sold on blender and am a big fan. I think blender is more a power user like program since it has more hotkeys than an old school flight sim (not surprising, OSS people are mostly power users themselves), and I do believe that blender will eventually turn into a 3dsmax+Zbrush+Premiere+AfterEffects+Photoshop power house, judging how it's developing now. It has a very healthy development cycle and is making much better progress then for example max and maya do.
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While I also advertise and recommend blender on many occasions, I believe it has finally gained enough momentum to keep going on it's own. It's starting to get used in big/serious productions, and has become the standard in various 3d indie/mod/amateur/enthusiasts communities. It's impossible for new generations of modelers to miss it due to not hearing about it, while the current and the old don't use it either because they already settled on something that works for them or by choice (we all have different tastes & preferences).
Where I don't see blender get enough recognition is perhaps in video/film communities. Blender has good video editing capabilities (NLE), tracking and a super awesome node based compositor. Not many people seem to know or talk about this side of blender.
Tears of Steel - a short sci-fi movie made entirely in blender:
All that said, now that I'm actually "stuck" with using blender, I kind of miss 3dsmax
... I started with blender long before I learned 3dsmax at work, and it took me a couple of tutorials and a few weeks until I became proficient in max. And I'm still not at home with blender and it's interface, I have to think too much about it when I work in it - which border to split, where to find that option, are the top icons part of this view or the bottom ones, what's that hotkey again etc (me trying to work in blender via hotkeys is like an elephant walking in a porcelain shop - things get wrecked very quickly -
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I demo-ed ipisoft and a bunch of other solutions 2-3 years back, and couldn't get a decent import anywhere. The recognition seemed ok, but importing the capture onto different skeletons (and in different apps) resulted mostly in garbage animations. Well to be fair, importing animations of any kind onto a custom skeleton seems to be a real challenge for pretty much every 3d app I've seen so far - without throwing cheap experimental mo-cap into the mix. So at that time I kind of abandoned hope for effectively mo-caping and animating models by myself.
Since then I stumbled upon http://www.ikinema.com/webanimate which seems like a promising and easy to use tool for re-targeting and cleaning up animations. While I haven't tested it with any self made mo-cap data yet, it did the trick for me with some other 3rd party animation files that were problematic to import and apply.. so I think it might be worth a shot.
I did have relative success using motion detection as player input. At first I tried OpenNI framework, but the skeleton tracking seemed a bit slow-ish and inaccurate. Then I just grabbed the raw depth data from the kinnect and ran my own "hand" tracking algorithm over it. The results were more fluid and responsive, although there was still a lot of noise which needed to be dealt with (as can be clearly seen in raw depth image in the video bellow)
- Edit: for some reason the video plays a bit choppy and has distorted colors
What are you working on :
in Showcase
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