paramecij

silly is the amount of time vs2010 takes to start up on my machine.. vs2008 takes 2sec

Same here. I'm always careful about these things, not so much because I fear being sued, more out of respect. I wouldn't want my work to be used without permission either, even though If you'd ask me nicely for it, I wouldn't say no.. Still, I got duped one time, I bought a couple of models on turbosquid (which I considered a trusted site), the info page was very solid and detailed (usually not the case), and the "artist" said they can be used in game as he himself tested them out in UDK, so it all looked legit to me. Then some time later I figure out that they were ripped from some game. Still haven't found out which one, but I'm positive, because I've investigated a little, and found out it matches the output of a little tool that can rip game models and textures from any DirectX application at run-time (quite clever actually).. that, and the seller got removed from turbosquid. Luckily I didn't use them anywhere before realizing this. I'm gonna open a dispute at turbosquid and see what they'll say about that... hopefully they won't weasel out with an "We're sorry, but the dispute was not initiated under our X-day warranty period blah blah" excuse, and offer a refund.

I've managed to get a somewhat satisfying driving behaviour with the vehicle controller. You can flip the car over doing sharp turns at too high speeds. I couldn't get the brakes to work 100% properly though, but I saw some commands for brakes etc commented out in the .c header, so I thought it would be implemented (or fixed if it was broken) at some point.. of course I realize now that will probably never happen

I believe Gmod is for you, check it out on youtube, lot of machinima done with it...

Because MoveEntity breaks the physics, as it 'teleports' rather then physically moves the entity

It's not entities themselves performing fuctions, think of it more like: instead of your code calling engine fuctions, the engine code is calling your functions BTW Anyone know what's the story with ENTITYCALLBACK_DRAW today, is it finally working in c too ?. ..and why is there still no documentation on it ?

Indeed, your FBX converter is VERY reliable. But generating the FBX has proven to be somewhat un-reliable by most apps that claim to be FBX compatible. I admit the support has much improved but I still have a bunch of max files that don't want to export to FBX correctly, but had success with intermediary formats such as .X or .SMD... Not everything you can do in max is fbx-exportable, so you have to be careful in the way you build and animate your model as I have found out. Max displays most of the warnings and errors when exporting, which is sometimes helpful, but some cases still don't produce any warnings..

.. And thanks for doing and posting this, I admit I haven't given this subject much thought before, but It always seemed to me that facial animation was a bit out of my reach. Because most of the pro models (even some specifically made for games) I considered buying for my game had the facial expressions and/or phoneme poses done as morphs, I thought this the only way.. so I would at the very least need to write some form of morph animation shader, a custom exporter for max, and figure out a lot of stuff in between.. But you have shown that skeletal facial animation can go a long way, and that lip-sync in real time is both easy* and cheap (in terms of cpu cycles and money), even for amateur/indie developers! (again) * easy only if you're not as rigging impaired as me

Consult the bundled pdf (if you haven't already), It has a few tips on what you should watch out, what doesn't work.. doing the edit mesh/edit poly modifier trick helped me a couple of times

What do you mean by 2D masks? Do you mean color-keying (not drawing pixels of specific color), or actual grayscale masks (like in photoshop etc) ? What are you trying to do with the masks ?

I don't know how the games you mentioned do it, but I would first try something simpler than physics.. I think it can be done reasonably well with just two checks (distance & angle): - if the enemy is inside the melee range of the player ( governed by the players current weapon length or reach ) - and if the player is facing the enemy ( or rather if the enemy is inside the weapons angle of attack ) - dish out damage to all who qualify or only the closest one(s) Simple and easy to extend, for example you could specify different angles or field-of-damage for each move so you could have 180° backward axe spins etc, just set the proper ranges for the move/animation and it's done. Maybe even add a "Leap to enemy" special power - easy, just multiply the weapons reach, and move/animate the player towards the enemy.. .. maybe this is what you meant with the "just do a cone in front of the player and just damage everything inside" ?

I think UU3D is worth buying, especially if you plan to use outsourced models, which may come in various different formats, or applications from which you cant export directly to GMF or have lacking FBX support,... and it's only like 60$ where 3dmax is around 5000$, and I had more success getting workable things out of UU3D than I did from max..

+1 This would be killer! ... one of the things I wish for to be (but probably wont) in the new engine... Oh, and I recommend peazip (free) or winrar (you can evaluate forever)

This will be a very fine addition to your engine, I'm sure. Nicely done! I had a brief look at the Dark Voices pack.. My assumptions are that the real value of the pack is in the provided wav-to-phonemes tool, or rather the pack -IS- the tool, and the head is thrown in as a bonus, correct?. And there are no additional dependencies for the game or limitations regarding the model/rig/animation set-up, so one could use morph instead of bone driven animation for example, or whatever, and the only "glue code" needed is for parsing the generated phoneme file (which should be easy and very cheap to process)? And it seems what makes a difference is the quality of the rig and animations themselves, not so much the quality of the extracted phonemes data. You did good work on rigging and animating the head, it looks very usable, and I'm sure you'll get even better results with some practice ! How did you do your expression and phoneme animations, are they essentially single key poses, which you blend between at 'playback', something else? Cheers

It's possible (I've done it multiple times), the workaround is by using OpenGL calls directly. (eg. glTexImage2D() etc,..) ..there is a good user written article on how to set-up and use OpenGL inside LE, so I'd start there first, and if you need further help with OpenGL just ask here

Dense forest... ~30fps on a old Quadro laptop gfx card (Geforce 8800 equivalent)

Projects in an advanced state of development already have their own web pages, where they try to gather and build their own community around.. I think it would benefit the smaller/beginning projects more, since this site is probably visited mostly by game developers, it would help in gathering some input, help, etc, maybe even new team members.. And I think it's more relevant to them/us anyway, the end user is mainly interested in the release date, pricing and future plans.. It might not necessarily make your product look as awesome to the casual visitor though, so I think I know where you're coming from..

I simply use: // dt = AppSpeed // time_scale = 0.0 - halt, 0.5 half, 1.0 normal, 2.0 double speed ... UpdateWorld( dt * time_scale ); .. it does the trick and more, but you are using Framework, so try and replace UpdateFramework() with calls to UpdateWorld (for all 3 world layers) and don't forget to add UpdateAppTime() in there somewhere, but i'm not sure what else UpdateFramework() does, so this might not be an option..

That's the spirit! Some apps and links I've stumbled upon while researching this subject: Animeeple - I had some limited success with this one, but they recently went bust Jimmy Rig - just found it, looks promising WebAnimate - same here, Havok Animation - does what you want, free for non-commercial and academic uses some further reading: Using an Intermediate Skeleton and Inverse Kinematics for Motion Retarget Rig Retargeting for 3D Animation Real-time Motion Retargeting to Highly Varied User-Created Morphologies Wolfire Blog

I have a big collection of base images for textures which I'm willing to share if someone would make textures from them! Nice job! I made a couple of similar ones but I think I like yours more

Hi Larry, I like the samples you posted, good quality work! But I much prefer to look at plain 2D images, because 3D renders can be sometimes misleading. (or at least do them inside a RT game engine) I mostly make the textures myself. I was disappointed with all the texture packs I saw so far,.. they were either of great quality and low quantity for a hefty price, or they were high in quantity for an affordable price but low in quality.. plus, no single seller could easily satisfy my texture needs (let alone single pack) and I'm not too keen on mixing content from many different sources (if I'm paying for it). Also what I found lacking was that almost none offered custom packs, where you can pick textures from the entire catalog - something you could consider I'm guessing a lot, majority of them probably without even realizing it. Most that do a quick google search usually end up at the same place, everybody knows and loves cgtextures.com (it's textures can be seen in some big commercial games), etc.. I remember a very distinct rubble texture I first saw in S.T.A.L.K.E.R., which I later encountered in a couple of other games also!

Also, I just remembered about these two: Softimage mod (or XSI mod) - I think it imports animated .x files (didn't see mentioned explicitly what formats are supported in the free version) SMD2X - with this, you can split animation and mesh data from .x files, etc, might be handy .. might be worth a shot

Interesting. I have a .max model of a similar setup to yours, from which I tried to export directly to .gmf via Arbuz tools, but the meshes were all messed up. Exporting it only as a static or rigged model was fine, and animations alone looked ok (in modelviewer), but adding animations in code produced the same messed up results. Then I tried exporting it to various formats like fbx, dae and x to convert the model elsewhere, but the results were the same, like the ones you describe (in fragmotion, uu3d and with fbx2gmf, but one .X viewer app managed to laod and display it almost correctly - I should check this with MS app too). Took a closer look inside max, compared it with others that caused no trouble, everything seemed identical, I even deleted the skin modifier and skinned/weighted it again, but If I used the original bones animation data, the issue was back. Tried a bunch more tricks, but nothing that would fix or allow me to re-use the animations. Now I'm using a simple "placeholder" animation I made myself until I find another way around this or get to the bottom of it. I'd like to take a look at your head model if you're at liberty to provide the file.

What are you talking about?, I increased my resolution by a factor of 3, and the menu looks even better now (downsized looks ugly here) ... Josh, if you still need the images, I believe this is what you are looking for?: http://opengameart.org/content/rpg-gui-construction-kit-v10

simple. On the page menu under 'support' go to documentation / community tutorials / lua programming .. there's a bunch of tutorials there, including loading a scene and controlling an animated character.