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clockwrk_routine
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« on: July 02, 2012, 09:34:08 AM »

hey 7dfps...

I'm working on a multiplayer game based off a spaghetti western card game BANG!.  The rules are pretty simple, everyone is dealt one of four roles at the start of the game, Sheriff Deputy Renegade and Bandit(?).  Bandits win by killing the Sheriff, Sheriff + Deputy win by killing everyone but eachother, Renegade wins by killing everyone.  You draw guns, beer, bullets etc.  Everyone is given a random character card, that has a special ability and a set amount of health.

The game itself is pretty mental not knowing who's who, a game of mind games, lying, mild paranoia.

I'll probably diverge from the theme, but build on upon the model in a 3d arena setting.  Assigning and deducting points depending on who you kill and what your role was to determine the winner.  "Cards" will spawn at different locations, bullets are limited.  You'll have a limited inventory in the way that you can only hold so many cards.  Maybe some character customization.

I like robots so there might be robots.  And I've been thinking about a fighting / aiming system like Virtual On

.  While your camera is locked on to a guy, your cursor is free to shoot down missiles or strategically fire a shot in the environment as your free to dodge and swerve around.  not sure how these ideas will gel...

I've been learning Unity for this.  Networking has been surprising easy but...  Right now, I have database registration, login, a lobby, joining a game, and real time syncing working locally when I test multiple instances of the game.  

TASTE TESTERS NEEDED

However I'm not sure if my networking script will allow other players to connect or create games behind their routers automatically.  The problem I think is the NAT punching, which if I can explain it is a way of opening ports for clients to connect to.  

I was wondering if anyone can help test a build with a couple computers.  It's really not much fun at this point, but I would really appreciate it if someone could test this.  I'll put up a link soon, just have to fix a couple things.

THANKS KISS PU

Here's the windows build.  you can input any email address as long as its in the form [email protected].  Otherwise you can get an email with your password and account name by yours truly <3  You won't be notified if there's an error registering, if there is just login as
username keokeo
password keokeo

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/46434785/unity/Bin.zip

Other things to note:
- After logging in, to your left the fields are:
To create a Game:
Game Name: name of the game
Player Amount: max number of players (set this between 1-9 or you might get an error)
port: it's just a randomly generating port number between 40000-250000.  NAT punching should work for any port if I understand it correctly.

-In the Center:
List of Games available to connect
Have to hit refresh upon logging in

After logging into a game a button to your left "Spawn" will spawn your character and load the Level.  I think it's best to wait till all computers are at the Spawn button stage, or you might get errors.  It'll probably be a waiting lobby at some point.

Controls:
wasd+space
space to flyyyy
« Last Edit: September 20, 2013, 01:16:30 AM by keo » Logged
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« Reply #1 on: July 03, 2012, 01:35:46 AM »

Have thought about trying the Blender Game Engine so will be following this to see how you go and further motivate me to try something outside of flash.
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clockwrk_routine
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« Reply #2 on: July 03, 2012, 08:08:46 AM »

INTRODUCTION

I'm a try to attempt a fairly coherent devlog about working with the Blender Game Engine.  I started a project a few weeks ago, a 2D platformer, with the goal of just creating a simple but complete experience using mostly the logic brick system1 with a little python.

There are several reasons why I chose the Blender Game Engine. 
- It's easy to pick up and I don't need to learn a language or to do any scripting to get immediate results.  I find it faster than working in Game Maker.
- It comes with a built in Physics engine. I don't want to roll my own or build off a template.  It's pretty awesome to boot in my opinion, it's fast and takes a couple clicks to work with it.
- It's low on resources which is perfect for my tiny netbook.
- It's free and opensource.

Several other advantages.  I can make all my necessary objects, levels and graphics within blender which makes prototyping a lot faster / easier.

In the end it will be a single level, there will be obstacles, enemies, collectables, power-ups and a finish point.  It will be sandwiched with a menu/title screen and End Screen.  Typical platformer stuff.

WHAT I HAVE DONE SO FAR
- Start Menu
- Player Jumps and moves side to side
- Player Shoots and Enemy dies
- Enemy Shoots and chases hero
- Camera follows hero
- Message System
- Sprites are animated2

I've gotten a lot out of following Solarlune's tutorials.  I totally encourage you to take a look if learning BGE is important to you and also to thank Solarlune for providing awesome resources/tutorials to learn from  Smiley

The biggest hurdle in learning Blender is navigating the interface, but I suspect once you try/see it once you'll get it.  It becomes fairly intuitive quick.

I wouldn't say this is a tutorial perse.  I will point things out here and there about working with the BGE.  But otherwise I'm open to questions and if you yourself are interested in starting a project alongside this I would totally be up for starting a skype/email group to support eachother in our learning endeavors.

Several other Resources for learning:
Blender Artists Forums there's a subforum just for BGE Projects and learning.
List of Blender IRC Rooms
Blender Python API
Blender Wiki






1 The Logic Brick System is the equivalent to Game Makers drag and drop programming interface.  It is however structured very differently.  You have 3 different kinds of logic bricks, the Sensor, the Controller, and the Actuator.  You can think of it like your nervous system, you first have to sense something happening (The Sensor), then you must decide to do with that sensation (The Controller), and then there's the reaction based on what you decided (The Actuator).  I will cover the basic Sensors, Controllers, and Actuators.

2 I'm using Solarlune's Sprite script.



Getting to the Blender Game Engine
On the 'Info' window/bar (at the top of the screen in blenders default state), there is a dropdown box that says Blender Render, switch this to Blender Game Engine.

-Physics tab will now change
-If you press 'P' over the '3D view' you will start the game.  You can also start it from the 'Info' bar or from the 'Properties:Render' Tab

Getting Physics to Work
In the Properties window of any object there is a Physics tab.  All objects default to 'Static' objects.  

- Static objects are objects you don't want to be affected by gravity but are still solid.  Levels are Static.

- Dynamic objects are objects affected by gravity and are solid.  Entities such as the player or enemies are Dynamic objects.

Quote
You can try this out.  Set up a plane for your ground and a Cube for your player, the cube should be above Plane.  Set the appropriate physics type for each.  Mouseover the 3D View and press 'P'

Movement
With your player cube selected.  In the 'Logic' window, set up a 'keyboard sensor' connected to an 'and controller' connected to a 'motion actuator'.  

Keyboard Sensor: For the Key will use the Right arrow.
And Controller: nothing to do here.
Motion actuator: Under Force, we want to apply a positive force along the Y axis

Quote
Knowing this you should be able to get the player moving in all necessary directions including jumping (set the force between 100-200)

Next time I will talk about:
- setting up the camera
- making the player fire an object
- collisions



Yesterday was spent working on graphics.  I've wanted to use a black and white comicbook style for a project before involving a girl and a squid.  That project fell short but I'm deciding to try that with this project, so I drew an eyeball and another crab in flash and exported as a gif animation, edited into a sprite sheet in graphics gale.


I kind of love drawing crabs.  I was playing Sword & Sorcery for the first time yesterday, I really like how they set up each scene, the perspective and being able to pan and look around.  So I had a neato idea for a mechanic which I will talk about later.
« Last Edit: July 12, 2012, 06:56:27 PM by poop » Logged
clockwrk_routine
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« Reply #3 on: July 03, 2012, 09:44:47 PM »

at the end of day 2

Tried something to see how it would look and have a new idea for this project
« Last Edit: July 04, 2012, 03:56:22 AM by shiny metal excess » Logged
clockwrk_routine
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« Reply #4 on: July 04, 2012, 10:35:27 PM »

And another direction ... texture WIP



I've always wanted a city/cyberpunk setting, I'm a try to do that.


So I started modeling again, I learned a few things like joining separate objects, and the wonderful knife tool (keyboard 'k').  The biggest thing I thought about was how to make the modelling process faster / more efficient so I can cut the amount of time I spend making assets.  So I started thinking about recycling parts.

In the above picture I have two separate objects, shoes and pants.  Usually my approach is to first model the whole character, the shoes and pants would be part of the mesh.  Here they are separate meshes.  Why?  Several reasons.  

- I can mix and match various parts to make new characters/outfits on the fly, joining the meshes together.

- I can think of many other ways I can reuse these objects in the game for example decorations

- I can duplicate these meshes and replace their textures easily to create more assets to work with

- I can focus on each part individually

- I will also do this with parts of the face like the nose, the mouth and the eyes, object decals

Another thing I'm excited about is rearranging various objects like a collage and joining the meshes to come up with new monsters, machinery, obscure objects.  Ex. lining eyes along arms, a several armed, several mouthed beast with a tv for a head etc

Another area to cut dev time is repurposing your armatures/animations for other meshes.

I keep losing my textures  Angry Since I'm texture painting inside blender, I don't think to save my textures.  save them often.
« Last Edit: July 04, 2012, 10:45:09 PM by shiny metal excess » Logged
clockwrk_routine
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« Reply #5 on: July 06, 2012, 03:45:28 AM »

and back to drawing crabs

this will be cyberpunk underwater story about a punk crab with a concealed claw gun fighting the nautical tyranny

A little about Cut-Out Animations.  Unlike traditional 2D animation, where each frame is drawn over to produce a moving image, cut-out technique uses several images to make up an animation.  Like in South Park, the feet and the facial expressions are moved/rotated/swapped out for different parts. 

Cut-out animations have their own look and feel to them.  The advantage of working with cut-out animation is that it saves a lot of time, it's really easy to organize/mix and reuse parts.  And maybe he can get cybernetic upgrades to his skeleton.

The way you set it up in Blender, is to have an object composed of several planes with different Z values.  An armature is parented to the object, it consists of isolated bones that are assigned to each of these planes.  You animate the bones.

While working with Cut-Out Animations, I noticed something that I tend to neglect.  I never assign materials/textures to my objects, I tend to unwrap them assign a new texture in the uv window, and then continue to paint them.  This works out fine in the 3D View when I animate it.  But previewing this in the game engine, my planes will not correspond to their assigned Z values.  The problem had to do with not assigning materials/textures properly.

Something I learned yesterday was how to map different materials/textures to different faces of an object. 

In this picture have two different materials, to add materials to an object click the '+' symbol.  To assign these materials to different faces, you select the corresponding faces in the 3D View, and click the assign button.

Next time I might or might not cover animation and actions inside blender.  Actions are sets of animations like walk cycle, run cycle.

Edit:  Instead of joining all the planes to a single object, it would be best to keep them separate but connected by the armature.  This way you can look each part up and swap them if need be with other meshes.  Using my crab example, maybe he'll be able to swap out claws for a laser blade or pulse cannon megaman style.
« Last Edit: July 06, 2012, 02:11:58 PM by shiny metal excess » Logged
clockwrk_routine
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« Reply #6 on: July 06, 2012, 01:07:46 PM »

Cut-Out Animation Continued

This is a short one, but doesn't cover Actions just yet because I'm not sure I'm prepared to explained  Smiley

While coming up with character/environment designs, there are various techniques/things to consider that you can use to add more oooomph to your animations/designs.

In the last post I talked about swapping/moving and rotating various parts, but all the tools available in blender are at your disposal.  You can scale/stretch/squash, animate a plane with several bones, and animate textures.  Here is an example of a situation unfortunately they are just words since I can't record anything in blender at the moment:

Your character is throwing a punch.

scale/stretch/squash - a fist getting bigger as it winds up to deliver a fatal punch. while it's moving it's stretching.  When it delivers the punch it squashes. and then returns to normal.
animate plane - while that is happening, a scarf the character has on is flowing to a sine pattern made from animating the bones.
animate textures -  and throbbing veins are showing on the arm.

The thing that I like about animating this way, is that I can add these little details at anytime and it doesn't have to all be in one pass, I can do them separately if needed.  I can also combine them into not just actions, but the actual design of a character, which opens up doors to experiment.
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Paul Jeffries
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« Reply #7 on: July 06, 2012, 01:50:22 PM »

This looks really cool.  I tried making a game in Blender myself a couple of years ago and found it a little limited, plus their interface for scripting in Python had some irritating bugs in it, although this was back before the 'Yo Frankie!' project when they added loads of new stuff to the game engine.  Do you still need to run the finished project through Blender or can you create stand-alone games now?  That was one of the main things that put me off last time.
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clockwrk_routine
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« Reply #8 on: July 06, 2012, 02:04:02 PM »

BGE feels pretty full featured to me, I haven't encountered any bugs with the built-in text editor, but you can plug in external scripts.  I haven't noticed any major bugs yet but I also haven't done much scripting.  You can export to stand alones by enabling it in the user-preferences:add-ons page, if you search 'export' it should come up.  It will then be under the file> export> export to stand alone or something of that nature.
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eddietree
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« Reply #9 on: July 07, 2012, 09:11:25 AM »

Keo, the 3d vertices pimp

pimp on

 Well, hello there!
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clockwrk_routine
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« Reply #10 on: July 08, 2012, 08:27:42 PM »

@eddie  Gentleman



So I was watching a lot of Muramasa: The Demon Blade let's plays.  I was noticing how they made their characters breathe, so I wanted to give that a whirl.  I did that using blenders armature, parenting the bones to the image, and then scaling them and making keyframes along the timeline.  Very cool eh! I'm excited where this is going.

edit: very weird to be texture painting while its still animating.
« Last Edit: July 08, 2012, 10:57:44 PM by buckteeth canyon » Logged
eddietree
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« Reply #11 on: July 08, 2012, 09:28:28 PM »

Have you tried adding a tinge of ambient occlusion? I find that simple solid-color low-poly 3D models with slight ambient occlusion shadow really makes it really fantastic.
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SolarLune
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« Reply #12 on: July 08, 2012, 09:30:02 PM »

^
@buckteeth canyon - I NEVER WOULD HAVE THOUGHT OF THAT (at least, I don't think I would have). That effect is pretty cool.

Be sure to keep trying things out in the engine to see if anything slows it down too much (general game-dev rule, really).

I don't quite remember if shape keys are fine for use in the BGE, but they just worked in a test I did, so they should be fine.

And aim for either Singletexture or GLSL mode if you disable mip-maps for a more easy conversion to a runtime, though the true option to disable interpolation on textures should be coming soon.

Anyway, good to see someone else using the BGE! I want to see how this ends up!

EDIT: I agree with eddietree. Maybe you could paint some AO on the sprite in some areas, or give it a shadow plane.
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clockwrk_routine
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« Reply #13 on: July 08, 2012, 10:02:50 PM »

Thanks you two!  My graphics card won't display effects/materials currently so I'm going to have to wait till I get a better setup to try AO.

Also stumbled across this shortcut which helps because I keep losing my textures  Angry
CTRL+ALT+S saves all your textures, if you saved them as separate files already.

edit: blender saves alpha enabled pngs weird has anyone noticed this?  It layers previous edits.
« Last Edit: July 08, 2012, 10:56:08 PM by buckteeth canyon » Logged
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O, the things left unsaid!


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« Reply #14 on: July 08, 2012, 10:03:26 PM »

This is crazy weird and cool looking. I'll just leave this here:  Blink
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rdein
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« Reply #15 on: July 08, 2012, 10:46:30 PM »

this looks great
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clockwrk_routine
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« Reply #16 on: July 09, 2012, 05:05:09 PM »

 Smiley I really appreciate it!  I'm going to be updating less frequently so I can work on this more diligently.  Here's a WIP of the main character reminds me of breath of fire and goku.

and a turn table of the model as per eddie's request
« Last Edit: July 09, 2012, 05:28:04 PM by buckteeth canyon » Logged
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« Reply #17 on: July 09, 2012, 05:14:16 PM »

would love to see a 3d rotation of this model!
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gf11221
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« Reply #18 on: July 09, 2012, 05:37:15 PM »

I love how you do the 2d assets using Blender 3D, works like wonder!
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eddietree
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« Reply #19 on: July 09, 2012, 05:39:04 PM »

Ah, is the model a 2D billboard? I thought it was straight up 3d model with skeleton/skinning!
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