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"Gorgeous tech demo trailer showcasing the features of Unreal Engine 3 and its free counterpart, the Unreal Development Kit, that help make lush environments."...
Wednesday, 24 November 2010
Wednesday, 8 September 2010
Next.. Ambient NPC population
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 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...
Monday, 30 August 2010
Attack of the Killer pathfinding butterflies!
Just a little bit of fun with A* pathfinding using Blitzmax and Leadwerks, and some Butterfly/Insect AI I had been working on. ...
Sunday, 29 August 2010
A* Pathfinding Using Blitzmax And Leadwerks Engine
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...
Monday, 23 August 2010
The Way Forward ... Making Blitzmax Trax ...
Following on from "On The Right Path, A* Pathfinding In Leadwerks" I thought before I archive the code, I'd have a little "dabble" with a basic function to get an NPC reading the path data and then following it to the "target" I had a couple of ideas on how to do this but as time for playing in leadwerks was running out I opted for a basic idea.
1. Target Position Selected
2. Path from NPC to selection calculated.
3. Path transfered to a temp storage array for that particular NPC
4. An NPC Pilot reads that data.
5. NPC follows the pilot.
Think of the "pilot" as the plastic stick thing on the underside of a scaletrix car .. it follows the groove...
Friday, 20 August 2010
On The Right Path, A* Pathfinding In Leadwerks.
Well, it has been a while since I made a blog entry, let alone done any work in LE. But I do keep an eye on the forum and Leadwerks in between Daily life and working on my project(s).
I have also been going through my Blitzmax code archive, where I stored all my Blitmax/LE projects and code snippets (finished and not completed). One idea I had been playing with before, was basic NPC AI. I had some small success with some Bugs using autonomous logic.
See Here
In my "treasure trove" of unfinished and messy development code I found what was going to be the next step (for me) with AI functionality. The dreaded "pathfinding". I have read that...
Saturday, 1 May 2010
Grunge Bob Square Pants ....
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...
Friday, 16 April 2010
Don't you just hate it when that happens?
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...
Monday, 12 April 2010
Crytek Planning a Free CryEngine Release?
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/d...ory?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....
Thursday, 11 March 2010
OOP I did it again ...
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...
Wednesday, 3 March 2010
SSAO, SSDO or NO in Leadwwerks.
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 "fizzin...
Tuesday, 2 March 2010
A superb addition
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....
Sunday, 28 February 2010
Finally
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...
Friday, 12 February 2010
Weather or not
Well nothing much to report, that does not mean nothing much has been going on 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...
Monday, 1 February 2010
CCTV using Leadwerks Engine 2.3
CCTV using Leadwerks Engine 2.3 from an app. written in Blitzmax as a proof of concept.
* The switch script being used to allow text and icons was created by Macklebee
** Best viewed in HD...
