Colourful Behaviour.

Currently I am working on the second phase of the MapData generator, which is to scan the map for scene objects and then adjust the walkable/unwalkable data accordingly. The basics are working fine from a simple AABB check per collision type. Although I am only using the x and z returns at the moment, a more "honest" check would also require y0 and y1 with reference to terrain elevation to be taken into account, but for now this will do as I have another system in mind to further "refine" the AABB space check.  I also integrated a version of my Blitzmax A* system, and have a test "AI Bot" that can path the generated data in the editor and...

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A* Pathfinding MapData Generator.

The Alpha of my MapData Generator, this is the first phase where the terrain is interrogated and using pre-defined criteria an external .dat file is created containing the walkable and unwalkable grid information for a loaded map. This information can then be fed into either my Blitzmax/Leadwerks A* solution: A* Pathfinding Using Blitzmax And Leadwerks Engine or my Lua/Leadwerks A* Solution: AI, Waypoints, A* Pathfinding, Lua & Leadwerks. Of course this is only one way to create the node graph data for A* pathfinding. But for current tests using my Lua A* Library this approach will do just fine. The editor currently has only hard coded settings which in the demo video also checks to see if a grid square is below the waterplane and mark it unwalkable. ...

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R.A.T.S. – Rodent Army Training Simulator

A friend of mine, Paul Thomas, is a developer on the team behind  R.A.T.S. – Rodent Army Training Simulator. I have been following this closely. I will be placing permanent links to his blog and to the R.A.T.S. website. In association with, and presented by  Plastic Piranha,  R.A.T.S. was demonstrated at E3 2011 and  reportedly, got fantastic feedback. I know Paul is hard at work on this, and I wish him and his crew all the best, and look forward to future updates and demos. You can check out the on going development on the R.A.T.S. website or over at 3D Masons. Heres little of the work so far. ...

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CryENGINE3 Free SDK hits 100,000 downloads

Cryteks CryENGINE®3 Free SDK, has hit 100,000 downloads in only five days of its release on August 17th. That is a massive achievment.CryENGINE®3 Free SDK is free of charge for non-commercial use, but they are offering a royalty-only license model to developers who are interested in using the SDK for commercial projects from which Crytek requires only 20% of the developer’s revenues generated from the commercial launch of their game. The free SDK can be downloaded from here Epic Games, announced the Unreal Development Kit (UDK) exceeded 50,000 users worldwide a week after its launch on Nov. 5 2009. In May 24 2011 Unity annouced that its...

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CryENGINE 3 Free SDK Released.

"Anyone can now download a full version of the best All-In-One Game Development Engine, for free and use it without charge for non-commercial game development. You can try out the fastest toolset for creating game worlds and use the power of CryENGINE 3 in your own games." More to come about this, I am just too busy downloading! CryENGINE 3 Free ...

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AI, Waypoints, A* Pathfinding, Lua & Leadwerks.

Over the last few days I have been getting into Lua script. A few days ago, I bounced an idea off of Macklebee about path nodes and waypoints, and things kind of took off in all directions. A special thanks to Macklebee for authoring the random visible node selection routine and other scripts and Lua snippets in this joint venture. Between us over the last few days we now have a small arsenal of different waypoints, path nodes and pathing techniques including a Lua scripted A* solution, which can use pre-calculated map data or be dynamic. Mack is currently working on another interesting idea along this route, and I have more functionality to code for some other ideas I have in this venture, from NPC behavioural information exchanges to waypoint 3D A* pathing, amongst other tweaks and new AI...

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UDK APEX Destructible asset test

Just a quick and simple test of the workflow. I created a "metal crate" in Silo 3D, textured it in Ultimate Unwrap 3D and then imported it into APEX 1.0 PhysX Lab, where it was "sliced and diced" and exported as an APEX Destructible asset, this was then imported into UDK and placed in a default scene. Took about 5 minutes start to finish. ...

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TGC Launch AGK (App Game Kit)

  Well, this product has been in the offing for a while now, but as of today it is officially released. I pre ordered my copy a week or so ago. It did how ever take nearly an hour to get a download slot to retrieve my prize, I guess the bandwidth was taking a hammering over at TGC. I only have had a short time to play with this and go through the examples but it looks fun and relatively easy. The Tier 1 basic is pretty close to Dark Basic Pro which I used to use, and the rest of the syntax is not that dissimilar to Blitzmax or Lua. Tier 2 for this game engine is C++, or what they call native. "The App Game Kit solves many problems...

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3rd Person Movement & Animation Control Rig Test

This is a video showing a simple test of a 3rd person view Movement & Animation control rig. Features include camera collision, movement to animation synchronisation and skeletal bone spatial position reference routines as demonstrated here with the throwing of grenades. Written in Blitzmax and using the Leadwerks Engine this is the simple base code off of which a more robust solution will be created. The test also utilises a Blitzmax module that I created to take the game mechanic aspects from Furious Frank and have them readily available for other projects, in this case the explosion system and particle FX were used. The grenade object/model Lua script is a hybrid of two scripts written by Macklebee for a grenade launcher and ammo, which is used in Furious Frank. Character model is...

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Metro : Last Light

Another release I am personally looking forward to. Metro : Last Light  is the sequel to Metro 2033. Here Huw Beynon from THQ takes us through what to expect for the upcoming game: "Much as changed since the darkones were scorched from the Earth. The air is not yet pure enough to breath, but sometimes we glimpse the sun for a bit of blue sky and the ice has begun to melt, but sadly we ourselves have not changed. War still rages throughout the Metro and we face a new threat from secrets long buried by our fathers. The prison held at station is our only hope. He is the key to ending this madness. We have to find him Artyom....

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A Free CryENGINE SDK .. August 2011?

Well, if the hype and rumours are true then in the next few weeks we could be playing around with CryENGINE 3 in all its "full access" glory. I have blogged about this before, but information has always been scant to say the least. Crytek planning to release UDK-like version of CryEngine 3 I had completely forgotten about it, but came across An open letter to the Crytek Modding Community: "In August 2011 we will be launching a free CryENGINE SDK. If you want to use it for fun, like all our previous MOD SDKs it will be completely free of charge, to anyone who wants to play with it! You just register, download the SDK with a personalized license key and you're good to go!" The letter is from Cevat Yerli the CEO & President of Crytek, and when I say "full access" that seems to be exactly...

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Ambient NPC Population, a continuation of an idea.

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,...

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Oh how I hate AppTime() and the randomness of it all.

Actually I don't hate AppTime() I just don't like using it in some instances. Its extremely useful and from what I can tell a more accurate mechanism to use than AppSpeed(). Whilst working on Furious Frank, one thing I noticed and it always caught my eye, was what I term “Chorus Line Syndrome” where using the basic AppTime() frame incrementing code for looping animations results in a regimented animation playback for like models/characters. I have ignored this issue thus far as it was not such a big deal in the early stages. However I decided it needed to be sorted, rather than just left as this issue will no doubt crop up again and its always handy when problems do arise again to have a basic template solution. First I took the lua entity script for the bug and removed all dependence on...

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MAGIA .. Monday .. a little bit .. and beyond

Furious Frank V0.01 came about from my requirement to have a simple application in which to test code in my code archives from the last year. It What was supposed to be a simple cleaning out the harddrive exercise got a little side-tracked. This version was achieved in about 14 hours on a Monday. MAGIA .. Monday MAGIA .. Monday ... and a little bit Furious Frank V0.02 is the 10 or so hours I have worked on it since. With the prospect of a whole 3 days ahead with nothing to take up my time, I wanted to get Furious Frank V0.02 uploaded and start on Furious Frank V0.03. It has so far taken the best part of 3 hours to wrestle out that which was required for this demo from my oh so tidy development folder. I have coded the settings to make this still an easy "game", but as its still in development...

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UDK - Hawken

Hawken is a FPS multiplayer mech combat game. The team behind the development is Adhesive Games, a small independent game studio located in Los Angeles. "When the Adhesive Games team set out to create Hawken, they had almost no experience using Unreal Engine 3. For Khang Le, art director at Adhesive Games, the focus was on finding a robust solution that could deliver the graphically intense vision he had for the game on a tight schedule and with triple-A quality. Le and his team decided to use UDK for the game because, when it came to Unreal Engine 3, he says, “We were familiar with its reputation as possibly the most licensed game engine in the industry. Being able to begin production using a cutting-edge game engine with no start-up cost offers an important opportunity to indie...

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MAGIA .. Monday ... and a little bit

Just a little update, I have managed only to grab a few hours here and there to spend on this since last Monday, and its now looking like it will not be until thursday when I can get into it like I did last monday. So heres a quick low quality video of how it stands at the moment. Have a good week all. I hope to get V0.02 uploaded by the end of the week. ...

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MAGIA .. Monday

Feeling the need to finally start sorting through my storage HDD's I came across my Blitzmax code library. I needed to test the code snippets and sort through what was worth keeping and what was broken. I found a FPS framework I had been working on but the code got broken with the release of 2.32, so before I binned it I thought I'd have yet another go at getting it at least to run. This was about 6.00 am monday morning, well I did have the whole of the day to myself, quite a rare occurrence. At around 11.00 am it was up and running, took an hour to locate all the assets it utilised lol. Still full of bugs and problems, I thought what the ......

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Crytek to release UDK-like version of CryEngine 3

Last April, I blogged about the news that Crytek might be releasing a free version of the CryEngine, much in the same way that Epic did with UDK and the Unreal 3 engine and also Unity licensing the indie version of their engine as free. Well, it seems that this will happen with CryEngine 3. According to Crytek co-founder Anvi Yerli, "The barriers for entry will be very low, and perhaps [it will be distributed] for free." Details and a release date for this CryEngine 3 Lite SDK have yet to be announced. It seems resonable to speculate that such a release could be similar to what Epic Games did when it released its UDK tools in 2009. Full Article Here Sean Tracy also mentions this at the end of an interview recorded at GDC 11. It is turning out to be an interesting year for indie d...

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Unreal Engine 3 Samaritan Real-Time Demo

Revealed at the 2011 Game Developers Conference, the real-time demo of "Samaritan" shows what Epic wants to see in the next generation of games. The features demonstrated in this video are available now in UDK...

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The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - Official Trailer

"We're pleased to share the first ever in-game trailer for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, the next installment in The Elder Scrolls series from award-winning creators of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Fallout 3, Bethesda Game Studios. " You might find you need to log into Youtube to view the trailer for age verification. It seems Skyrim will be released world-wide on 11.11.11 on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC ... so something to look forward to at the end of the year other than the cold weather. If they release another instalment of Fallout at the same time ... then hibernation this coming winter will just not be an opt...

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I'll Take What's Behind Door Number 3

Time is proving to be a most scarce commodity at the moment. So having a few hours spare I set myself some tasks and as usual did something completely different :rolleyes: I started work on a room and ended up on a new 90 degree section, corridor doorway section (with separate reusable door frame / doors and simple placeholder keypad switch box all to need textures), a few WIP scripts for the doors and some hashed together sound FX for them to and a short corridor "Door Plug" section to allow the standard sections to fit the door frame. Part of the plan for this modular approach to the level is that as many sections/parts as possible will be...

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Scale to the chief

With the basic texture workflow pretty much sorted for the modular level design (see here), I have turned my attention to getting a scale I am happy with. When this is done then after each section is modelled and then UV mapped it should be just a simple case of converting to .gmf format (famous last words). Scaling seems to be an issue that crops up across all the engines I use. But truthfully it matters not what others scale to, but that the relative scaling used in a scene is consistent for all static and animated meshes from props to scene to characters. LE has a scale of 1 unit is about 1m, I simply use 1 unit as 1m, therefore a character...

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Bumping ..... Adventures in Textures

Firstly, I'd like to take this opportunity to wish you all a belated happy new year. I hope you all have had a great start to it. I have not been doing much on the coding front for the last few weeks. I decided to get some assets created and try and develop my texturing skills a little further. I also purchased Silo 3D Pro over the Christmas period as it was on offer. I had used the demo and was impressed at how "comfortable" it was to use. I now use this package as my main modeller but in conjunction with AC3D and UU3D. Basically Ultimate Unwrap 3D is the junction where all my modelling and art packages meet. Not only for Leadwerks with its...

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