Pixel Perfect

Just wanted to say that your work in 3D World Studio looks excellent. I can't really answer your question as only Josh (the designer) will have sufficient knowledge of the inner workings to answer that! Hopefully he will respond fairly quickly.

I pretty much agree with that. In the early days of Leadwerks I needed to know if I could create the kind of space scenes I needed for my STRANDED game so I developed some motion code and tested it in in a simple scene. It was all pretty basic but inherently worked and I left it at that point with the intention of pickling it up again and expanding on the ideas once I'd completed the rest of my game engine. This was the initial result: Space Scene Video (wmv)

That's not unlike the story line for my game idea STRANDED ... but without the Saviour bit. But hey ... go for it, sounds great!

I'd echo gamecreator's comments. C++ has no inherent networking capability you either need to write your own or use a third party library. RakNet has the best reputation in my experience.

Cool, that's very impressive! Looking forward to seeing the finished result.

I like the idea of the speed of construction and the automated tools but with all due respect the output of that process is no where near the quality of the tree in the first tutorial. That's a seriously beautiful tree. I might have a go at producing something like that myself at some point.

on 2) Some of the road node data is currently stored in some binary format in the sbx file by the editor ( I cursed Josh when I saw this as it completely screwed up my sbx file parsing routine at the time lol). Presumably if Josh is prepared to divulge the format then it would be quite possible to procedurally output this data. or ... as Chris suggests above, feed the shader directly

You're welcome Roland. AI really is the place where all the fun starts, where everything we work towards finally starts to happen. I'm sure you're really going to enjoy it

Modern game AI is generally geared around Finite State Machines or Decision Trees. Both are specific testing and switching mechanisms designed to facilitate AI. Traditional programming conditional switching mechanisms (case, if then etc) become to cumbersome on their own to use for anything other than really simple AI.

Essentially whatever you need to trigger it. I have an example of a change of guard. In this case the trigger is simply the passage of time, after 6 hours have elapsed the AI will assign a WalkTo Action for a resting guard in the guard room which will use the path finding to move to the position supplied, that of a common point where the exchange of guards is to take place. The same Action is assigned to the currently patrolling Guard and when both reach the designated point (actually a waypoint) then the AI takes over again and issues the series of Actions required to initiate the actual handover. In the case of my FPS game and the weapons acquisition scenario the simple discovery of a weapons object (via a frequently executed raycast based on line of sight) will trigger the necessary action to cause the player to acquire the weapon if so desired. Its entirely up to you what mechanisms trigger what and that the AI responds to that.

The approach that EKI One uses for this is a nice one, hence my explanation here: It's basically to define Actions which NPCs can subscribe too and those Actions are tied to stage directions which are translated at the character level to actual animations. So a Walk Action would have a Walk stage direction assigned, A Run Action a Run stage direction and a Pick Up Object a Pick Up stage direction so on so forth. The Walk stage direction would then be mapped on a per model basis to the respective model animation etc. The AI determines under whatever circumstances what Action should be currently performed for any given NPC, which may be as the result of FMS activity or say the result of a trigger firing etc like in your example ... proximity to an object for instance. I use a similar technique to the one your describing for weapon acquisition where the object notifies the player its a weapon and available for pickup. The nice thing about assigning Actions to NPCs and their associated stage directions is the fact that it keeps everything nice and generic. Differing NPCs can share the same basic Actions and stage directions but these result in different actual animations being triggered for individual character models. So a Drink Action could have a a gentile character sipping his drink whilst the same Action on a dwarf might trigger a heavy drinking animation and the animation names do not need to follow a common naming convention. The AI only ever works at this generic level passing Action instructions to a stage directions manager that translates these into actual animation calls to the NPC instances concerned.

Now that's a beautiful looking tree and tutorial, nice find!

Its a nice attempt Michael but the apples just don't work as simple images attached to planes as they look distorted and completely unnatural unless viewed from exactly the right angle, they'd be better as real 3D models with smoothing but I'm not sure how many polys that would add to the overall model.

I'd keep asking yourself the question then because people/entire institutions have been asking these same questions for years There are many articles/videos which attempt to analyse just what makes games addictively playable and highly attractive available on line, so studying these helps built the bigger picture I guess, along with your own feelings about games (assuming your experience mirrors many others). The game certainly should excite you and make you really want to play it; otherwise it's unlikely anyone else will want to. However, having all the right ingredients is often still not enough, effective marketing, visibility, and luck all play a part and some of those factors are not under your direct control

Great, so your using a keyboard and there is no noticeable latency even with just your on-board sound card. Might take a look at Native Instruments then. I'm interested in the Abbey Road Drum samples too as I have a Roland Midi Drum Kit which would benefit from some better samples. Cheers Chris

Thanks Chris. Yes, the cross-hairs are from the FPS side of the engine and have no place in this game, just served as a temporary targeting indicator till I think of some more suitable mechanism for this game. The engine's designed to offer dual support for both FPS and RPG/Adventure games. The actual spell effects on the targets have yet to be designed and will of course depend on the spell type in use at the time, as will the visual 'in flight' effects and colors. There is just a simple animated 'star burst' on impact at the moment to serve as visual feedback of the collision taking place, otherwise the spells time out after a configurable distance! There is a lot to do yet, I haven't even demoed any of the AI side I've been working on with the EKI One AI engine, which is coming along nicely, but will do at some point. I estimate I still have about 6 months work left to do to get all of my planned functionality into the engine and tested.

Thanks for the feedback Chris. Yes, I've been thinking of adding to my current sound modules. They are all hardware units at the moment, either standard rack mount modules or soundcard based; so no issues with latency there. The last time I seriously tried software emulated sounds I had too much issue with latency for me to concider it viable. If I can't play it live from an instrument, either a keyboard or a midi guitar then I'm not really interested. But that was some time ago and computer performance has improved greatly. The sound quality of modern software synths is superb, I just need them to respond quickly enough to be able to drive them from a real instrument. What are you using as the input device/instrument?

Thanks again guys. Hi paramecij. Not seen you around much in a while! Not a great deal to be honest. I simply added 11 bones on the example posted, all extended from the head bone and then added the vertex weighting and animated the 10 phonemes. Because I had never really had to create bones before it took me a little while due to trial and error but I think I could probably do another now in a about 2 - 3 hours. (An experienced rigger and animator would do it far faster). It's far simpler than rigging a whole skeleton! You are limited by a lack of vertices for models not designed with this in mind, but I found it's still quite effective. You could of course opt to improve the geometry in those areas before rigging it, but that's beyond my skills at the moment really. It took a bit of work to get the look n feel right but I'm certainly happy with it now. I like the first person view but need to find a better aiming system than the cross hairs, makes me think of first person shooters when I see them. Doesn't really fit in with the medieval look and feel of the game. But that's not that important right now, it'll come in time. The hands were from a FPSC pack, I can't recall the pack number off the top of my head.

Hey Chris, if I wanted to drive Native Instruments from a midi input what sort of latency am I looking at?

Very nice indeed

The most commonly used mechanism for maintaining apparent detail whilst reducing the actual polys is applying a normal map from a high poly version to a low poly version of the same model. Its amazing what a difference this makes if it's done well I would agree with Chris's suggestion of up to 10K max for main characters and considerably less for the rest.

The Leadwerks Terrain has the feature to allow holes to be placed in it to allow you to pass into Cave/Underground systems etc. I'm not aware of any functions being exposed to allow manipulation of these in code but I could be mistaken.

Very nice Chris. It's so easy to tell when a real musician has composed the music, even when using electronic tools, as opposed to the myriad of 'computer' musicians we get these days! This has soul and feel to it. Great job!

I agree. The majority of top games still simply combine standard terrain with models for cliffs, overhangs etc. Its easy to do and looks great so no need to make it more complicated.

Thanks guys. A little more I've been working on lately, some late night spell casting practice: