[4e6] World Wild West

Input testing, Camera placement and a clean game-structure added(no ogre ExampleApplication here). I've done a (massive) information searching, gathering references and background information, and decided that the first (and hopefully not the only) level will be in some wild west city. I've also done some ui sketches and the like on how to best fit in overlay's into a "cartoony" world.

Tomorrow(or tonight) I'll get started doing 3d models of houses that the player can take cover behind, so I can (hopefully) implement scene loading and movement by the end of this week.

Bear in mind that cartoony != disney. As much as I hate the anti-hero concept, the "hero" is an anti hero. I am toying with the idea that your character has stopped a robbery by shooting the bad guy through some innocent woman/child.
The celshading and outline are there to create/enhance a dark, twisted world. I'm thinking in the lines of red dead revolver, mixed with lucky luke and god of war.

This week I focused on the art pipeline. I modeled a (simple) house, made some textures(wood and grass). If I model one house every day I might have a pretty large town in 2-3 weeks (sigh), then I can start on the cave or the train level, I dont know how to make those without it looking (too) goofy. I also shadows, so now I get a real western feeling, to bad that there is a robot in the scene that spoils it :)
I also rewrote the camera system since it was flawed.

I watched "high plains drifter" so I could get some inspiration for weapons to use in the game. The current list includes sixshooters, shotgun, sniper rifle, dynamite, lasso(should pretty much work like the secondary fire of painkiller from painkiller), whiplash, axe, knife, bow and gatlinggun. The player will only be able to carry 3 at any given time, so (s)he have to prioritize.

Finally, next week I probably have to get acquainted with blender as it seems to be able to process the dotScene and make animated characters.

Gustav,
That's great looking artwork. I particularly like the shadows. My 12 year-old just told me that I'm "dead meat". Obviously your 3D graphics are much nicer than my simple 2D art.

Keep up the great work.

Regards,
ChuckB

Thanks Chuck, thb 3d isn't all that different from 2d unless you yourself are telling the hardware what to do. In my case I am not, I tell ogre, and I tell it that I want it to cast shadows from this (light) onto all of that (world). The only difference is that 2d is easier to make programmer art in :D

I was actually going to wait to the weekend to post this, but why wait :D

I know I was going to make a new house(finish this one) but I went nuts with the effects, don't mind the low framerate - this is debug and unoptimized. Gotta cashe the blur matrices :)

The black and white thing will be used in slow-motion sequences, and the blury thing will be used when damaged(as in Call of Duty 2+), recharging health or whatever it's called.

Nothing worth showing has been done this week. The modeling has been pretty much null, and the optimization turned out to be not what I've been hoping for. I get as much fps as the ogre sample. The harsh reality is that I might have to implement a health status-bar even if I don't like that option. I also spent some time designing how my code will interact, the code is pretty static as of now, and I realized that before I add more features, I better make some nice design of what I have. I also went through my vhs collection and discovered that I got 3 cowboy movies laying around. I might have to dig out my recorder so I actually can watch them and grab references.

The refactoring should be done by the end of this week. I only got a few classes more to write but as for now I am pretty satisfied with the design. I am considering moving from the .scene format (octree) to a bsp version, since well mdeling should be easier(I think).

Hi,
Have you given consideration to 'wild west' style artwork for fonts, text graphics,etc.? I'm thinking for instructions, high score, data display?

We want to have an 1880's look...curious about your plans.

Regards,
Chuck

Looks pretty nice..! Well done..! don't forget the elements tho..!

I havent thought of fonts just yet, on the top of my head it could be some comical font(like comic sans) with some western colors, as I intend to include both. Graphically I am looking at "naruto: rise of a ninja" and the latest simpson game for inspiration, though I like the no-heads-up-display-design without text, so blur, small bars and icons are to be expected.

Instructions probably wont be necessary since I only use standard shooter/max payne controls and I dont have time to implement and test any new ideas.

As of now my main (only) concern is if I'm going to finish this in time, being a fulltime employee.
A trip to Rome last week didn't bring the game forward, but by the end of this weekend I think I might actually see my component based design in action. I have a clean design of everything except the shooting, but I'm pretty confident I will have that sorted out, and if everything goes as planned I might actually be able to shoot by the end of this year(fingers crossed)

So I've finally thrown out all the old code and I am now using a component based design, instead of the old "everithing in one class". I've also added animation and proper character movement. I really feel that I've accomplished something when I can walk around my own house. By the end of the week I plan to have physics up and running (so no more clipping). By the end of the month(December) I might have enemies and explosions working, that is what I've planned atleast :)

Unfortunately, at the moment, everything looks pretty much the same so you can tell if it is a new screenshot or a old one, so I wont bother posting any. I promise that I'll upload some when the physics is working.

Instead of Comic Sans, you might find another comic font that you can use. I don't know if Blambot allows you to include fonts, but their free fonts are pretty nice and can't be recognized from a hundred paces.

I always got frustrated with the everything in a file. One of the things I took from Java coding was the one class per file and keep it even when I do C++ or C# (my current language). Makes it easier when I know that if I want to find SomeClass, it is SomeClass.cs. :)

Quote:

Original post by dmoonfire Instead of Comic Sans, you might find another comic font that you can use. I don't know if Blambot allows you to include fonts, but their free fonts are pretty nice and can't be recognized from a hundred paces.

From the website: "...No Blambot font may be altered or redisributed without the express permission of Nate Piekos". So you can use them as long as you dont include the font file with your release.

I was going to skip the fonts(only hand-drawn images) or make my own, but you guys have sparked a interest so here is a font, I found just recently. It seems to be a pretty good western font with a good license. More can be found in the western or the comic category.

sirGustav,
Thanks for the link. We're working on a game based in 1880 (Jed, Ted and Fred). We'll need a western style font for User Interface....menu, etc.

Regards,
Chuck

I've added the PhysX Controller so the player can walk around in the level(affected by gravity) and collide(and slide) against walls and walk up hills. I've also integrated fmod in 3d, though atm there is only "step" sounds.

The playing of the sound is actually a sound component that listens to specific event(WalkStep) and plays a sound. The sound played is randomly choosen(Mersenne Twister RNG) from a list. I keep a list of the 3 recently played sounds aswell so sound A is never played in a row, and sequences as ABAB or ABCABC or impossible. Repetition is still possible if the sounds sound alike (and walking-step-sounds very much do).

Next up is barrels, dynamites and finally screens and perhaps a dev video :)

Come to think about it, "pony up some cash"(as in pay a debt) as a major story element probably won't be enough for the pony element :)

I actually tried to not making any crates, to set myself apart from the rest of the -time-until-crate games, and I was going for barrels instead(not crates at least :) ).
Getting the barrel into the game proved harder than I originally thought it would be. My first plan was to model it as a cylinder, but that idea was trashed really fast since I couldn't find any support for cylinders in the physics engine.
So I decided I would go and model the barrel and use the original mesh as collision. After several tries and fixing a few of my bugs, among forgetting to update the physics(oops) I was stuck. No matter what I did to the barrel just kept falling through the floor. I couldn't find any documentation on what kind of collisions physics supported, but I assumed there must be something wrong. Either with their code or mine, probably the latter.
Since I couldn't find the bug in my code I went the easy route (I am on a tight schedule and already behind at least a month from my original plan) and made crates. I feel really bad for making another game with crates, but after all - if the npc's in "assasins creed" are moving them around, why can't I have them, crates existed in the wild west right?
So after spending a few hours of tweaking gravity and density the creates bounce around nicely.

The creates fire of a local "I have collided" event and the sound component within picks up and plays a random bump sound. Just hearing the bumps in realtime while I push around crates (I can't pick them up) is inspiring and gives me a mental boost :)

Next up is dynamite throwing, explosions and the likes. I feel like this is going to take some time, and even if I don't finish on time this has sure been a rewarding, learning, and most important, fun experience.

[Edited by - sirGustav on January 16, 2008 10:28:46 PM]

I really hope you do finish. It is starting to look really good.

Thanks :)
I do however have 10 more features before I can call it complete, and only 10 weekends. It evens out, and I hope I actually can complete it before the contest ends, *fingers crossed* :)

I am still working on the dynamites, they are a hefty update, though the first element should be that right ;) Still some tweaking graphically and explosions(!) before I move onto the shooting from the hip part of the wild west :)