Skip to main content

Latest Blender

If you have been following the open game dev project "Yo! Frankie" which has lead to major improvements in the blender game engine, You will be exited to know that blender has put up a game dev competition. So if you are as exited about blender and it's internal game engine as I am.. go ahead and post your entry before 16th march 2009.

Now that i've made the announcement, ever since the game engine got an upgrade, i've been craving to develop a game on it. So i kinda decided to port the "Transporter" game i made for pyweek to blender's game engine. Pretty easy right.. i mean.. ive' got the art, ive' got the logic bricks from blender game engine.. how hard can it be.. so i started working on that and soon i learnt about the above competetion. Without a seconds' hesitation i registered. Since the blender game kit 1 has been released for free, I was able to better organize the data etc. Whenever i got a doubt about how something would/should be done, I would just open up the YoFrankie! 's data files and have a look at them. It is pretty amazing how with a little knowledge and a lot of available source code you can come up with your own thing. Any way i spent almost two days trying to figure out how to design the ai for the cops without using python scriptiong, only to figure out that the best way to do the ai is to put in the python scripts :D.. so i gave up on designing a game with only logic bricks and started doing my thing.you would think that implementing the ai using python would be straight forward.. At least i thought it would be.. (coz iv'e done it before so thought I could just reuse that code). But around 4 days into the development .. i figured out how to use the states for the objects. Pretty neat concept with which we can just implement some thing of a state machine. So basically the ai now is a mixutre of the python script (for making it track hero object) and states (to stop and turn away when ever it hits a tree or a barricade).
One thing i did understand about using BGE is that you should organize your data properly and make most of the available features. To get it to this state iv'e had to struggle with a lot of things. The ai designing, the texturing (hud), getting font colors, getting smoke to work, all these were a little challenging. But the results do look good. More later

Oh btw.. if you want to design a game using BGE i suggest you get the blender game kit1 book to try and understand the basics of the blender game engine. Next you should go through the library linking followed in YoFrankie! project. They even have a video tutorial in the downloads section demonstrating how to use the linking etc. This helps organize your data.. and you can just edit in one place and it will be reflected everywhere.

Comments

Shree Kumar said…
Hi Vamsi,

I'm finding the links on this page very useful. Will read more from this site at leisure !

Cheers
-- Shree

Popular posts from this blog

Vehicle Physics (Godot 2D)

I've always been fascinated with the vehicle physics used in games. I played so many racing games / the hill climb games and every single time i would wonder wow that must be really hard to do. Thanks to the new generation of game development tools, developing physics based games has become almost a second nature to most people. I didn't want to be left out so i gave it a shot.. I tried setting up vehicle physics in GoDot Engine for a 2D vehicle. Here is what the vehicle scene looks like.. 2D vehicle setup in GoDot As you can see the body collision shape is not right but the rest of the stuff just works. The idea is simple think of what parts move along with the body vs what doesn't. I was kinda stuck setting up the pinJoint2D in GoDot, it actually clearly takes two nodes under the properties. This makes sure that the wheels are hinged to the DampingSpring2D. The Damping Spring2D takes two physics bodies(Body and the PinJoint2D) and makes it work like shock ab

Epic Games Store on Steam Deck

EGS ( Epic Games Store ) like it or hate it, has been giving away free games and if you like free games you would have picked up atleast a couple of them. So given that some of those games are Deck Verified / Playable, its fair to assume you would like to install the EGS on the Deck.  Installing EGS on Steam Deck Switch to Desktop Mode on your Steam Deck Download the EGS installer for windows from the Epic Store website: https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/download (using your web browser of choice)      Open Steam in the desktop mode and add the installer as a non-steam game                                In the browse window, switch from .desktop files to All files. Select EpicInstaller-xxx.msi and add it to steam library. Find EpicInstaller in your steam library and open its' properties by hitting the "Gear" icon on the right side of game details page. Set the proton compatibility to latest one. Now hit the play button and go through the install screens of EGS.  Once t

Flash animations in GoDot Engine

If you have not heard about GoDot game engine,.. you should check it out right away.. godotengine.org Last time, i wrote a blog post about my experience making a simple physics game to GoDot Engine. Though there are a bunch of free options announced during the GDC this year, i thought ill' contribute to the engine. The one piece that is most important for game dev is the pipeline for the engine. One of the most common tools used for 2D animations is Flash. I have been using a library called Super Animation for almost all the games we've made for android at TMG. It's  a  free tool which lets you convert swf files to .sam files. This file can then be loaded in Cocos2Dx using the Open source loader library  https://github.com/raymondlu/super-animation-samples I thought it would be a good idea to port this cpp library to GoDot so that i understand how to write custom modules for the engine. This is the video of the module in action. I have exposed