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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.
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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
10:50 PM
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