Game engine updates

I've kinda taken a detour the last 3 months. I spent most of my time last year and beginning of this year building upon panda3d and designing a game to run on linux and windows. Recently I starting reading and exploring XNA. For those who do not know, XNA is a framework from Microsoft which allows you to build games that can be run on Windows, Zune and Xbox360. The framework is free and can integrate with Visual studio express C#. So the ide and framework can be downloaded for free and you can start designing games. The cool thing is XNA gamestudio 3.0 not only integrates with the ide but also allows you one-click deployment to Xbox360 live so you can sell your game online to anyone who owns a xbox360 and has a live account.

This is really cool. To be able to develop your game and reach anyone with a xbox360 and live account.

I am still interested in panda and I want to develop a game that runs on linux cause we need more linux games but I have to admit that for the last 3 months I have been playing with XNA and have developed most of the game mechanics I built in panda over the last year. I am thinking I might build a panda version of my game and a xna version so xbox360 users, window users and linux users can all run the same game.

Subversion Panda and Ubuntu

I spent the last couple hours getting eclipse, python, panda3d onto my workstation communicating with a brand new server running ubuntu, apache, and subversion. Why?

It seemed like a great idea at the time. I have lots and lots of source code with various projects that I have and am continuing to write over the last 9 years and I am tired of hauling different external drives to and from work depending on the project I am working on.

I decided to start using subversion - I never really used any version control system but it is appealing to me to have a version control system in place to check code in and out to any machine I happen to work off of. But I really did not know what was involved in setting up Subversion. In all honesty however it would have been easier if the server was not a apache machine with virtual aliases etc. I also wanted to subversion repos to build themselves on an NAS sitting in the same area as the server which brought it's own level of issues with SAMBA and permissions. The process was so draining and long I really need to redo it and blog about it so others can benefit from it.

Well now I have a subversion box and I can check in code and put code into it from eclipse or any other subversion client.

Enough for tonight - I am off to sleep and dream about all the code I can make tomorrow. :)

Content

So it's been awhile since I have updated the site but I have been working on content and storyline and code. I recently rebuild lava linux to include the lastest panda build so I can use it as a development system. It's funny that while I have been learning panda and more importantly python I have built some smaller projects like a linux terminal server gui client. The one included in ubuntu does not allow mapping printers so I rebuilt it and added the printer ability also expanded on some TS options like auto-reconnect, etc. Maybe I'll post it on launchpad or google-code.

NY

Just got back from my vacation in NY.

Went to The ED Sullivan Theater :) Very cool.
Went to Angelo's Pizzeria - David Letterman mentions it sometimes on his show.
Saw Times Square, Central Park - walked up and down broadway and had dinner in China Town and Little Italy.

All in all it was a great time.

I flew an airline that I never tried before - Jet Blue. If you haven't used them before - you should - excellent. your pick of 7 snacks - including animal cracks :) water, juices, sodas included. Direct TV on everyone's chair, XM radio and the seats are leather and lots of room to relax. Free wifi in the terminals - Loved it.

Now that I am back in Chicago - will update my lava site and obviously catch up with all my Ubuntu brethren :)

Models Models Models

Oh my - it seems it takes me about a week to do a model justice. Skinning and bones and the 15 general animations: swimming, running, sneaking, etc.

I'm going to start on the mounting models next week: horse, tanks, vans, cars, etc.

I'm getting pretty good with blender but still miss my milkshape 3d and 3dsmax.

Building a World, one model at a time

So I am beginning to put together all the sketches for the character types and races. Also building up manifests for all backgrounds. Being a GameMaster for a local group of guys here in chicago has actually helped me. Playing tons of D&D and Rifts makes it easier to envision what I would like in a game as well as making the images come to life.

I don't know if anyone else can relate. You get a group of guys together to play some RPG and before you know it they start drawing what their characters would look like. Well that was the case with me and being the artist, the guys would always ask me to draw their characters. After awhile I got pretty good at it but I never thought I would be putting it to use in making an online game. Well here is a sample of one of the characters I am in the process of building.

Landscape Test

So I generated a heightmap in gimp, then wrote some python code in panda3d to import the heightmap, wrap a texture map onto it and then project that as a landscape. I also added some keybinding so I could move around and did a quick print to screen with instructions. I grabbed some music from a freeware site and added the sound code and voila, 2 hours later have the finished landscape. This landscape is alittle different from my other test as that was much smaller. This test, loads the landscape in sections so theoretically it could be limitless. The other test was very small, this landscape is a realtime landscape with over 300,000 miles. Lots of room to build a world and it could be bigger, the engine i am writing onto of panda loads sections of the heightmap as the player moves so that it can scale without eating away too much memory and without constant pauses in the rendering or having to load one area at a time. Again I am building this on a version of Ubuntu I customized called LAVA. You can find it on the other blogs to the right. I also tested the code and it is able to run on Windows thanks to the fact that panda, python are cross platform.