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.

Back

Well I am back from my trip from Europe. Was fantastic. Rome, I think, was the best. London, one big party, and Florence was simply beautiful. I thought venice was WAAAAAAYYYYY over rated.

So I am back online..... ohhhh I missed the internet, all my projects ;)

I know the site has been stagnant for awhile but the project is alive and I'll try to wrap up version 1 of my world editor.

It's been a little difficult actually writing the spec for the world file. I'm obviously writing it in XML and although I have built a wiki site and have been really good about documenting my changes, it seems everytime I think I have nailed down everything I need in the spec, I go and find out I need to add a field for plasma, or transparency, etc. It's really one of those things that evolves as your design level increases.

Well with version 1 of the world editor I will release the spec for the file format so others can add to the editor.