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.

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.

Standalone World Testing

So I built a 300 mile landscape using freeworld and exported it as a heightmap and was able to texture map and reload into panda and it runs great. Collsion detection works as well as a primitive skymap.

I also tested out building a bsp building using several tools like halflife editors hammer was able to texturemap and convert to X. It also loaded into panda with no issues.

I'm playing with all the shadow options today as well as experimenting with the particle systems in panda to see if I can create a fire pit in the building and have it illuminate the room and cast shadows on the walls. So far I am very happy with panda. Maybe in the next day or so I will upload some photos so you can all see the progress I am making.

Project Overview

Time for a quick overview of what the project will need:

1) Database server: I think MYSQL will work great for this project, quick to implement, fast, open standard, lots of interfaces, php support, cfm support, xml support and FREE!!! I am setting it up in the background on one of my servers for this project and will have it up and online shortly.

2) Web server: Obviously we need a site, artwork as well as the backend scripting support for the site. I think the user forums, user creation, etc can be setup using php on apache/windows. I have servers with both. I am thinking during this development time, I am going to implement this on the same server running the DB.

3) Database schema: We need to start to lay out what our game will need as persistent objects in the game world as well as what we need to maintain about the character states, login info, etc.

4) Artwork, Music, Voice Overs: The assessment flow has to be determined. 3dsmax to panda, x to panda, blender to panda, gimp, phototshop, etc. Music, voice overs, etc. I want to use as much free open source software for this project so that more people can participate so I am obviously leaning towards a work flow that is conducive to that.

5) Game Style and mechanics: UI, physics, etc. Would be great if we could allow for skinning, ui customizations, original story line, etc.

6) GMs and Quest makers: Need to create the tools to allow users to create content on servers.

7) Game Server: Responsible for connecting the client to all other services on the backend as well as managing the list of publicly attached servers.

8) Game Server toolset: Tools to govern the game server: Seeing who is on, booting people. I am thinking of implementing this in the client like WOW so GMS can login to the game world and admin it. I still think that maybe there should be a GOD tool so we could admin the servers from 'above'

9) I would like to be able to provide a server so others can download and host servers on their own but link them back to a public list so clients could browse within the software to a global list of servers. Each server could have its own maps, game play, etc.

Theres alot of work, please message me if you are interested in helping out on any of these pieces. I am going to start up an irc server so we can begin talking about these items but for now, email me and I'll start up a list of contributors.