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Plan for Clint S. Brewer
Plan for Clint S. Brewer
| Name: | Clint S. Brewer | |
|---|---|---|
| Date Posted: | Aug 03, 2005 | |
| Rating: |  Not Rated | |
| Public: | YES | |
| Comments: | YES | |
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| Profile Page: | View profile page for Clint S. Brewer |
Blog post
UnEarthed Games devdiary, thoughts on making tge dev easier for single player game makers
There's a new devdiary at UnEarthed Games talking about my experience making a game in a day the weekend before last.
Work is going along heavily with UnEarthed Gods. Revamped dialog system and new conversation editor, new spells, better saving and loading, improved ai, and the game arc is coming into place. I'll be talking more about these in the next couple weeks.
if you haven't seen them before, there are screenshots of UnEarthed Gods here.
I've been working with TGE 1.3 since about December of last year, now about eight months, and it feels great to finally be comfortable working with it. There really is a lot there to be used; quite a few things have made my game development easier. Thinking back over this time, there's a couple things that would have made it even easier:
1. Ability to link any object to any node / bone. This was something I had to add that I use all the time. Linking lights to things, linking emitters and triggers to things etc. Once this is done, the weapon system could be rewritten to make them a shapebase type of object linked to the players mount point with special handling, instead of the special shape base image object that is owned by the player, making it difficult to get to in any sort of generic way.
2. A single player game starting point with save and load. It was a good learning experience to make this change myself, but development on the game could have gone more quickly if there was a good clean single player mod starting point from the beginning. I realize that save and load can be very game specific, but there is core functionality that would be simple to provide an example of use. I think this would help new developers who might want to use TGE for a single player game.
3. Ability to easily bypass networking code. It's great that the networking code is there and it opens up new possibilities, like a possible co-op mode for UnEarthed Gods, but, for me, it added a lot to the learning curve and made it much slower to do any engine modifications. I realize this is central to Torque, and could not easily be changed, but I think it's worth noting that it hampered my single player game development and learning TGE.
4. A generic AI system that makes it easy to add different types of AI with different behavior. Personally I love working on artificial intelligence code, so didn't mind getting the chance to do this myself. Never the less, I think it would be a great help to new developers if it was already there.
I think that if some of these changes could be made, it would make development easier for a good number of people and possibly we would see more single player TGE / TSE games.
Work is going along heavily with UnEarthed Gods. Revamped dialog system and new conversation editor, new spells, better saving and loading, improved ai, and the game arc is coming into place. I'll be talking more about these in the next couple weeks.
if you haven't seen them before, there are screenshots of UnEarthed Gods here.
I've been working with TGE 1.3 since about December of last year, now about eight months, and it feels great to finally be comfortable working with it. There really is a lot there to be used; quite a few things have made my game development easier. Thinking back over this time, there's a couple things that would have made it even easier:
1. Ability to link any object to any node / bone. This was something I had to add that I use all the time. Linking lights to things, linking emitters and triggers to things etc. Once this is done, the weapon system could be rewritten to make them a shapebase type of object linked to the players mount point with special handling, instead of the special shape base image object that is owned by the player, making it difficult to get to in any sort of generic way.
2. A single player game starting point with save and load. It was a good learning experience to make this change myself, but development on the game could have gone more quickly if there was a good clean single player mod starting point from the beginning. I realize that save and load can be very game specific, but there is core functionality that would be simple to provide an example of use. I think this would help new developers who might want to use TGE for a single player game.
3. Ability to easily bypass networking code. It's great that the networking code is there and it opens up new possibilities, like a possible co-op mode for UnEarthed Gods, but, for me, it added a lot to the learning curve and made it much slower to do any engine modifications. I realize this is central to Torque, and could not easily be changed, but I think it's worth noting that it hampered my single player game development and learning TGE.
4. A generic AI system that makes it easy to add different types of AI with different behavior. Personally I love working on artificial intelligence code, so didn't mind getting the chance to do this myself. Never the less, I think it would be a great help to new developers if it was already there.
I think that if some of these changes could be made, it would make development easier for a good number of people and possibly we would see more single player TGE / TSE games.
Recent Blog Posts
| List: | 12/22/06 - Snowing and Skating in the Music Lounge: ho ho ho 10/31/06 - Halloween in The Music Lounge 10/08/06 - PussycatDolls 100s of people in TGE 09/13/06 - The Music Lounge Beta5: eye candy: cyclic changes: DJ Dance Groove 10/18/05 - Plan for Clint S. Brewer 08/19/05 - Plan for Clint S. Brewer 08/03/05 - Plan for Clint S. Brewer 07/21/05 - Plan for Clint S. Brewer |
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Submit your own resources!| Samuel Lopez De Victoria (Aug 03, 2005 at 20:58 GMT) |
| Clint S. Brewer (Aug 03, 2005 at 22:07 GMT) |
Edited on Aug 03, 2005 22:07 GMT
| Jason Correia (Aug 04, 2005 at 05:10 GMT) |
| Clint S. Brewer (Aug 04, 2005 at 05:23 GMT) |
| Unsung Zero (Aug 04, 2005 at 13:17 GMT) |
I read your postup of the AI system you've been working on and I enjoyed it. It has answered some questions about recycling code.
| Stephane Conde (Aug 04, 2005 at 15:53 GMT) |
Any chance of you posting a resource based on your linking objects to nodes code? This has been a real sour spot for me in Torque. First of all, mounting players to other players/objects is not really working in Torque (players mount based on the bottom of their bounding box rather than using a mountPoint node like the shapeImages do). Secondly, it seems like nodes such as mount0, mount1, mountPoint, cam, eye, etc. are not properly taken care of by the transition code. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I've noticed that all armature will properly transition in the expected way, but any nodes will simply take the fastest route (often cutting right through the model) to get to their transition point.
So, all that to say... any chance of throwing some of your great work towards the community? :)
Anyway, your game is looking great and take care!
Stephane
| Clint S. Brewer (Aug 04, 2005 at 19:31 GMT) |
Quote:Thanks Unsung Zero. it definitely paid off to take the time to make a bit more of a generic system. I've made about 6 different types of ai with it so far, and each required relatively few minor changes.
I read your postup of the AI system you've been working on and I enjoyed it.
Quote:
Any chance of you posting a resource based on your linking objects to nodes code?
not anytime soon, it'd take a bit of work to gather all the relevant code, it wasn't a trivial thing, although it wasn't too dificult to add either. There's a forum post from Ben Garney from a while ago talking about linking/mounting gamebase objects to other gamebase objects, I think. this was what I based my changes off of. There's still a few problems with my code I haven't ironed out yet either. when I get those fixed I'll post more info.
Quote:
Secondly, it seems like nodes such as mount0, mount1, mountPoint, cam, eye, etc. are not properly taken care of by the transition code.
I haven't noticed that problem, but it's possible I've changed code back in the day to fix it, although I don't think I did.
Quote:
Anyway, your game is looking great and take care!
thanks Stephane, it's good to hear feedback especially when you are working in a bubble by yourself :)
| Nick Zafiris (Aug 19, 2005 at 10:37 GMT) |
I remember when you had that thread about "saving/loading single player thoughts". I see you've made great progress, keep it up.
I took some time off scripting to finalize on the game design and story for my post-nuclear project but now I'm getting back into it. Did you end up using the PersistGroup? Would you mind sharing the method you used to distinguish if you're "editing" a mission or "playing" a mission and how you went about using unique names for objects?
Thanks, Nick
| Clint S. Brewer (Aug 19, 2005 at 15:38 GMT) |
| Nick Zafiris (Aug 19, 2005 at 19:24 GMT) |
| Clint S. Brewer (Aug 19, 2005 at 19:41 GMT) |
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