Jungle Fever (pics and video inside!)

Hey again,

time to give you another project update I guess... :)
The project I've mentioned in my last blogs is progressing nicely...
Coding-wise, I've added simple swarms to the game in the last week - here are some pics:




A Swarm is basically a PathShape (check out my resource), moving an invisble "SwarmShape" along a given path...



Here are some bats in action:



That invisble shape has 32 mount points (had to hack the engine a bit to allow that) you can mount other shapes to... those mounted shapes are animated and the animations are movement animations - so by playing an animation you can "move" the mounted shapes along x,y and z axis.
So in effect you can animate the whole swarm, e.g. move all the shapes towards the center, away from center, left/right, up/down, etc.
I'm using a resource by Paul Dana to set the animation thread position, so I'm even able to tell the mounted shapes how far they should move on the axis I specify... in fact, Paul had the idea to do the swarm movements this way - so thanks again, Paul! :)
Previous efforts didn't work... I was trying to just create shapes at the PathShape location and randomly update their position/transform relative to the PathShape each tick, but that gave me a weird "lag" behaviour of the shapes....
The swarms have additional features, such as a steady swarm sound playing as they move, as well as a random sound (with min and max time values when to trigger it) which is used for e.g. "screams" of bats or birds. You can also give them a swarm type (middle, wide, close) which determines the overall move animations inside the swarm (e.g. "wide" makes them move away from the center only, thus giving the swarm a "wider" appearance), and of course you can set the number of objects to mount, you can set a delay when to start moving along the path (so you can time the moment they appear to the player e.g.)...
Well, it looks really cool to have lots of swarms flying around, making noise and doing random "formations" and stuff ;)

We also have lots of new animals with very basic "animal AI" (basically random choices of "idle", "sleep", "walk around", "flee" from the player if in view and playing random animations from time to time), e.g. gorillas, hippos, leopards, orang utans, grey herons etc.
Here is a flamingo:



As stated in my last blog, it's not really a game, it's sort of a "medical project" where people drive through the jungle on a boat (also a pathshape which you can just start or stop, but not really "control") and they have to react to certain visual and/or acoustic stimuli... we are proud to be able to help sick people using the TGE, although we don't have that much scope to "go wild" and add stuff we'd like since the requirements of our client are pretty fixed and clear.
Of course, there will be a lot of content packs (current working title of the pack series is "Jungle Fever") available in the 3D-Diggers online shop which we are currently preparing for "indie needs" (e.g. animal packs, plant packs, maybe even a "Swarm Pack" ;)) - so be curious! :)

Anyways, here is a video showing off some of the features I've talked about, enjoy!

Low quility (~20 MB)
High quility (~40 MB)


Until next time! :)