Blog for Ramen-sama at GarageGames.com

Dynamic Attachment Update - Animated Environments

Ramen-sama — 2008-02-22T04:37:43+00:00

The vast majority(right?) of you guys are following my sorta-resource called "Platforms Players Can Ride"
But it's evolved a bit past being able to ride around on pathshapes.

www.garagegames.com/mg/forums/result.thread.php?qt=57187
EXIBIT Z

Recently i added in the ability to attach pretty much any gamebase object to the player, and any gamebase object to any other gamebase object. Basically you can attach objects to the player and attach things to other objects.

EXIBIT A

This works different from "mounting" because it's not doing that. It simply "parents in place". So where ever the object is when you attach it is where it will stay, until you move the parent object, in that case the attached object follows suit.

My previous experiment i did was attaching objects in relation to a node. Again, not mounting, just whenever a node moved, the object followed. Could be used for arrows being lodged in a players body after being shot from archers, or simply picking things up in their hands.

EXHIBIT B
But my goal towards the begining of this project was to introduce a type of gameplay never seen. OMG What am i talking about?

Well i am talking about animated Environments players can walk on or in!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=30BhujhMl6w
here's a youtube video showing it off

The motion of it is extreme just for demonstration purposes. But the uses of this could be simple moving bridges, or any type of platforming puzzle, to walking around on giant monsters! provided you setup the collision meshes in a certain way.

Dynamic Attachment to objects

Ramen-sama — 2008-01-06T09:59:32+00:00

Ok, so some of you may be familiar with my "Platforms that players can ride" psuedo-resource. It allows players to ride DTS pathshape objects wherever they roam.

I've been working on this code ALL day, since about 10am till.. heck it's 3:41 now. I hit alot of snags, forgot what most of my code did, etc.

I've improved it. Now other types of objects can ride the platforms. Currently, Item, players, and static shapes can ride around. yay.

It's also 1.5.2 compatible. quite a few small changes were made to some of the files, so this has been "fixed"

Suppose i better show some pictures, how bout a video as well?

Here you can see the player object with a dozen or some objects attached to him. And off in the distance is our favorite orc to shoot, Kork, riding along a pathshape.

subvoicestudios.com/~ramensama/TorqueDynamicAttachment.avi 1024 x 768
subvoicestudios.com/~ramensama/TorqueDynamicAttachment-sm.avi 800 x 600

Now please know that there's a few times when the screen doesn't update, this was when i was pressing the ~ key... apparently that told fraps to do some benchmark crap at that time. it's not related to the attachment code which is instantaneous.

I could remake the video... but i'm not gonna :P

The next step for me is attaching in relation to node. So the player can reach down and pick something up, or something. Or Projectiles, swords, shrapnel will stick into the player and animate based on a node... but not restricted to the node's transform like mounting. As you can tell this is a step beyond mounting.

I've laid the ground work for most types of objects to work, but right now they need to have an interpolatetick function.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Updated code availalable in my link below. Check it out!
www.garagegames.com/mg/forums/result.thread.php?qt=57187
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

3D Painting with Modo

Ramen-sama — 2008-01-03T09:15:31+00:00

I should state for the record that i suck at textures. The whole concept is hard for me. So typically in my works i've had rather bland textures. I think the way you create textures is just too unnatural. So i decided to give 3d Painting a shot. I knew the concept of how it works and decided to just give it a shot.

So here goes a "typical" wall i'd make. it's more then just a flat wall, but even so it just looks so plain.

So i spent no less then 5 minutes in modo and "painted" some details in.

Here's a couple variations

Looks better!

www.luxology.com/whatismodo/

I tried out modo because it supports the LWO Lightwave format file, natively loads and saves instead of importing.

I think this is the most natural way of texturing. it works just like spray painting in a viewport you can rotate/zoom however you like. it's definately cool.

and for a final image, a render in lightwave of the walls

A* Pathfinding stuffs

Ramen-sama — 2007-12-25T03:57:11+00:00

So i'm rather bored and getting back to some pathfinding code for TGE. For my project i can't use pregenerated paths due to the fact this is for a battle system. With multiple characters moving around, can't have paths created ahead of time.

As stated in the title it's A* pathfinding using binary heaps. Currently you'll need to provide the code an array stating walkable areas and unwalkable areas, a start xy and end xy, and it will give you a path consisting of another array of sqaures that will be your path. From there you can dynamically generate a path using those squares converted to a vector to represent your "real world" coords.

I was curious how many people actually need such a setup? I may get around to releasing the code if others are interested.

[EDIT - Added Some Pics]

Here's some images of my nights work. It randomly generates an area of walkable, and not walkable areas. You can edit these as you wish with clicking and dragging. Then you enter pathfinding mode, where you click a start and end position. and wham. it generates a path.

So what use is this? well this grid i created was just for a personal graphical reference. But you can generate the "map data" from whatever method you choose to represent paths on whatever type of environment you are using.

So for me, i plan on having multiple characters running about, so for this to work well, i'd simply need to modify the map data each time a character moves to a new square. this way there won't be any intersecting paths between moving characters.

This pathfinding is very quick. my attempts at getting a time in MS just seems to give me a 0ms search time. maybe i'm doing it wrong.

subvoicestudios.com/~ramensama/Pathfinding_Test_1.0.zip

By default it will generate a map on it's own, and put you into pathfind mode, so you can start clicking and right clicking. if you want to modify the map, open the console and type PathFindMode();

More Platforms, works in 1.5

Ramen-sama — 2007-02-14T02:37:16+00:00

Well i updated my psedo resource for platforms players can ride, it's now compatible with torque 1.5.

www.garagegames.com/mg/forums/result.thread.php?qt=57187
go here for a private thread to get the code

The same rules apply. it must be extracted into a stock torque 1.5 working directory.

It will overwrite any exisiting files.

add ../engine/game/pathshape.cc and .h to your visual studio project.

Compile.

Start torque.

Load the stronghold mission.

Theres two platforms in this area.

One acts as an elevator... BUT you must be very careful with this one. there's no collision checking if the player strikes a beam. it will cause issues. This isn't designed to be used as an elevator with vertical hazards like this. so it's there for demonstration purposes.

The other is on the lake.

They are setup to "start" moving on a collision with the player. you can change that however you feel.

For more information on pathshapes, check out the resource for them. however, i'm using a slightly modded version of it. i'd suggest reading the pathshape.cs file and even the source files.

No blog is complete without at least two relevant pictures.

Yes i see the odd shadow on the lake... don't ask me what's up with that.

This 1.5 is new.. so let me know if it doesn't work like it should.

Platforms Players can Ride Version 1.1

Ramen-sama — 2007-01-28T00:37:19+00:00

Ok, i'm still alive. Not as active lately. I went ahead and updated my platform code slightly to fix a couple bugs.

www.garagegames.com/blogs/11127/10822
This is the previous blog showing pictures and describing it more.

And for an updated forum thread... go here

www.garagegames.com/mg/forums/result.thread.php?qt=57187

it seemed that there was a bug with what starts the platform moving. It's setup so that when the player and it collide, it starts moving. When the platform was done with it's loop, it seemed to be triggering another collision. and then the pathshape would skip the first node. Either way, it's fixed now. Please post some feed back. If anyone can make it compatble with torque 1.5, let me know.

Kork's Journey into Lightwave 3D

Ramen-sama — 2006-09-20T22:09:57+00:00

Alright, a great many people(maybe 3) might be interested in my current side project. I've been working on getting kork into lightwave. Not just his mesh, but the skeleton as well. Having this will enable modelers/animators to use the default torque animations with their lightwave 3d created models. Well i don't have much more then that to say, I've got weight maps working, UV Maps are having to be hand edited to fix some errors during exporation..... having to manually rotate bone rotations and other stuff... i'll post more when i have a working solution. Till then... Pictures!

Here's kork loaded up in layout

Kork's UV Map

A dance move perhaps?

More Lightwave stuff.

Ramen-sama — 2006-08-09T23:39:24+00:00

Still working on some modeling, doing some character design stuff. I find this aspect pretty difficult without any clear character sketches / designs / and what not. I'm not so creative with that stuff, so i have to rely on others. Which usually ends up with me begging for character designs and not getting anything. Anyone out there do anime style character designs :) talk with me.

Anyhow. here's what i've got currently. its all designed by me.

It's currently a mix between UV textured surfaces and just colored surfaces right now. I've still got to decide how to texture the upper body.

Anyhow. that's enough out of me for now.

More character pics, Hair is hard to do, you know.

Ramen-sama — 2006-07-31T05:59:24+00:00

Been doing some more modeling. Trying to improve my ability to model hair. i see hair as possibly the hardest thing to model.

Anyhow I love pics, so here's some pics of the characters head in torque.

Angle View:

Front view:

Side view:

Back view:

I'm not quite done yet. but i'm fairly satisfied so far. I tried a new way of making hair this time, and it seems promissing. So i'll get back to work on it more tomorrow.

Till then, any comments?

Evolutions of your Character Designs

Ramen-sama — 2006-07-14T00:41:59+00:00

Ever wonder to yourself as you change your characters if you're going the right direction? Somethign i make lots of little changes, and end up making drastic changes, Gotta wonder if you're going the right way sometimes. Like for example a character i've been modeling off an on for a few months.

Here's a current shot of her. it's a render from lightwave. it's not incredibly high res, just a notch above what i'll have visually in torque. I'll be going for a similiar shading scheme, if i can do so in real time, that'd be nice, if not i'll have to use textures. But i'm not a fan of textures for the most part. I like having real geometry to work with.

But anyhow, here's a couple previous versions of this character.

So how do other people handle the urge to make changes?

If anyone wants to see more pics of her, let me know. I usually have plenty of them. But most of them are nude/scantily clad. Not because i'm a perv or anything, but because it's important to start with a working body before dealing with clothing, which i do have pics of them too. :P