Blog for Andy Hawkins at GarageGames.com

Lightwave Tut and BRAVE progress

Andy Hawkins — 2008-07-28T01:27:47+00:00

So I thought I would promote my free Lightwave tutorials again because they tend to get lost in the listings and I have heard a few people ask recently about this.

Go to this resource to learn how to model, unwrap, weight map, texture, animate and export to Torque - a player character!!!

www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=1009...

Also I just thought I would talk about progress on BRAVE. I have been doing some lighting tests and shrinking the operational area so I can pack in more detail. I have also started created a "to scale" L3DT map of London, represented by the fairly unremarkable pic below.

I have found that waterblocks seem to only be as big as 4k x 4k - has anyone else noticed this?

I have been refining my AV-8B Harrier model, and I've got the voices working in the game.

I need to write a scene controller which handles cut-scenes, dialogue, pop up GUI and mission control so I can show maps, pics, and run cut-scenes to move the story along.

It's all polish really.

I'm going to upgrade FGE to work in 1.7.1 and then give the files to Decane for their pack.

Finally once it's all done I will be adjusting to work for Instance Action and go find a publisher.

Here's some pics.

BRAVE Troop Deploy Code and Modelling

Andy Hawkins — 2008-05-31T11:18:10+00:00

I have finally debugged the code to tell troops to mount vehicles and deploy on command from the player. The most significant thing about this is that is happens out of sync with the mission progression. It's important in my mission structure as the first part of the mission is to tell the base of an approaching saucer. Comms are down so the only way to tell them is actually fly to the base. The saucer attacks based on the mission progression, so if you don't get there in time, the troops are dumb-founded and stand there helplessly getting blown away. Get there in time and they are given the order to move out. Troops find Humvees, mount up and escape to a new area, where they are deployed to perform further duties.

Here's a vid... note: the men should disappear but don't because startFade(0,0,true) is broken in TGEA 1.0.3 :( If anyone knows how to make entities disappear in TGEA1.0.3 I'd like know.

BRAVE Troop Deploy on YouTube

Now I'm modelling a truck to pull the rocket over to the new base as well. Here's a screenie...

Next I'm going to work on code to make humans build things like tents, and ferry parts to establish a new base. This is an important part of my game to make an arcade shooter with RTS elements which you have to preserve to have a chance of winning.

Oh yeah I bought the Vegetation Pack from Dex-Soft (thanks again!) - I think I have bought almost all their packs :) ... and the Rock Pack from Eivaa Games.

BRAVE Base Camp

Andy Hawkins — 2008-05-15T23:12:49+00:00

I've been trying to get some sort of physics solution into the game so when the aliens start blowing stuff up (like buildings) they do so realistically. At the moment I'm having trouble getting the physics objects to collide with the terrain or each other using the existing resources. A couple of members in the community have been really helping me out - thanks especially to Gary, Ron, Scott, Sam and mb. I think I've almost found what I need but I've been spending way too long on this tech and went back into world building last night and generated the base camp seen below.

What this represents is the army you start with in Mission 1 that you need to protect. I wont spoil the surprises that come during the game, but the basic idea is to protect as many of these guys as you can while blowing up aliens to maintain a support infrastructure. At the end of each level (sub-mission) you get a tally of whose left and a bonus for them - exactly like the human tally in Defender. As you progress through the mission you will lose more and more of them, with no immediate reinforcements (see below) so it makes winning the mission that much harder.

I've left the game design open-ended so in a sandbox situation you could let all your army die and try take on the aliens all by yourself. It's up to you! YOU determine the fate of the world.

I should have a public demo soon. Oh yeah, last pic is my atrocious player model (which will be replaced) but I'm using it as proof of concept for the clothing pipeline my sister is helping me with. I will have two base humans (male and female) with a myriad of skins and accessories to represent the remaining human race who wander around looking for protection. Pick one up and they become a soldier for the cause! If they survive a level they upgrade their skill to a profession - infantry, pilot, gunnery, engineer etc - so they can use vehicles and weapons left by previously killed humans.

Sounds like fun? I hope so.

BRAVE Beta Release

Andy Hawkins — 2008-05-04T12:17:53+00:00

Well I made the deadline but I am not totally happy with what I have so I have refactored the ideas a little, and have been working with my sister to add content and missions to the beta. I'm doing this because the beta as it stands is really just an example of what I want to do, and what I have in my head and on my HDD is what I want the beta to be.

So I have been working since the beta to add all these things and should have what I wanted in soon, probably the next few days.

After that I will be focusing on building an awareness of the game.

BRAVE - London 4

Andy Hawkins — 2008-04-27T10:12:47+00:00

No time to talk, so here's some pics from the latest build. I need to add lots more world building stuff and get more humans and trucks running along to meet the requirements of the mission. Big mothership saucers now come in spawning landers, and when you destroy them they carreen to the ground - I want to emulate the saucer crashing in MiB hopefully when they go down. More updates soon. My sister is finalising the landmarks so they aren't in yet.

BRAVE - London 3

Andy Hawkins — 2008-04-21T15:40:34+00:00

Here's my latest progress on London. I'm still struggling with the scene management, but while I try to solve that I moved on with getting the weapon system going and including some bad guys.

Below are snaps from the game in action with one Saucer spawning landers and another one crash landed. No lighting, smoke or debris yet - but I will be iterating all the time on the world building.

The reticles are a modification of the GuiReticleCtrl which allows you to specify a third type of recticle using a bitmap. It allows you to set a target reticle and a lock reticle as well - but I'm still debugging that one before I give it back to the public. See here if you can help...
www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=1380...

Onto the images...

BRAVE - Awwwright! - London 2

Andy Hawkins — 2008-04-13T12:51:49+00:00

Very, very, VERY happy now. I started spending some money and time on content and started getting some VERY pleasing results. This is an update of my world building of London for BRAVE - due in 2 weeks EEK!!!

So kudos to RRGT (Really Really Good Things Studio) for the amount of effort Alan and Kyle put into helping me. I was uncertain of the speed and performance of their District Pack so Alan sent me a sample city block "on loan" to trial it. He even went ahead and added another LOD so that buildings go to simple blocks at a distance, which was really important for me to make sure I could cram heaps of buildings into the scene.

I generated these pics below and on my crappy lappy the frame rate rarely dips below 60 fps.

The guys also stayed up til 3:45am to deliver files for me even though they were restructuring their website - how cool are they? Kyle painstakingly typed the same info over and over again in email after email of me asking "so do I get the source files too?" and he's like "well, yes, yes you do" - he didn't flinch and go "jesus Hawkins, read your frickin emails properly the first time", even though I asked the same question twice - so these guys deserve lots of praise.

Finally they saved me heaps of time. Considering how long it would take for me to model all these objects, not to mention downtime tracking bugs and problems, these packs have saved me heaps of time - thanks guys!!! Content packs save you time - remember that!

So finally I'm adding several ship classes, there are ally planes, landers, mutants, harvesters and motherships. Once I get the code from the previous alpha in to TGEA I will start creating missions, adding content and polish and polish and polish.

These screens are my shape replicators, London aerial map, RRGT sample city block, and my new British Aerospace Harrier AV-8B, leveraging FGE - Decane's Flight Game Engine all running in TGEA 1.0.3

EDIT: Added link to FGE

BRAVE Update - London 1

Andy Hawkins — 2008-04-09T16:06:55+00:00

I made some good progress today. I've grabbed some medium rez sat map images from Google Maps and created an aerial photo of London. I grided it up to work out which areas to snap and after I had low rez tiles I zoomed in the google maps and was able to grab higher rez images, scale up the lores ones and paste over. This will provide an excellent reference in-game as I world build. I think I have to pay for the use of the satellite images if it goes commercial. So I'm going to look into the cost. Otherwise I'll have to do a paint over.

Then I've tested a bunch of shape replicators on a flat plane with the aerial map attached for some speed tests.

Here's some pics. I'll add a video to this tomorrow when I can grab a sequence using my faster computer, but right now the frame rate is very high.

BRAVE - Shaders, Terrain and Harrier progress

Andy Hawkins — 2008-04-05T05:48:45+00:00

As promised here the video showing the terrain and shaders I got in place after my week long struggle with TGEA, L3DT and Atlas. The footpath is a DIF with a cobblestone texture bought from DexSoft added to it. I created the normal map using CrazyBump. The enviroment comprises a blended terrain created with L3DT and imported into TGEA using Atlas script. The trees are placed using fxFoliageReplicator from TorqueScript.

Shaders and Terrain

Here's an update on my Harrier too.

Here's my efforts after 1 hour of modelling. I set the view inside an inverted cube and started sculpting out the basic shape. Then I mapped the blueprint (found here) to the model along the planar axes to get a feel for how the textures are going to be layed out.

Next pass I'll be adding more polys to join everything up and add the missiles, aerials, wheels etc.

B.R.A.V.E Alpha 2 in the works

Andy Hawkins — 2008-04-03T12:55:39+00:00

Some of you may have followed my progress through these threads...
www.garagegames.com/mg/forums/result.thread.php?qt=73599
www.garagegames.com/mg/forums/result.thread.php?qt=73674
www.garagegames.com/mg/forums/result.thread.php?qt=73673
www.garagegames.com/mg/forums/result.thread.php?qt=73572
... and in the end I succeeded in getting the terrain into TGEA the way I wanted it. Here's some screenies - the bottom pick showing a material I generated out of CrazyBump. I'll cut some video of it soon.

I bought the Sci-fi texture pack
dexsoft-games.com/textures/sci-fi2.html

and the Dungeon and Ground pack
dexsoft-games.com/textures/dungeon.html
...from Dexsoft games.

Oh yeah I bought L3DT at the beginning of the month.
www.bundysoft.com/L3DT/

So next I'm going to model up the Harrier - couldn't find a decent cheap one - and finish off the Carrier - hey a rhyme! Also I roped my sister into environmental modelling. I think we are going to have Alpha 2 ready soon.

image copyright Richard Seaman (just for reference)

Pics of terrain success!