Blog for Adrian Tysoe at GarageGames.com

FMC full metal conflict playable demo

Adrian Tysoe — 2006-04-18T17:41:07+00:00

A couple of my friends and I are now 3 weeks into developing our game engine that uses Ogre3D for rendering. We threw together a demo from some old media from a project I started a couple of years ago.

It's early days yet but the engine already shows a lot of promise, and the game demo is quite a lot of fun.

Here's some screenies:

The demo is aproximately 7.4mb

dreamspace.banishedstudios.com/FMCalphaTest.zip

Slightly updated version, may possibly work better. 6.6mb

dreamspace.banishedstudios.com/Aurora.rar

Oh, nearly forgot, WASD FPS style controls, mouselook to steer, and LMB to Fire!
It's only meant to be a quickie, so no real effort went into weapons balancing etc, and the AI is very simplistic :)

Wednesday Nov 2 0:50

Adrian Tysoe — 2005-11-02T00:50:52+00:00

one of my on going pet projects. (Fun Racer) Someday I'd like to try and port it to Torque.

This little racing game has been an ongoing pet project of mine for quite some time. Originaly started as a Leadfoot game, but things didn't work out as planned and I ended up starting over. By chance, Today I saw a job opportunity for a racing game. After preparing a new self playing demo I thought I'd take the opportunity to show it to anyone interested at GG too.

Heh Just read over my plan again and noticed the abundance of I's :). Infact Damien Sturdy did a wonderful job coding the core racing engine and hacking into ODE in order to get the most out of it and realise many of the concepts and ideas I had in mind during the development of the project.

It's supposed to be more of a casual fun party type racing game, rather than a serious sim or arcade racer.

Key features:

ODE Physics

Dynamic AI. Cars see walls and other vehicles and can dynamically adjust their racing line and speed in order to avoid a collision with a preference to hitting other cars over walls. They will also brake to avoid collisions. (good enough that 3 cars can navigate corners 3 abreast "most of the time").

Multiplayer up to 12 players on LAN (with a high end PC) 6-8 recommended for 1Ghz machines and a Geforce 3 generation video cards. LAN Multiplayer is auto negotiating coin op style setup where AI controls any additional NPC racers to fill in the empty positions.

You can play MP over the internet with mixed results. 2-4 player can be playable, the physics eating up the bandwidth somewhat.

Recently I've been seriously considering trying to port this game over to torque, with the new art pipeline the art assets will load straight into TGE which is kind of cool. Our biggest problem with the game so far has been internet multiplayer. Something torque excels at. In its currennt incarnation it can run quite well, but when it comes to playing over great distances, often 8000+ miles it can really bog down.

The one thing that is currently holding back trying to get the game up and running in torque is physics. So if anyone knows of any good networked physics solutions that are avaliable for torque users? I'm all ears. I once saw a Dracer video which left me pretty impressed, whether that technology will filter down to the community I don't know. What I saw looked very impressive. Other than that I noticed novodex used torque for their Ageia physics demo's which were very cool, but at this point in time I don't think thats an affordable solution.

If I could get it up and running to a similar standard as the current prototype, I believe something like this could do quite well on Xbox live. Which is one of my long term goals as far as indie games go.

So if anyone has any info regarding networked physics solutions let me know. Feel free to try out this self playing demo. 10mb

With the demo we pretty much maxed out the game as far as we felt it could go and still run at an acceptable speed on a 1ghz machine, the Older ODE physics implementation we used being quite a CPU hog.

s93153354.onlinehome.us/raceproto.zip

Quick info

I left the .ini file available so people could play with some of the settings we left open in there.

keys 1-9 change camera
ctrl+1 to 9 change car in view

you can tweak the .ini file to change a lot of settings

the game is moleboxed for security, as a consequence it may not run on some win98 systems.

if you want full screen:

screenmode=1

in the ini fixes that. And reducing the FPS on the mirror or number of cars in the ini will increase performance. (you can add more cars too, allthough I havent tried with more than 12).

Tuesday Oct 11 18:15

Adrian Tysoe — 2005-10-11T18:15:24+00:00

New Video Card and some more Torque Stuff.

Well, I was going to go to IGC, but with my wife starting a new job and actually having some cash available to spare I bought a new Video Card instead. All I can say is WOW!!! After having a Geforce3 for 4+ years the Geforce6 made a HUGE difference. If you're a 3d artist like me and don't have a modern video card with at least shader 2.0 , you should really get one now :) My current system runs considerably faster, up to about 5x in many instances, regardless of the resolution.

Only Problem with this purchase was that I missed out on IGC, something I had some misgivings about, particularly once I watched what was going on over there. Ddaily feedback from Jeremy did nothing but wet my appetite even more.

It looks like there are going to be some changes in our plans after IGC. We have been batting around the idea of Aerial Antics 2 or an Upgrade pack for some time. And with the new art pipeline we have for torque and the positive response to what was going to be Aerial Antics reboost. Were seriously considering porting Aerial Antics over to TSE and making a go at getting it out on Xbox360.

From the start Aerial Antics was designed with Consoles and Game pads in mind, to the point that the controls with anything else, although adequate, had a pretty steep learning curve. This recently forced us to reconsider the pacing and slow it down for easy accessibility where casual gamers are concerned.

I think were about ready for taking a shot at Xbox 360 and xbox live arcade, will definitely be nice to target something faster than a pentium 2 400 with Geforce 2GTS which was our recommended minimum spec for the original Aerial Antics:). Next time we won't have to be inhibited so much graphically and can add a plethora of multiplayer gameplay modes that the game has always been screaming for.

Our other game shown for the first time at IGC was Oust, which is our new big project. Shown at an early rough preliminary stage, after quite a few teething problems with the new art path, it was good to get something playable out there.

For those that like myself didn't make it to IGC, I have a few media shots and a 11mb WMV video that shows the preliminary roughed out first level of Oust. Previously known as King of the Mountain. Once I get it more polished with new characters, a proper introduction via Snapshot is required methinks :).

Misc Scenery shots:

Work in Progress Character: Hunter/Tycoon 1662 triangles

Menu Background image:

11mb flythrough video. 11mb wmv

s93153354.onlinehome.us/Movieoust.wmv

Oh, better give a nod towards 21-6 and Orbz, since we plopped a couple of their boosters as standins for our accelerator objects.

Saturday Jul 24 5:50

Adrian Tysoe — 2004-07-24T05:50:41+00:00

Starting on a new project

Well after Aerial Antics we've had a lot of swings and roundabouts. Almost finished our second (supposedly short gaming project) which ended up taking a reatively short time in man hours spread over a few months.

Anyway, got all excited about starting a new project from scratch built around the new max exporter, rather than Unwrap3D which was all that was avaliable when we were making Aerial antics.

For months we've been tossing around a handfull of game ideas and after much tossing and turning Jeremy and I settled on something. During the week I thought I'd experiment and hopefully J will be able to put together a prototype game in the following weeks.

started playing with multipass rendering in the exporter, and can do nice masked landscapes with masked shinyness or environment maps. Pretty exciting stuff except for the odd alpha sorting issue that I'm praying J will be able to fix in code so that this tech is useable.

Friday Sep 26 5:15

Adrian Tysoe — 2003-09-26T05:15:19+00:00

Just finished our final Beta of Aerial Antics and starting to submit to publishers now.

Well we put the game up for Jeff to scrutinize and hope to get a contract with Garage Games. Were currently clearing small bugs we find during testing and the game is looking very polished.

Better get some new screenshots, these are ancient :)

Here's the new character and goal cam :)

Web page will be done soon :)