Blog for Aun Arinyasak at GarageGames.com

Bubble Warrior :: Demo Powered By TGB

Aun Arinyasak — 2008-02-06T03:40:05+00:00

I've been working for Creative Kingdom for a while now. They started the game department when I join the company and it been a great experience so far working with such a huge company ( right now the employee count is almost 300 !). The game department, consist of 3 members, we just completed a demo for our up coming game named "Bubble Warrior".

Bubble Warrior is one of Creative Kingdom's cartoon that is On Air on Thailand's Channel 9. When I joined Creative Kingdom my main task was to develop games to support the company's cartoon that is on air.

Here's a flash video of the game

or you could download the video here (xVid)

The game still need a lot more work to do. Still needs 2 more character and still need a lot more levels to play with. So we'll be needing all your suggestion and testing, let me know what you think of it !

You can get the Bubble Warrior Installer here Bubble Warrior Game page

Some more screenies. . .

Play with your Xbox 360 or PS2 Controllers

You can choose different character with different abilities

Have your friend play with you

Thanks !

Aun.

Fly to Malaysia and you'll get Dell's support

Aun Arinyasak — 2007-07-17T16:07:21+00:00

Today My Dell Inspiron E1705 had a crash down. It's VGA was broken somehow and therefore it can't display anything on any monitors. We will be having a small conference to promote TORQUEX and I really need to use my laptop to prepare a short demo of TORQUEX. So, I made a call to Dell Thailand Technical support. Here was the conversation.

ME : Hi, My Dell Inspiron E1705 is broken the VGA seems to be the problem.

TS : How can you be sure it's the VGA.

ME : My Dell won't display anything but the Hard drive is still active and all the function lights are still on including the LCD black light. I tried taking out the battery and leave it for 5 minutes then open it again and that didn't work. I plug in another LCD monitor but the monitor couldn't find the laptop. I've reset the memory by taking out the RAM and put it in again that still doesn't work.

TS : Okay I think there're some problem with your VGA.

ME : Yeap, so what do I do next.

TS : You need to know we don't support Inspiron here in Thailand.

ME : Ok and ..... ?

TS : You'll need to fly to Singapore and get Technical support there.

ME : What........... you must be joking aren't there any alternative ?

TS : Oh yes you could choose to go to Malaysia too.

ME : Hm.... can't I just order the NVidia 7900GS from you I'm willing to pay.

TS : I think you need to go back and read the warranty that came with your computer and find the part that says even if you have a international warranty you won't get any support if the country you are in don't have that model.

ME : So then.... how can your technical support help me ?

TS : I will send you to customer service.

ME : hah ?

---------- wait 2 minutes -----------

CS : Hi , I heard your problem from the technical support

ME : Yes.

CS : We don't support Inspiron model.

ME : Yes, so I've heard.

CS : Even if it is an international warranty.

ME : Yes, I've heard that too. Can't I order the Nvidia 7900GS from you and maybe you could help and get the order from Singapore or the US.

CS : No, I don't think you understand this, we don't support Inspiron.

CS : I'll send you to Malaysia Technical Support

ME :.........

---------- wait 1 minutes ----------------

-- Thai Customer support is still on the line but now she included Malaysia Customer support on the line too --

Malay-CS: Hi my name is ......... , I am ............. , don't worry as we heard your problem it will take only 2 - 3 business days to fix your Dell laptop. (a really friendly Malaysian speaking Thai)

ME : Hm... I don't understand your Thai can we speak English ?

Thai-CS : He says that it will take you only 2 - 3 days if you fly to Malaysia to fix your laptop.

ME : Oh.... so I have to buy a round trip to Malaysia for 9000 Baht ( 300$ ) and have to stay at a hotel to do nothing and wait for the technical support at least 2 days?

Malay-CS : Yes, you need to come to Malaysia and call us and tell your address and we will process your support in 1 - 2 day from the day you called.

ME : Hm..... ok Thanks. (I had enough)

=========================================================================

-- Then I made another call to my travel agent friend --

ME : Dude , I need a round ticket to Malaysia and I'll be staying there for 2 days. How much would it cost.

F : Huh your on your vacation already.

ME : No, I've never had a vacation. I need to get my laptop fix there.

F : Your crazy, why don't you call Dell Thailand and have it fix here.

ME : I did, this is what they told me to do.

F : Then you need to email Micheal Dell and CC your problem to Sony, Acer , etc..... Then you'll get their support for sure.

ME : Okay, so how much is the trip?

At the end, I sent an email to technical support in Singapore and USA which both were extreamlly helpful. Dell Singapore have sent an email saying that they would sent the parts by mail to Thailand and would take only 3 days. My only request to him is sent the part to my house directly don't let the part pass Dell Thailand.

And for some game related things. On the 21 of July, Chiang Mai Digital Works have team up with the Software Industry Promotion Agency of Thailand to help kids make games in their school break. We are trying to promote the use of TorqueX and XNA Game Studio to kids to make their first game. For any Thai resident that is interested please have a look in our website. The event is free and with enough support we would also arrange a small TorqueX course (about 40 - 120 hours) for free.

TorqueX event website (Thai)

Aun.

Torque Motion

-- Torque Motion -- with Adam and Ava Animations

Aun Arinyasak — 2007-02-28T06:55:20+00:00

The Torque Motion Team are proud to announce the first update for theTM-Basic Animation Pack. The updates contain the following.
Version 1.1 includes:
60 DSQ Torque Animation files for Ava
60 DSQ Torque Animation files for Adam
Updated all the original .DSQ Torque animation files for Kork & Space Kork to be exported without any node transform

Updated documents and code base for the previews

So, for our exsisting customers you can download your updates for free. And for people that are not our customers the price is still the same. This is what you will get in the current TM-Basic Animation Pack.

TM-Basic Animation Pack:
- 60 DSQ Torque Animation files for Kork and Space Kork
- 60 DSQ Torque Animation files for Ava
- 60 DSQ Torque Animation files for Adam
- Code and Script implementation samples with documentation

Thats a total of 180 DSQ Torque Animations files from 60 Motion Capture source animations. We manually hand animate the animations for Adam and Ava using the original Motion Capture source animations so both of the models using our animations won't look "orcish". We been through all the troubles of animating and exporting so you wouldn't have to. ;)

Here are some comparison between all three models.

(Adam and Ava are created by Spencer Boomhower. Both models will not be included in the Basic Animation Pack.)

Please have a look in Adam' Gallery and Ava's Gallery to see all their animations. Every DSQ Torque Animation files will be interchangable between models using the same skeleton.

Here's an in-game video to see the animations in action.

For high-res video 20 meg [*.wmv] you can grab it here.

What's next ?
- We are working on another update for this pack and hopefully we could release the update soon.
- We are standardizing our motion capture source file, documenting the process of getting the source file to work with your model and exporting it to the dsq format so it can work properly. This will take quite a time before we can release our motion capture source file.

The Torque Motion - Basic Animation Pack can be locate here

Aun Arinyasak
Torque-Motion

Enhance Your Kork Animations - Torque Motion Basic Animation Pack

Aun Arinyasak — 2007-01-09T06:18:40+00:00

For the last two months or so, I've been busy with a motion capture project my team have been working on. As an indie, it's really hard to find a good position in the market where you can stand out and make the rest of the people remember who you are. After our last game, we knew with the amount of developers and money we have, threre's no way we could establish a finish game and still buy food and pay our rent. We came with a strategy to filled up what's not already avilable in the market, so here you see it.

The last game(my last plan) we worked on was a hazard. It required us to have 5 tribes, each tribe with many different animations (some basic animations can be shared in different tribes some can not) and structure. Making the animation work correctly on each model was a nightmare , just imagine I as the programer and my co-worker as the animator had to fix the slash animation of each tribes to collide and play correctly. This might not sound as horrible for a larger team but from a team with only one programer and one animator, it is really horrible and time consuming.

We came with a solution that we think will aid indies with the same problem we have encounter. That is by making a preanimated animation pack so indies that need to protyped their game can easily get through.

More infomation about us can be found hereon our website

Here are some infomation about Torque Motion Basic Animation Pack for kork.

Torque Motion :: Basic Animation Pack > what is it ???
: It is a preanimated animation pack especially for kork. It contains 60 preanimated basic animation (*.dsq) in it.

How do I know that the animations will suite my needs ?
: We have listed all animation names , infomation and gif animated pictures in our website. We encourage you to visit our website and give us some feedbacks how you feel about it.

Animation's Info

Note one thing : All the animations are animated for basical use, not especially for one game genre.

A downloadable video can be found here[20 Meg ,*.wmv].

What is the technology behind Torqur Motion :: Basic Animation Pack ?
: Every animations are motion captured from a real actor (except the death animations which are half half mo-cap and generate ) then animate by hand again to run in a perfect loop with the correct bone tranform.

Will it be easy to drop in my game ?
: If you are using Kork to prototype you game it will be very easy. Since , some animations requried TGE tuning YOU WILL HAVE TO BE A TGE OWNER. All changes need to be made are included in the Torque Motion :: Basic Animation Pack with documentation(almost 150 pages).

The Torque Motion :: Basic Animation Pack will also include source and documentation of this simple Animation Player Gui so you can easily test your animations in game.

When will it be available and what price?
: It's coming soon, just some document correction left to do. It will be at a very affortable price.

We already have plans for our next pack. You can see by the name of this pack we have already prepare ourselves for a fps animation pack and maybe ported this pack to some other models available in garagegames. Before that, we really want to hear your feed backs.

Aun Arinyasak.
Torque Motion.

-- Lanna -- development blog

Aun Arinyasak — 2006-10-07T10:26:45+00:00

My team just finish a project named Lanna (but according to the design document it's name is Wild of Wars which doesn't make much sense). And of course we choose to use Torque game engine. This project took us about two month to do with the amount of 4 people in our team. The team is consist with one - project manage (also a programmer , sound engineer and a particle designer ) , two programmers , and one 2D artist (you might be thinking were is the modeler and animator , huh). Almost every resources used in the game were made just for this game , it is because of the design documents that made us unable to buy models for this game. And it was our company policies that made us unable to hire a freelance modeler, so the models and animations were done by a programmer's work. So here are some screenies and details from the project.

This is the title and the credit page. In the title page we use the cg water resource and our cg glow effect to make it brighter. On the right is the credit page .

Here is one of intro story picture before playing the game. The language we used in the game is Thai language and was easily put into Torque.

On the left is the player's inventory system and the save-load game system. And on the right is the dialog system we use trough out the game. You could see the hero's hand is on fire, for this effect we use Torque's stock ShapeBaseImage and Particle with a little modification so the particle's could always be rendered.

This is some of the in-game screenies. The game is Action-Rpg the player could basically play in a first-person view or third-person view. This is one of the levels I like most, where the Ai would hide behind the stones in the mission and attack you when you turn your back on them.

The hero could select 4 weapons to use 3 of them are firing weapons and one is a melee weapon. First we use the Realm War melee resource to do the melee attacking system, it turn out to be very hard for us to export the models to do the animations correctly (remember we didn't have any modelers or animators) and even when the animation was exported correctly we couldn't change the time scale to make the weapon hit the player. So we had to do the melee attacking system by ourselves and got some good results from it, but still if you are going to do a melee system, Realm War is a good place to start.

In this picture you could tell that the camera isn't Torque stock camera. The camera is one of the elements in the game we spend most of our time on. And it really paid off, the camera really bring more dynamic to the game.

The last picture here are some fighting screenies. We made some tribe houses and objects to put in our mission but for some reason it was taking a lot of frame-rate so all of the interior couldn't be put in the game(they were all low ploygons). Even until now I still don't know why the interiors in the starter.fps didn't have any problem droping in our game(it was just a test we didn't put any starter.fps interiors in our game ), but why ours were taking alot of frame-rate.

So, done with the development blog of Lanna. After we finish this project we all decided to quit working for our company. We all felt we love making games but disappointed on how our company is making it. So, now I guess I am on a long vacation until I think of something to do. That would be absolutely making another game. :)

Aun.

My first bloomy plan

Aun Arinyasak — 2006-08-06T12:56:58+00:00

Yesterday I had a chat with Anton and a few others in the irc channel. The chat was on how to make a bloom filter with nvidia's CG. I told Anton that I will show my current work in my plan and let him and others who came in here tell me what you think of my work and some ideas improving it :)

Well, I been long working with J2me and lecturing Java for the Software Promotion Agency of Thailand.To tell the turth , since I was using Java for so long I hadn't been using any C++. So, last month when my team started a new project which is a type of educational game thing , I thought it would a good time for me to start learning C++.

I listed what I wanted to change in the engine. And came up with about three things that is :

1. Add a post process (using CG)
2. Add a new chase camera object (or is it a fluid camera?)
3. Add some more needed functions to the AI object

Now, the chase camera object and the AI functions are done . But The Bloom effect still doesn't satisfy me , I been playing with it for quite sometime and it still doesn't look enough bloomy. So here are some screenies.

screenshot

screenshot

screenshot

screenshot

Added a blur filter from ATI's Render Monkey sample and that killed the framerate like ****
screenshot

An inverse filter
screenshot

A CG editor for the mission designer.And the last pic is the one I'll be using for my Bloom effect.
screenshot

This morning I just bought TLK which was a great idea and should've happen along time ago. TGE really looks better with it !!

It is a must for every TGE users.

I have to thank.. Pisal Setthawong www.garagegames.com/blogs/20289/10710 it was his plan that started me on intregrating CG to TGE.

Gosh ... I hope some one will intregrate GLSL to TGE someday . :)