Community Resources for First Person Shooters

This post is a follow up to the previous

FPS resource list post

My new "zen coding" philosophy is to break everything down into clearly defined "simple" bite size tasks. Each task has a small well defined point of completion. Even if I don't complete all the tasks, just completing one task will benefit myself and others. The 1,000 mile game development journey begins and ends with a single small well defined step. The philosophy is simple. You may not think you can complete such a huge journey, but you can always take the next step. This continuing blog is part of the process. It documents the completion of each step along the way, for the benefit of the community here at Garage Games.

I'm upgrading the Burger Wars code base from TGE 1.3 to TGEA 1.8.0. Naturally there are a few things that have changed along the way. Its important to go back to the original resources when doing the upgrade so I can test each feature as its implemented. My hope is to pull more team members back in the loop as I get closer to completion. The biggest task for me is getting TGEA 1.8.0 back to where we left off with the TGE 1.3 code base.

I'm a firm believer that you get back what you give away. Contributing to the community always helps my own game development. I intend to release a patch of the basic features so anyone else can apply the following things to their game. My sincere hope is that this gets rolled into the starter fps stonghold demo by Garage Games. I think all these resources will be a big help to any independent gamer who wishes to make a first person shooter. If this happens, it will also help me upgrade to T3D as my work will already be waiting in the code base. (See how you get back what you give away?)

The FPS resource list of things to roll into this patch includes the following:

1. Mission Area Force Fields (Done)
2. Team implementation (Done)
3. Team hud that shows enemy names in Red (Done)
4. Weapon Inventory
5. Capture the flag game type implementation.
6. Working A.I.
7. Character / Team selection

Having 3 of the 7 accomplished so far is not bad. I'm doing the minimum set of modifications (not adding artwork) so the patch should be a clean implementation of art assets already available in the strong hold demo.

Notice the team selection messages in the upper left chat hud, and that Kork's name is displayed in Red (enemy team)

I finished step 3 Torque team Id last week. Drawing the enemy names in red resulted in my first painless brush with the GFX code base. I simply passed in a new color variable to the GuiShapeNameHud drawname function, and then passed that on to the GFX SetBitmapModulation function.

void GuiShapeNameHud::drawName(Point2I offset, const char *name, F32 opacity, ColorF color)
{
   // Center the name
   offset.x -= mProfile->mFont->getStrWidth((const UTF8 *)name) / 2;
   offset.y -= mProfile->mFont->getHeight();

   // Deal with opacity and draw.
   mTextColor.alpha = opacity;
   GFX->getDrawUtil()->setBitmapModulation(color);
   GFX->getDrawUtil()->drawText(mProfile->mFont, offset, name);
   GFX->getDrawUtil()->clearBitmapModulation();
}

I'm updating the original resources as I go. The goal is to Leave a trail of bread crumbs for others to follow. Should I fail to produce a viable patch, each resource will be updated with what needed to be done to get it working. Everything I did to get Torque team Id working with TGEA 1.8.0 is documented at the end of the resource.

Here is the complete resource list I'm working on --- (click link to follow) --> FPS resource list. These are some of the "absolute must have" resources I think any FPS game should take advantage of. I strongly recommend bookmarking this link for anyone currently working on an FPS game.