Finally, time to post.
Crazy amount of work with three crunch times on the go. I just sent the final parts of my book, Grome 3 Terrain Modelling for Ogre3D, Unity and UDK (or whatever order it ends up in) to the publisher "PackT". Publication won't be too far away. Thanks to awesome technical review work at the guys over at Quad Software (www.quadsoftware.com) they kept me busier than I'd hoped :)
There was a CombatHelo development blog update scheduled to be auto-published in 2 days time but I've now delayed this till mid-February. Since I'll have time to complete some more development work this seemed prudent (as I didn't complete the AI material in the blog after falling ill over Christmas). I've once again trimmed the game feature list, removing the first-person on-foot component (until the Afghan campaign). Currently the game is going to feel like an in-depth Novalogic'esque production but manageable given current time constraints.
If you don't follow my occasional ramblings on LinkedIn or Twitter, I'll be spending the next few months focused on assembling playable build which I'll be taking down to the Weston Super-Mare flight-sim show this May. Although I should warn that I'm only going there to hang-out with my pals from Komodo Simulations and just soak up the atmosphere (and maybe a few brewskies).
Parting shot: When you put crew speech into a game, annoyingly it means the crew models have to lip-sync otherwise it looks weird.
Sunday, 27 January 2013
Sunday, 4 November 2012
Phase 1 progress
An update on where I am with Phase 1. October was crunch-time at my day-job, 2 am late nights were regular at one point. Catching up on the work-item list, as of this weekend I have completed:
- Event Manager
- Triggers
- AI Behaviour (steering core)
- AI Waypoint paths
Individual Steering behaviours are in progress, these are the bits of code that describe individual states such as fight or flight, wandering and obstacle avoidance. These constitute the bulk of the core-game features that were outstanding. Currently these are being assembled into a test harness for unit testing. The goal here is to have everything needed to build a set of simple scenarios for the cockpit experience.
Other news
We looked at how much work is required in DCS World add-ons. Extensive LUA work is required but we don't have the resources (man-power) to commit. If the opportunity arises we'll do it but the current priority is seeing through our current project.
Thanks for the comments, feedback and general chit chat on the blog. I promised fewer blog updates and more code time.
Saturday, 15 September 2012
Filing a new flight plan
I can't believe it, no blog update for a whole month! Time flies.
The book is almost done at my end apart from reviewing the second drafts and peer review. If you're not aware its called "GROME 3.1 Terrain Modelling for Ogre3D, UDK and Unity". Despite the title it's more of a short guide on using GROME with notes on how to export terrains to Unity and other game engines. Squashing it down to 150 pages is challenging. Ideally 200 pages would cover all functions and allow for more in-depth exporting processes, but it's a fixed number of pages. Time moves on, one project is winding down and now we're into September, as promised it's time to take a look at the Combat-Helo project and give everyone who's still following this blog some news on what's going to happen....probably.
Because I'm working full time for a medical software company, combat-helo will only see after-hours work when I resume development. As a result the road-map has to be adjusted accordingly, there simply isn't the man-hours required to complete the existing one, to this end I've broken it down into more reasonable phased releases. This was always the intention however I've reduced the scope of the releases.
One of the ideas David and I toyed with is a spin-off helicopter game for the action market featuring Maximum-Overkill'esq game-play but retaining some of the avionic toys we have in our Apache implementation. The advantage of doing this was getting some credibility, to say we've released something (even if it is not much more than a fancy demo with 'splosions). Some people just want to see some of the stuff we've been doing first hand. Frankly it's not the game I want to make but it's one we could build on. Once that is in the wild we would continue development on the full-spec game in stages. The action-game would have been targeted for Steam and Origin stores with some brain dead title and trailer. However someone already beat us to the brain dead trailer part.
Valve's Greenlight project has deflated my enthusiasm for this plan, regardless I'm committed to seeing it through. But then I'm less than thrilled with how long Combat-Helo has taken; going from a full-time project to part-time, to no-time, now hedging back to part-time. My will focus will be on getting it ready as a cockpit demo with basic game-play and releasing it as a re-branded game. Once this has escaped I will work on finishing the rest of the features. To make it formal here's an announcement.
Work on Combat-Helo resumes on Sept 29th.
The road-map for game releases is looking like this...
The book is almost done at my end apart from reviewing the second drafts and peer review. If you're not aware its called "GROME 3.1 Terrain Modelling for Ogre3D, UDK and Unity". Despite the title it's more of a short guide on using GROME with notes on how to export terrains to Unity and other game engines. Squashing it down to 150 pages is challenging. Ideally 200 pages would cover all functions and allow for more in-depth exporting processes, but it's a fixed number of pages. Time moves on, one project is winding down and now we're into September, as promised it's time to take a look at the Combat-Helo project and give everyone who's still following this blog some news on what's going to happen....probably.
Because I'm working full time for a medical software company, combat-helo will only see after-hours work when I resume development. As a result the road-map has to be adjusted accordingly, there simply isn't the man-hours required to complete the existing one, to this end I've broken it down into more reasonable phased releases. This was always the intention however I've reduced the scope of the releases.
One of the ideas David and I toyed with is a spin-off helicopter game for the action market featuring Maximum-Overkill'esq game-play but retaining some of the avionic toys we have in our Apache implementation. The advantage of doing this was getting some credibility, to say we've released something (even if it is not much more than a fancy demo with 'splosions). Some people just want to see some of the stuff we've been doing first hand. Frankly it's not the game I want to make but it's one we could build on. Once that is in the wild we would continue development on the full-spec game in stages. The action-game would have been targeted for Steam and Origin stores with some brain dead title and trailer. However someone already beat us to the brain dead trailer part.
Valve's Greenlight project has deflated my enthusiasm for this plan, regardless I'm committed to seeing it through. But then I'm less than thrilled with how long Combat-Helo has taken; going from a full-time project to part-time, to no-time, now hedging back to part-time. My will focus will be on getting it ready as a cockpit demo with basic game-play and releasing it as a re-branded game. Once this has escaped I will work on finishing the rest of the features. To make it formal here's an announcement.
Work on Combat-Helo resumes on Sept 29th.
The road-map for game releases is looking like this...
- Phase 1 - Cockpit demo and shooter
- Phase 2 - Multi-player update and fixes
- Phase 3 - Editor
- Phase 4 - Gunnery Trainer
- Phase 5 - Overseas campaigns
- Phase 6 - Addon aircraft (CH-47)
Tuesday, 31 July 2012
One Week Only - Augmented Reality Project
As I'm on holiday until Thursday with some old friends visiting from Denmark we decided to do a kind of "invention exchange". We're geeking out and building a "Bullseye" table. Let me explain, Bullseye is some proprietary research software used in some museums and exhibition stands, it's image tracking software that runs on the GPU and can INDIVIDUALLY track hundreds of little paper targets on the surface of the table in real-time.
It's written in Java and outputs the data via a couple of common multi-touch formats so it can be used by game engines such as Unity3D.
The hard part is calibrating the cheap and nasty camera equipment since we're using cheap stuff we can find around the house but as this is a prototype quality isn't an issue.
Today we're converting an old MAME cocktail arcade cabinet to use as the table. We'll fit a relatively inexpensive projector (around 200 UKP) under the table to project the game onto the underside of the table.
The little paper Bullseye targets are glued under objects (LEGO works fine but you can use model tanks/Battletech/Star Wars figures etc). The web cam under the table sees the shadow of the target and the Bullseye software sends the filtered camera image to the shader on the GPU. This scans the image for the geometry of the targets and writes the information to a small texture. Each target has an ID, position and rotation value. Fingers and other shadows will be tracked as objects with NO ID or rotation. The rotation is worked out from the shapes on the outer circle. The inner circle contains a binary representation of the target ID.
Tracking over 64 objects at 10 fps using a $10 camera is reasonably OK so long as the calibration is fine. As you increase the camera resolution and frame speed you can track more objects. One of the tables built already by the Bullseye developers is fast enough to run a virtual air-hockey game using some very expensive cameras.
For our prototype we're going to try and put together a simple Apache helicopter arming table and send that data into Combat-Helo. Failing that a simple snake or sound game. As time is running out we need to get a move on. More updates as we go.
Information on TUIO protocols and multi-touch displays can be found here http://www.tuio.org/
It's written in Java and outputs the data via a couple of common multi-touch formats so it can be used by game engines such as Unity3D.
The hard part is calibrating the cheap and nasty camera equipment since we're using cheap stuff we can find around the house but as this is a prototype quality isn't an issue.
Today we're converting an old MAME cocktail arcade cabinet to use as the table. We'll fit a relatively inexpensive projector (around 200 UKP) under the table to project the game onto the underside of the table.
The little paper Bullseye targets are glued under objects (LEGO works fine but you can use model tanks/Battletech/Star Wars figures etc). The web cam under the table sees the shadow of the target and the Bullseye software sends the filtered camera image to the shader on the GPU. This scans the image for the geometry of the targets and writes the information to a small texture. Each target has an ID, position and rotation value. Fingers and other shadows will be tracked as objects with NO ID or rotation. The rotation is worked out from the shapes on the outer circle. The inner circle contains a binary representation of the target ID.
Tracking over 64 objects at 10 fps using a $10 camera is reasonably OK so long as the calibration is fine. As you increase the camera resolution and frame speed you can track more objects. One of the tables built already by the Bullseye developers is fast enough to run a virtual air-hockey game using some very expensive cameras.
For our prototype we're going to try and put together a simple Apache helicopter arming table and send that data into Combat-Helo. Failing that a simple snake or sound game. As time is running out we need to get a move on. More updates as we go.
Information on TUIO protocols and multi-touch displays can be found here http://www.tuio.org/
Sunday, 15 July 2012
We interrupt this program.
Had planned and written a blog update to go out this weekend however some of the details I anticipated would be in it are still to be confirmed.
So here instead is a 30 second video of waves in Leadwerks engine I recorded earlier while working on water in various 3D engines. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.
(Actually I leave this scene running while playing Art of Noise in the background)
So here instead is a 30 second video of waves in Leadwerks engine I recorded earlier while working on water in various 3D engines. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.
(Actually I leave this scene running while playing Art of Noise in the background)
Tuesday, 12 June 2012
Weather clearing up - sunny spells in the afternoon
Last month I didn't have a clue exactly what was going to happen with regard to the project and work etc. As it happens I'm grateful things worked out as well as they did. My book is well under way and on schedule, new job starting shortly and thank goodness; not one but TWO replacement couches. If you didn't know I've been sitting in a hole padded with cushions for two years, a glamorous life but on the plus side visitors didn't want to stay long. However come the end of July I have some guests from Denmark coming over to show me how to build an AR table. Using a piece of target tracking software called "Bullseye" and Unity3D here's some footage of a music table in action courtesy of LEGO.
As it's going open source soon and I have a TON of painted Battletech figures and helicopters sitting in a box I'm hoping we can jam a prototype AR tabletop mech game in a week for not much expense. I haven't told him yet but it's too late for them to cancel the holiday. Sorry Lena :)
He's also quite keen to get some stick time on Combat-Helo so it's a good opportunity to get it fixed up for another public outing. Dave and I have been working on a rescue plan which I'm happy with. Currently I still only have a few hours during the week to work on the project, this will increase around mid-July.
Gunfighter6 just stepped and delivered a script full of stand-in speech files. So big thank you for that. What I did for the script was generate a cut-down version for the gunnery range and have just 3 parts, the range officer and two crewmen. The trick is to turn unfiltered speech into multiple parts by mixing radio noise, if that doesn't work then I'll have to batch process noise into the audio fragments using Audacity. It's now capable of running scripts.
Audacity 2.0 - great program.
The Leadwerks Community Project is picking up pace but some of the guys working on it have pulled out all the stops to put in some awesome work and I'm learning a thing or two from every update. Here's the third video blog of what's going on behind the scenes. Roll the tape Johhny....
I just watched Indie Game - The Movie (www.indiegamethemovie.com/), a highly emotional experience and my heart goes out to all developers out there who feel the same level of frustration and conviction. In the darker moments when the pressure is on and you can only see the problems, that's when you want to give up. Some of those guys were working for 5 years, without support. As a movie it's beautifully shot and scored. If you want some insight into what it's like being the little guy trying to code your 'big idea' this is spot on...except for most it doesn't have the good bit at the end.
I'm thankful for Dave's patience and continued support from folks. Next update will be in about two weeks, until then have fun.
As it's going open source soon and I have a TON of painted Battletech figures and helicopters sitting in a box I'm hoping we can jam a prototype AR tabletop mech game in a week for not much expense. I haven't told him yet but it's too late for them to cancel the holiday. Sorry Lena :)
He's also quite keen to get some stick time on Combat-Helo so it's a good opportunity to get it fixed up for another public outing. Dave and I have been working on a rescue plan which I'm happy with. Currently I still only have a few hours during the week to work on the project, this will increase around mid-July.
Gunfighter6 just stepped and delivered a script full of stand-in speech files. So big thank you for that. What I did for the script was generate a cut-down version for the gunnery range and have just 3 parts, the range officer and two crewmen. The trick is to turn unfiltered speech into multiple parts by mixing radio noise, if that doesn't work then I'll have to batch process noise into the audio fragments using Audacity. It's now capable of running scripts.
Audacity 2.0 - great program.
The Leadwerks Community Project is picking up pace but some of the guys working on it have pulled out all the stops to put in some awesome work and I'm learning a thing or two from every update. Here's the third video blog of what's going on behind the scenes. Roll the tape Johhny....
I just watched Indie Game - The Movie (www.indiegamethemovie.com/), a highly emotional experience and my heart goes out to all developers out there who feel the same level of frustration and conviction. In the darker moments when the pressure is on and you can only see the problems, that's when you want to give up. Some of those guys were working for 5 years, without support. As a movie it's beautifully shot and scored. If you want some insight into what it's like being the little guy trying to code your 'big idea' this is spot on...except for most it doesn't have the good bit at the end.
I'm thankful for Dave's patience and continued support from folks. Next update will be in about two weeks, until then have fun.
Monday, 21 May 2012
Flying a desk in bad weather
I don't like this new "blogger" interface at all. Nonetheless. This is a post I kept putting off but it's not all bad news so I'm comfortable making it now.
As some of you are already aware my funds for this venture expired at the end of March when it ceased to be a full time enterprise. All time on the project is whatever I can scrape together (and justify) between other work. Currently I'm under contract to finish a book on terrain modeling for programmers and artists using GROME 3.1 for Unity, UDK, iPhone and Ogre3D. I have to say it's been a blast working on this. A wise man one put in his forum sig "Best way to learn is to teach others."
In it I'll be covering diverse topics such as world scales, FPS engines, terrain tiling and LOD, procedural generation of topography, textures, importing DEMs and exporting terrain so it will run on Unity iPhone and more.
Asynchronous terrain tile loading was something I was researching for the next iteration of the Combat-Helo engine which is why I ended up being asked to write the book. Hopefully I'll be in a better position to put it into practice (beyond the examples in the book) later in the year. Expect publication around end of August/September, if only for my terrible puns. Too bad nobody seems to be hiring to do this stuff.
Watch out for: Grome 3.1 Terrain Modeling with Ogre3D, UDK and Unity3D
ISBN# 978-2-849529-18-2
Coming to a bookstore this Fall.
But what about Combat-freeking-Helo?
Only getting a few hours a week to tinker is not enough. The problem is interest from debts incurred during development can no longer be supported out of my own pocket. Costs of hardware and licenses not to mention time (Dave didn't get paid at all, I owe him a massive beer tab and a luxury foot-massage - at least) need to be addressed. In addition legal costs of releasing can't be met, and they are necessary today, more so than ever.
It is a frustrating situation. Kickstarter has been mentioned by some readers. They are popular atm, seems every man and his dog is funding re-makes on it. Unless I can find a business development manager to set-up a US based entity it's not going to be an option for us. I don't have the time or experience of US business law to set one up. One UK developer (Carmageddon) recently had to do just that, I envy them.
From the start I clearly said I wouldn't work on the project unless it was funded, when that funding didn't appear I went ahead out of my own pocket but knew time was limited. If we could literally kickstart this thing and give it what it needs (business development, professional audio, animation library, second programmer, Dave's beer tab) to the tune of about $20,000 we're good. That's the sit-rep. When I get current commitments out of the way I can devote a little more time to fix pressing issues.
As for the work that is being done:
Paolo has been busy with his own family commitments and found time to finish off the game's mascot, looking excellent in my opinion. I hope to have some made up into squad patches for a limited edition release (if only because I want one on my jacket so I might as well get a bunch made up).
He's been brainstorming game-play record keeping ideas, some of which will make it into the game as they are way better than mine and as it turned out, easier to implement from an art point of view.
Moving on to other things. It's my personal blog so I might as well indulge myself and write about what else I've been doing.
Dungeon Crawlers
I started a small series on "Procedural Content Generation". A tutorial on building an old-school dynamic Dungeon crawler in LUA. When creating the combat-helo vehicle scripts I realised I was missing some subtitles of LUA, this has been a good opportunity to explore it. Here's links to the first 3 parts. The final two parts will be posted after I get my current book chapter off to the publisher.
- Procedural Content Creation Part 1
- Procedural Content Creation Part 2
- Procedural Content Creation Part 3
Proland 4.0 goes OpenSource
Back on the subject of terrain, some great news this month as Proland 4.0 went opensource under a dual commercial GPL3 license. If you're not familiar with Proland it's the work headed up by French researchers Eric Bruneton and Fabrice Neyret. While they were at the time reluctant to license for militaristic applications we were quite interested in using it for a Search and Rescue application (the project later became tied to Unity and using GROME as a world data import tool).
As some of you are already aware my funds for this venture expired at the end of March when it ceased to be a full time enterprise. All time on the project is whatever I can scrape together (and justify) between other work. Currently I'm under contract to finish a book on terrain modeling for programmers and artists using GROME 3.1 for Unity, UDK, iPhone and Ogre3D. I have to say it's been a blast working on this. A wise man one put in his forum sig "Best way to learn is to teach others."
In it I'll be covering diverse topics such as world scales, FPS engines, terrain tiling and LOD, procedural generation of topography, textures, importing DEMs and exporting terrain so it will run on Unity iPhone and more.
Asynchronous terrain tile loading was something I was researching for the next iteration of the Combat-Helo engine which is why I ended up being asked to write the book. Hopefully I'll be in a better position to put it into practice (beyond the examples in the book) later in the year. Expect publication around end of August/September, if only for my terrible puns. Too bad nobody seems to be hiring to do this stuff.
Watch out for: Grome 3.1 Terrain Modeling with Ogre3D, UDK and Unity3D
ISBN# 978-2-849529-18-2
Coming to a bookstore this Fall.
But what about Combat-freeking-Helo?
Only getting a few hours a week to tinker is not enough. The problem is interest from debts incurred during development can no longer be supported out of my own pocket. Costs of hardware and licenses not to mention time (Dave didn't get paid at all, I owe him a massive beer tab and a luxury foot-massage - at least) need to be addressed. In addition legal costs of releasing can't be met, and they are necessary today, more so than ever.
It is a frustrating situation. Kickstarter has been mentioned by some readers. They are popular atm, seems every man and his dog is funding re-makes on it. Unless I can find a business development manager to set-up a US based entity it's not going to be an option for us. I don't have the time or experience of US business law to set one up. One UK developer (Carmageddon) recently had to do just that, I envy them.
From the start I clearly said I wouldn't work on the project unless it was funded, when that funding didn't appear I went ahead out of my own pocket but knew time was limited. If we could literally kickstart this thing and give it what it needs (business development, professional audio, animation library, second programmer, Dave's beer tab) to the tune of about $20,000 we're good. That's the sit-rep. When I get current commitments out of the way I can devote a little more time to fix pressing issues.
As for the work that is being done:
- I redeveloped the audio script for the Firing Range. It would be nice if we can at least get the minimum amount of voice work done to bring life to the cockpit.
- LUA scripting of mobiles is partly complete. Need to create nav-grid data, still outstanding.
- Flight model still down, forces are not getting updated and attempts to debug have not met with success. Will be something simple but like finding needle in a haystack, time intensive. Came up with strategy to deal with this thanks in part to the Leadwerks Community Project guys.
Mossie - "Victory Stings the Loser"
Paolo has been busy with his own family commitments and found time to finish off the game's mascot, looking excellent in my opinion. I hope to have some made up into squad patches for a limited edition release (if only because I want one on my jacket so I might as well get a bunch made up).
He's been brainstorming game-play record keeping ideas, some of which will make it into the game as they are way better than mine and as it turned out, easier to implement from an art point of view.
Moving on to other things. It's my personal blog so I might as well indulge myself and write about what else I've been doing.
Dungeon Crawlers
I started a small series on "Procedural Content Generation". A tutorial on building an old-school dynamic Dungeon crawler in LUA. When creating the combat-helo vehicle scripts I realised I was missing some subtitles of LUA, this has been a good opportunity to explore it. Here's links to the first 3 parts. The final two parts will be posted after I get my current book chapter off to the publisher.
- Procedural Content Creation Part 1
- Procedural Content Creation Part 2
- Procedural Content Creation Part 3
Proland 4.0 goes OpenSource
Back on the subject of terrain, some great news this month as Proland 4.0 went opensource under a dual commercial GPL3 license. If you're not familiar with Proland it's the work headed up by French researchers Eric Bruneton and Fabrice Neyret. While they were at the time reluctant to license for militaristic applications we were quite interested in using it for a Search and Rescue application (the project later became tied to Unity and using GROME as a world data import tool).
Here's the text of the announcement:
INRIA is pleased to announce that Proland has been released in Open Source:
http://proland.inrialpes.fr
Proland is a C++/OpenGL library for the real-time realistic rendering of very large and detailed 3D natural scenes on GPU. It is capable of rendering entire planets from ground to space. Proland is released under a dual GPLv3/commercial license. You can try it by downloading the precompiled Windows demo at http://proland.inria...r/download.html.
http://proland.inrialpes.fr
Proland is a C++/OpenGL library for the real-time realistic rendering of very large and detailed 3D natural scenes on GPU. It is capable of rendering entire planets from ground to space. Proland is released under a dual GPLv3/commercial license. You can try it by downloading the precompiled Windows demo at http://proland.inria...r/download.html.
ZOMBIES
The Leadwerks community recently got together to start building a Zombie FPS. I'm not doing much of anything except this time I'm doing it in C++ and using TinyXML to do all the game loading and saving. Just watching some of the guys put down animation code here, subway level designs, weapon code. Quite inspiring. Everyone seems to have something to bring to the party, even if it's just my two tins of Dutch lager.
I think the "Worst Case Scenario" game idea is a good one. Giant ants, a 53.5ft tall woman, amorphous blobs, zombies, walking plants and secret nuclear tests all thrown into one bad day in Smalltown USA is a Steam classic waiting to happen. Did I leave out the alien robot and killer rabbits? How foolish. I look forward to playing the LCP (Leadwerks Community Project) game which is already taking shape.
Parting Shot
As usual, if there's any major announcement it will be made here. My twitter feed tends to have a high signal to noise ratio.
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