My book was published on the 18th of Feb. This is a companion guide to anyone wanting to learn how to use GROME. It also covers plugins and scripts for exporting to other game engines. GROME is kind of like Photoshop for terrain.
I want to quote from the forward at the beginning of the book as it's addressed (in part) to you guys:
Finally, a big thank you to the simulation community, SimHQ, and various individuals that continue to be supportive in the face of my endless and annoying prevarication and distractions (of which this book is but one of them). Sorry! Art is never finished, only abandoned.
It uses the Graphite Engine which comes as an SDK with every GROME license. Streaming and paging comes as standard, originally designed for use in an MMO.
Now that project is over and done with, Combat-Helo development will now resume in earnest. Watch this space.
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.
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.
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...
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)
It will remain a donation project until we procure a new host 3D engine that can handle the terrain size needed for historical campaigns. The software architecture of our Apache will continue to remain as engine agnostic as possible.
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/
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)
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.
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.
