crystalspace3d.org/planet

To kickstart some new levels for Yo-Frankie I have decided to run a six week competition to create new levels for the game. These can then be included in a future release of YoFrankie, which will include updates for the next blender release and bugfixes.

Goal: Create a great new level for YoFrankie based on the following criteria…

• Level design (the level should be fun to run around, explore, and play in)
• Game play (playing the level from start to finish should be engaging)
• Good graphics quality (nice textures/materials/scenery)

Bonus Points for…

• Efficiency - Creative use of existing Yo Frankie assets (textures/materials/models/sounds).
• Replay value - Come up with a way that makes your level fun to play again and again!
• Puzzles - Its possible to create puzzles with no programming (pushing blocks about, spring boxes, moving platforms)
• 2 player features (when the level is extra fun to play with or against a friend)

No Bonus Points for…

• Slow level logic/python scripts
• Level running slower then existing YoFrakie levels (level_1_home)

Starting Date: January 16th, 2009
Deadline: February 28th, 2009

First Prize 250 Euro
Second Prize 150 Euro
Third Prize 100 Euro
(Payment via PayPal)

Notes

• You may focus mostly on one area, awesome graphics, great puzzles, fun 2 player, challenging platforms to glide between etc.
• This project should be something a non technical artist can finish. You can make a level without adding any logic bricks or scripts, the players have their own logic, so you can get by with knowing 3-4 property names to assign to different level objects - see the wiki for details.
• Your level doesn’t need to use GLSL materials (old texface materials are ok too).
• This level will eventually be included with other levels, start by adding your level to the “levels” directory, and reuse existing groups where possible.
• Even if you don’t win, your level can still be included in the next release of YoFrankie.
• This is not an official Blender Foundation competition, see my contact details below.
• To get updated YoFrankie files from Subversion see projects.blender.org/projects/yofrankie

Judging
I’ll run a community vote on blender artists, however I’ll decide on the final outcome if it seems biased in some way or if people are not able to test levels.

Rules

• Collaboration is fine, but I’ll only accept an entry from a single person.
• Final level must be under 100mb compressed.
• No modifications to the player logic (jump height, glide distance etc) - bug fixes are an exception.
• Your level must be under the same creative commons license as all existing YoFrankie levels.
• No node based materials (just use material-textures for more efficient shaders)
• You can enter more then one level
• Level cannot have been entered into a previous competition

I’ll answer questions on the thread, but you can mail me personally too.
Contact:  Campbell Barton - ideasman42@gmail.com

Behold.. Yo Frankie! Online! Both the binaries and the whole production tree are available in .zip format and also browsable via web.

So go to the Download Yo Frankie! page and start playing the game, playing with the source files, or open the blend files in Blender 2.48a and do both!

A big new is that Yo Frankie! is now part of Blender Projects, this means that you can make and share your own levels, characters, whatever! and also help in the development and maintenance of the game, so we can all play Yo Frankie! in future Blender versions.

That’s all folks!
Thanks for everything,
The Apricot Open Game Crew

The Blender Gamekit book update project is now in its last stage. We’re reviewing the designed pages, finishing the cd for the book, and hopefully within one or two weeks it goes to print! (But you know, planning doesn’t match human limitations always!)

You now can start pre-ordering copies even. Up to december 15 with a nice 20% discount!
Click here to visit the Blender e-shop.

Needless to say: revenues will help Blender Foundation projects (and me & Brecht coding 2.5!

-Ton-

The long wait is almost over, today the dvds were delivered to the Blender Institute. Tomorrow we’ll pack them all for our sponsors/customers, monday it gets picked up by the Global Mail service.
Delivery is usually 2-4 days for countries close, 1 week for rest of Europe, 2 weeks for USA and rest of world.

In case you’ve moved to another place after ordering, make sure the e-shop knows! (Mail shop at blender.org order number and new address).

-Ton-

On the first day of sessions (Saturday), one of the sessions I attended was that of managing content in open source games. There was a previous session on open source games in general, which I will cover in a later post. A very important question in open source games is how we can develop games with high-quality content, but still manage artists who are not familiar with open source development procedures?

The folks from Battle for Wesnoth began talking about their problems in getting content for their game. Originally, they stated, they had a system that had fairly bad graphics. Over time, it has become a much more aesthetically appealing system, with animated sprites and high-quality artwork. Over time, they were able to find a good artist to place in the position of lead artist. The lead artist is the person who signs off on all the artwork in the game, whether it be textures, conceptual artwork, or sprites and animations.

One thing Battle for Wesnoth developers had to deal with is younger artists. They were able to get artwork from a number of teenagers, but this artwork was fairly low-quality, due to the lack of experience of the artists. So, at times, it was necessary to just tell people that their artwork wasn't of the quality necessary in Battle for Wesnoth. On the other hand, they admitted that they accepted artwork from a number of artists who weren't initially very good, but improved over time.

Worldforge is another project that had representatives present in this session. Worldforge isn't exactly a game, really, but rather an open source world-building application. The requirements for this application are incredibly massive, and a method is needed for developing a method of accepting, rating, and storing assets. The representatives from Worldforge stated that they have begun building an application that takes assets from artists, and stores and presents it for evaluation from an administrator. Ideally, it would be nice to have a system that can rank assets, present it for approval to an administrator, then if approved, commit it to the asset version control system. The application they presented is called Wombat, and they are asking for help from open source developers to evaluate and improve this application.

BZFlag also spoke about their asset-management system. A primary problem they encounter is that artists don't understand licensing. One of the things they had to place into their application was an option for "I stole this" for artists submitting content.

One of the things that I find more difficult about content in games is finding artists. I realize that expecting artists to commit assets into an svn server is probably not going to work, but how does one come upon artists to begin with? I think this is a very important question, as both groups brought up the idea that artists aren't as familiar with open source software development as computer scientists are. Thus, they aren't as exposed to the different groups as we are, and don't have any idea that they can get experience with an open source software group. Some of the questions that I have are, "How can we advertise in a more effective method, to minimize budget constraints, to get artists more interested in our projects?", "How can we keep artists around, once they've developed a single piece of artwork?", "How can we help improve a mediocre artists' skills?", and "How can we express to an artist what we need done, and have them actually do the necessary work, rather than what they want to do?".

More pictures and posts to come!

So, once again its been way too long since my last update. Life here in Taiwan is hectic with tons and tons of homework almost every day. Anyhow, last weekend I flew over to USA and California for the Google Summer of Code Mentor summit.

On Friday after my morning class I got my stuff together and after a delightful afternoon in Taipei with a friend I headed off to Taoyuan for my 11 hour flight to San Francisco. Was the first time I flew anything but economy class, sitting in the very luxurious economy plus, but in fact it made a noticeable difference. I arrived at SFO in the evening and at the Domain Hotel in Sunnyvale where I met my co-mentor Scott Johnsson for the first time. He’s a great guy but it was late so I went straight to bed.

Saturday we were supposed to be picked up at the hotel by a bus at 8:45, at 8:50 Leslie showed up and told us there had been a screw-up. A quick scrambling of cars and we were on our way to Googleplex for registration, breakfast and the days sessions.
Starting out with the always as fun common (and confused) scheduling session, the rest of the day was filled with interesting discussions. My personal mix was “Open source in embedded systems”, “Open content for games”, “How to deal with assholes”, “How to avoid disappeared students” and finally “Windows ports of OSS projects”.

A few interesting points that came up:

• GPL and other licenses becomes more interesting and complicated in the scope of embedded systems and even more so in the realm of hardware “programming”.
• Cut out the assholes. People that destroy your project, be it technically or socially, should be kept short and told to leave as soon as possible.
• All projects have students disappearing students in all states of GSoC program. Ways that have/does work to keep them during the program is personal contact (Skype/phone/meeting) and having secondary means of contact such as a relative, professor or friend. After the project is over an important part is to quickly get their work integrated so that they have an area to assume responsibility of.
• One should be very happy if you have (good) native Windows developers on your project.

The day at Googleplex was finished by a summary session hosted by Leslie Hawtorne and Chris DiBona with some Faq on the program. After a quick shuttle back to the hotel everyone gathered around the pool area at the Wild Palms Hotel for traditional pizza+beer+whatever-you-like party.

One difference this year compared to last years was that we actually had a day 2 of the summit, yay! :) So after a quick breakfast at the hotel Sunday morning we once again headed off to Googleplex. The morning schedule became a bit delayed but at 11ish people started away with a bit less formal sessions. Me and Scott teamed up with most of the other OSS game developers that were around for a short while of game hacking until lunch. After enjoying another great meal from the Google chefs we had a few more sessions in the afternoon. Directly after lunch we continued from yesterdays “Assholes” session with “Attracting and keeping the best people in your project”. It was the most interesting discussion of the day I think, lots of great ideas. More or less it went on for the entire afternoon, even though officially we had a few photo-shoots and I spent some time with Kai Blin from Wine/Samba/WoldForge discussing the possibility of an open source good interchange format instead of Collada.

Unfortunately I had to get back to Taiwan directly after the summit and couldn’t take any vacation in SF (bummer), so Sunday evening after closing session and some food in Mountain View Kai dropped off me and Erik (also WorldForge guy) at SFO, where I went through another four hours at the airport and then 12 hours home. Early morning Tuesday local time I finally set my foot back in my dorm, and went directly to class.

So, I just got back to Roseville from Mountain View, CA. It was pretty nice there, so it's not quite so wonderful to return to 34 degree (F) weather here in Minnesota, but home is home, and I'm glad to be back.

It was a great trip. It was my first time attending the mentor summit (as this is the first time I was a mentor for gsoc), and I had a great time. I learned a ton, and had the opportunity to meet a large number of very interesting people. In addition, I learned quite a bit about open source management, as well as game development in general. I intend to share all of these things with you over the next few days, but I need to get some sleep right now, so I will leave you with the next best thing: pictures! (more to come, I promise)

Hi!

Currently I'm really stuck with my work. I'd really need to get the trunk merged into my branch (because of some new renderfeatures res wrote for my purpose and because I do have to extend the RM which is not in my branch!), but ever when I do that, the resulting code is not running well. Means, I don't get any 3D output on ANY testapp.
As long as I could not solve this problem, I can't do any big step... unfortunatly! (Really annoying thing)

There are some good news though: The csCloudSystem was tested and works fine by now. Then the a first version of the RM-extension is implemented as well. But as long as I'm not able to test it or even compile it, I can't say if it's working as it should!

bye

I'm about to implement the renderingstuff. I already did various things (especially preparation stuff) and now I'll have to extend the rendermanager. It will take while till I understand how the whole thing works, but it's necessary!

Bye

Hi!

The last few days I worked to get the plugin running. Now it does. I made also several changes on the interface. After the plugin was finally running, I made some first performance tests and debugged all SERIOUS problems (no crashing anymore ;-)). Physical problems I'll be first able to detect, when I've written some rendering methods, to watch the cloud evolution itself.

After now, I'm going to check out all the rendering stuff. So till then ;-)

The watermesh now has a working loader. The tags that the factory accepts within the <params> tag are as follows:

<length> The number of units long the mesh is along the z-axis.
<width> The number of units long the mesh is along the x-axis.
<gran> The number of vertices per unit length/width
<murk> The murkiness of the water
<isocean> Boolean value saying whether or not the mesh is an ocean.

The object accepts only the factory and material tags. Note that the proper material needs to be set in order for the watermesh to function properly.

-Pavel

This is a video of the ocean mesh in its current state: ocean-prelim.mpg (Note: You might have to right click and "Save Target As")

Things to do:
* Reflection/refraction
* Figure out a way to calculate normals based on wave equations
* Perspective corrected texture mapping for the normal map far away
* Get better video recording software/converters for Mac OS X

-Pavel

Hi!

This week I worked very intensly on cloud dynamics. I could improve it further I initially expected. By now all main-methods and functionallities are implemented, but not tested yet. Now I want to figure out the best way for debugging a simulation. I think a graphical approach would be the best in this case, but we'll see...

The past few weeks I've been experimenting different ways to get the little quad of water mesh I had into an ocean. My initial approach was to implement some sort of geometry as described in this paper, but I ran into a good number of problems. First off, after constructing the near patch, it wasn't too easy to integrate it into CS with a moving camera. I had to index the texture and wave generation coordinates in world space from the shaders, and that sometimes had bad effects. Also, the far patch gave me a number of problems, most of which was that it was almost impossible to find the correct transform to paste it in front of the camera. I'm not too sure how the conics in the paper mentioned above would have proved useful.

So, I decided on a new approach. A better approach. I got my idea from this paper, which employed the use of different ocean "cells," each with their own geometry. This way I was able to do some LOD calculation at the same time as I was generating the ocean waves. Since the wave generation is still based on world-space coordinates, it was easy to tile the cells and maintain a seamless ocean surface. Currently the only problem with this approach is that the texture coordinates are not accurately being set so there is noticeable "popping" when you move the camera up away from the ocean because you can see the different texture coordinates changing. I hope to get that fixed over the weekend.

-Pavel

Hi!

Yesterday I finally got the msvcgen run due to help of res, xordan, brandano and vknecht.
Afterwards I immediatly started with implementation. After some initial issues I got the existing code running and extended it.
Currently am working on various aspects of the cloud-dynamics. The basic construct is already coded, now I take care of some calculus-functions and other helper methods which are needed by the simulation.

So, after reading about tangent space and realizing that my normal maps were in it, I figured out where my lighting equations were going wrong. Consequently I was able to put all the necessary vectors into tangent space to do my lighting equations, and now we have a water that has a proper (approximated) Fresnel term and goes translucent at the correct angles, as can be seen here.

-Pavel

Hello, everyone.

I've been working on adding a water mesh plugin to CS for the past month, and I haven't really been letting the community keep up with my progress. So, I'd like to tell you all what I've done so far!

First, I started to build off of the protomesh plugin that's already in CS. This gave me a great framework for having a general factory with all of the necessary information: vertex locations, color, normals, etc. The great thing about the protomesh is that it doesn't have too much clutter in the code so it was relatively simple to figure out how everything worked with SCF and implementation details. Hence, it was fairly easy to get *some* sort of mesh going, and the next step would be to add water-like attributes to it.

This is where things started getting tricky since this is my first time doing a water effect and I had to do a lot of reading regarding reflection, refraction, Fresnel values, wave generation, fluid dynamics, etc. Finally, after I settled on this paper, I started learning about the shader system in CS.

In my Graphics course here at the University of Chicago, the term "shader" was used to mean the vertex and fragment programs that are loaded for the specific rendering step. Unfortunately this created a bit of confusion when reading the documentation for shaders in CS, so it wasn't immediately obvious how everything worked. It wasn't too long, however, until I finally realized how to define shader variables, add shader programs, and generally define a mechanism for rendering a simple water mesh.

So, with the help of sueastside, I got some ideas (and normal maps) to create a preliminary water effect. Unfortunately, after reading a few different methods for looking up or approximating the Fresnel value, it isn't terribly clear what the best way to go about implementing it in CS is. I have a few ideas that involve tactics from the aforementioned paper, but I want to have a working version of everything before I start making it all better.

So, I present to you what I have so far in the form of screen shots (or you can go check out my SVN branch). These are using the same hard coded directional light with different normal maps. =)

-Pavel

So... Since I've many exams right now, I didn't had much time to work, but I was able to steal a little bit and I put down the first Interfaces for the cloud system

Now that I've got something (as far as I've tested) working, I'll explain what the final system is turning out to be like.

Firstly; two reference files..

http://crystal.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/*checkout*/crystal/CS/branches/soc2008/threadcomm/apps/tests/threadtest/threadtest.h
http://crystal.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/*checkout*/crystal/CS/branches/soc2008/threadcomm/apps/tests/threadtest/threadtest.cpp

Start off in the header file.

Here you will see an interface; iThreadTest, and the implementation csThreadTest.

iThreadTest looks like a normal interface. Nothing new there.

You will see that csThreadTest implements ThreadedCallable. This is important, it basically allows the object instance of the class to be stored inside an event message. This message is what is sent to the thread manager and queued as a job to be executed by a thread.

In csThreadTest the functions you wish to be executed in other threads are declared with the THREADED_CALLABLE_DECX macro. You pass the class, the function name, the argument types and the argument names separately. This macro then does two things;
1) Creates a function called functionnameTC(). This is what your function will really be called.
2) Creates a function called functionname, to satisfy the implementation of the interface. This function will create a thread event based on the arguments passed to the macro and pass that thread event message to the thread manager for processing. It stores the arguments passed by copying them onto the heap and storing pointers to that data in an array.

Now look at the .cpp file.

The functions are implemented using the THREADED_CALLABLE_IMP macro. You again pass the class and function name, but this time you pass the argument type and name as a single argument, like you would declare a normal function.
This macro simply creates the function header for class::functionnameTC().

Go to the bottom where the main function is. See that the functions are called normally via the interface.

I will provide a more detailed look at how it works behind the scenes shortly.

This is going to be a quick update on what's happening now.

I'm investigating and trying out better ways to pass the data between threads, I'll write something more detailed once I'm successful in finding something good.

On the csparser side of things I've started writing the threaded loader. I'm writing it in a separate file to the current one, along with a new loader context which is also in its own file. I'm going to be writing it 'from scratch with some copy/paste', basically I'll be taking anything useful from the current loader (bottom node parsing and loading) and giving it some refactoring, then rewriting everything else which I don't think is usable.

My reasoning for doing this is that the current loader seems quite coupled, it has multiple ways of doing the same thing, functions which do more than the name suggests (and more than they should do, see last point), and lots of functions which I want to rename or change the return type of. I'm also hoping I can speed things up and make everything a little nicer on the eye while I'm at it. I won't have to worry about API breakage or altering the semantics of methods when I'm fixing resource sharing conflicts either.

Currently I'm tring to find a good design for the cloudssimulation system.

As soon as I "found" a good one, I'll start to implement first the cloud dynamics, without concenring the whole rendering stuff.

Till then

So - back to work on COLLADA conversion. I'm still reworking the 3d surface triangulation algorithm I originally wrote last summer, but with all the changes to the rendermanager and such, I've mostly been getting caught up with setting up a good testing environment. In order to isolate and identify bugs in the code I wrote, I am attempting to visualize the 3D surface triangulation using a csSimpleRenderMesh. So, once triangulated, the csTriangleMesh is converted to a csSimpleRenderMesh, and then visualized. I am having difficulty right now trying to visualize this. I can't seem to get the csSimpleRenderMesh to appear on the screen. Part of the situation was in getting the render manager set up and working, but now that seems to be finished.

I have the following code setup to perform the rendering of what (I believe) is a simple triangle:


void Tri3DTest::Frame()
{
// we want to draw result
csSimpleRenderMesh rendMesh;
rendMesh.object2world.Identity();

csVector3 verts[2];
verts[0].Set (0, 0, 0);
verts[1].Set (10.0, 0, 0);
verts[2].Set(0, 10.0, 0);

csVector4 cols[2];
cols[0].Set(1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0);
cols[1].Set(1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0);
cols[2].Set(1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0);

rendMesh.vertices = verts;
rendMesh.vertexCount = 3;
rendMesh.colors = cols;

rendMesh.meshtype = CS_MESHTYPE_TRIANGLES;
csAlphaMode alf;
alf.alphaType = alf.alphaSmooth;
alf.autoAlphaMode = false;
rendMesh.alphaType = alf;

g3d->BeginDraw(engine->GetBeginDrawFlags() | CSDRAW_3DGRAPHICS);
view->Draw();
g3d->DrawSimpleMesh(rendMesh, 0);
g3d->FinishDraw();
}


However, all I get is a black screen. I should say that a bit ago, I got a black screen. Now, I added the line view->Draw() and get a segfault. This was due (in part) to the rendermanager not being set correctly. This problem has been corrected, but I am rebuilding the Crystal Space core library at the moment, as I was previously getting a number of weird errors with walktest. Walktest displayed, but not like it did previously, without the new rendermanager code in the trunk. The level seems to be full of errors now. I thought perhaps it could be my platform, along with some weirdness in incremental linking with the msvc compiler, so I am rebuilding things just to be sure. Once this is complete, I will see if the new 3D triangulation test visualization works.

For this first entry I'll quickly go over what I'm aiming to achieve and then fill you in on what I've got done so far.

The idea is to provide an easy to use method to run member functions inside threads.
There's got to be some central management providing a queue, access methods and the framework to create the right number of threads.
There's got to be some base class to inherit from, to provide the methods needed to interact with the management.

As as test case I'm working with csLoader, with a goal to give CS some multi-threaded loading capabilities.

I've committed my test ideas to supplement this entry, so you can see exactly what I'm experimenting with at the moment.
You can see this here: http://crystal.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/crystal?view=rev&revision=29857

threadmanager.h/cpp:

In these files I've provided a singleton based thread manager. This is pretty small and simple, it combines processor detection with a ThreadedJobQueue, giving a globally accessible threadsafe queue with 'cpu/core count' number of worker threads. The only publicly visible method to interact with this queue is to enqueue jobs to it. Each 'job' is in the form of a ThreadEvent.

threadevent.h:

Here I have three things;
A macro for queueing an event.
The ThreadedCallable class which is to be inherited by classes which are to be threaded.
The ThreadEvent class which is the 'job' package containing all the information needed for the method call.

The macro simply creates a new ThreadEvent (filling it with the given information) and adds it to the global thread queue.

The ThreadedCallable class contains two methods:
GetThreadedCallable() - This is to simply query the ThreadedCallable type.
RunMethod(); - This needs to be implemented by the inheriting class. When this method is executed it should find the correct method to run based on the methodIndex and extract the arguments for this method from the args array.

The ThreadEvent class contains the object who's method should be called, the methodIndex which represents which method is to be called and the args array, which contains a copy of all the arguments to that method. When a thread pops this off the queue, it will execute the Run() method, which in turn will call the RunMethod() of the appropriate object, which will then call the desired method and call that, passing the contents of args to it.

So at the moment this is a simple callback system. I've tested it out with two methods of csLoader and it works fairly well. There are currently issues with calling multiple methods of csLoader at the same time (in some cases), which I'll deal with in future once I've finalised the system. I'm not ecstatic with how it works right now, it doesn't seem as developer-friendly as it could be (or as fast). But it's a possible implementation that I'd be content with if nothing better is found.

On the csLoader side of things, you can see that I've added on a threaded loader object. I'm unsure if this is the best way to go about it, or if I should make it an SCF query-able object (so people can do csQueryRegistry for iThreadedLoader, instead of querying for iLoader and calling GetThreadedLoader() as it is now). The way I do it now is kind of nice because technically they are the same system, the threaded bit is just a small extension. I'll need some feedback on the 'correct' way to do this.

I yelled out "No escape!" as I pounded my fists against the cushioned walls. I started to cry, but it wasn't emotional, my eyes were all bloodshot and dry from the sleep deprivation. They say it's the cause of my paranoia, but I know better. I remember well the night I last slept and the day before when my mind was only clouded with meaningless worries. I was there when it happened...

Rumbling at the door, I shuffled backwards into a corner, trapped as a bunny just sitting there, clinging at life but overcome by fear, waiting for it's predator to deal the final blow. The door swings open followed by a hollow tud when it's stopped by the wall's padding. The white coats. Did another day already pass? The two men enter the cell, but immediatly stop at the door, their shadows cast into the chamber, deformed projections whirl over the floor and walls. One of them approuches me with one hand behind his back, uttering meaningless words in a soothing voice as he comes towards me. I growl at him when he's just at my feet and try to push myself deeper into the corner.

A swift motion and he dealt the final blow, an injection needle punctured my right shoulder. "Sweet dreams." he said without barely moving his lips, not even making a dent in that grin of his, as he exited the room. The other man shut the door behind him. I heared the lock sliding and clicking in place. Are there others like me in here. Why aren't they doing anything to ... My vision became blurry, I must fight the sedative, keep my thoughts clear. Think! I tried to slap myself on the head, I was unable to move my arms, my head nodding as my neck struggled to support it's weight. A string of thoughts fading into nothingness, overwelmed by defeat, giving in to the drug.
Sedative one, me zero.

If you grew up in a small remote town like myself you'd know it has several downsides, especially if you're as old as me and missed the great video game era by a hair. Well, I'm not being completely honest about entertainment at our house. At least we had books. Every Sunday of each month we played Crazy Christians and held a great book burning much to the chagrin of the town priest whom we had nicknamed Mister Hypocrite. At this point you should have noticed my usage of the word “we”. By “we” I'm of course referring to myself and my twin brother. Obviously you're thinking that a twin brother must be great. You could simply blame things on the other if need be. Unfortunately that is a double edged blade, and worse still, mostly blunt on his side. No matter how much I hated my brother though, I still didn't want other people to hurt him. Thats a privilege I want to keep to myself. Don't let that fact mislead you though, he's definitely the evil crazy one. The craziest thing I've ever thought of was building a machine to shrink us down, so that we could hold a fair race with our pet hamster. Unfortunately what I didn't realize at the time was that humans are bipeds so even even given equal size, the hamster would still win.

Google Mentor Summit 2008

Marten (thebolt) and Scott (jwir3) just returned from the 2008 Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit, in Mountain View, California. For those of you not familiar with the Mentor Summit, it's an annual event bringing together hundreds of mentors from different open source projects (and walks of life) to discuss the Google Summer of Code, general open source software development, Google's role as an open source support organization, and numerous specific topics related to different areas of open source development.

The proceedings of the conference have not yet been made public, but as soon as they are, we'll post them here. In the meantime, check out Jwir3's Blog for some interesting pictures and comments.

---

Just a short note! DVD is done, we’re still doing some tests, and we need Campbell for final blessings, but tomorrow it will be ready to go to the DVD reproduction factory!

Printing takes 2 weeks, shipping will happen during weekend of 1-2 november, customers will then get the copy within 1 (europe) or 2 (rest of world) weeks. Exciting

---

• Blender 2.48a update: A serious bug in the GE requires a new build of the players/runtimes, which we want to include this on the DVD. Meaning our planning shifts with a week… sorry.

---

• Nov 7 update: DVD factory started printing! We expect the dvds in end of the week, and ship saturday 14th.

Its close to release and were finalizing the levels, cleaning up the files and removing smaller glitches. however there are some things that we didn’t post about because we were too busy.
Behind the exciting GLSL shaders, along with the funny animations and pretty scenery we did manage to get some gameplay in.
Here’s a video of the game Chris and myself recorded, showing some of the gameplay you can expect to see.

It might also come as news to some of you that you can play a second player - Momo - Thanks to Moraes Junior ‘mangojambo’ for making the character and all animations to match Frankies.

For more information on gamelogic and examples the DVD will include , see the ApricotBgeLogic Wiki

Download the OGG Theora (32meg)
Youtube video

With all great improvements in the Blender Game Engine we’re getting flooded with positive response all over, including professional game makers, colleges and studios. It really looks like this poor neglected part in Blender has love and attention again from everyone! A 3D creation tool combo with a GE is still a great concept, opening up new opportunities and markets for Blender artists.

I’m very happy to announce that Carsten Wartmann, writer of many Blender books and main author of the Blender Gamekit, has accepted to start working on a fully updated version of the Blender Gamekit! This project, including DTP/design by Samo Korosec, is scheduled to finish during november. Should be in time for Santa to deliver it under the Christmas trees.
The updated Gamekit will cover all new functionality, glsl materials, multilayer texture, character animation and logic states and bricks. Carsten will also clean-up the old tutorials to make them work well and add new ones, also based on Yo Frankie! As soon as the first tangible results come back from the designer, and we know more about final scheduling, we’ll add the new book in the store for pre-ordering.

As for all recent Blender Foundation/Institute products, we’ll publish it all under an open license too: the Creative Commons Attribute. The work Carsten realizes will also be provided to the wiki team.

This also means that’s it is about time to make the old Gamekit pdf + CDROM freely available too. Download the pdf and the cdrom (includes Blender 2.25) here:

http://download.blender.org/documentation/gamekit1/

Have fun! And please note that the book and .blend files were written for Blender 2.25.

-Ton-

Sometimes the world can be very big, on other times it’s small, so very small.

Sunday afternoon, after we came back from Taipei, we were invited to a hot-pot party with most of the other exchange students and some other international students as well as our new-found Taiwanese friends (who btw are the most open and best people I’ve met in a long time, they rock!).

After some time I talked to a guy from Brazil, Rodolfo, who is now living here and studying at NCTU when he said he recognized me. A short biography-review later we realized that we had met before, at RTWH in Aachen during the first Crystal Space conference there. Rodolfo used to work on the driving simulator for a year or two around 2006 so he was part of the crew hosting us there and now we meet again in a dormitory in Hsinchu. Small world.

Time for an update from the Blender Game Engine team! and guess what.. we’ve got something you can play!

Being this the first Blender Game Engine demo we publish, it will only focus on the technical side, so don’t expect big gameplay experience, in this demo we provide a small level with a few platforms and some characters running around, so you can test if the blenderplayer runs on your computer and we can have nice feedback from that.

Please check the yo_readme!.txt file, it will guide you through the controller keys, and how to setup Blender for running without some gfx features for older computers. (even a spanish version! : )

---

You can get Yo Frankie! Demo #1 right below, basically there is a version with and without GLSL, while GLSL gives you nice shaders, real time shadows and other features.. it can be very expensive, so if the game runs any slow in your computer, you should check the version without GLSL).

---

Update #2

YoFrankie! Demo 1.2!!
Updated the Source files, Linux, Windows and OSX binaries!

Release logs
- Press F1 for help!
- Fixed major slowdowns in game.
- Plenty of fixes in the GLSL side and some warnings in game.
- Updated Bullet Physics System.
- [Linux] built-in (static) libraries!: OpenAL, FreeALUT, libGCC, and Python.

Remember you can always use the source files with a recent Blender build!

---

Update #1

Updated the Linux version to use static python (so it doesn’t depends on the one installed in the computer), also doesn’t use gettext, exr, and some others.
Tagged it as 1.1 so you can keep track of which version you’re playing.

---

Linux:

• Yo Frankie! Demo 1.2 - with GLSL support - Linux 32bit [~27MB]
• Yo Frankie! Demo 1.2 - with GLSL support - Linux 64bit [~27MB]
• Yo Frankie! Demo 1.2 - No GLSL (Texture Face Mode) - Linux 32bit [~27MB]
• Yo Frankie! Demo 1.2 - No GLSL (Texture Face Mode) - Linux 64bit [~27MB]

---

Windows:

• Yo Frankie! Demo 1.2 - with GLSL support- Windows [~31MB]
• Yo Frankie! Demo 1.2 - No GLSL (Texture Face Mode) - Windows [~31MB]

---

OSX:

• Yo Frankie! Demo 1.2 - with GLSL - OSX 10.4 intel [~32 MB]
• Yo Frankie! Demo 1.2 - No GLSL - OSX 10.4 Intel [~32MB]
• Yo Frankie! Demo 1.0 - No GLSL - OSX 10.3 PPC [~30MB]

---

• Source Files: Yo Frankie! Demo 1.2 - Source Files [25MB]
  

At the right is an image you can see how the game should look with and without GLSL.

Note: If the binaries doesn’t run, you can always open the ‘.gamedata.blend’ in a very recent Blender build (trunk, not the apricot branch, built today or yesterday) and run it (the readme file is also embedded in the Text editor, so you can read it in Blender).

We want to make sure you all can play the game before we give more features away, once this demo is successful and we know it plays well in most computers, we plan to release a new demo with more gameplay and features.

We hope you enjoy it!, leave any technical problem right below, gameplay suggestions are also welcome but this time we are focusing mostly on having YoFrankie! running

Windows installer package for YoFrankie is available for testing: http://crystalspace3d.org/downloads/YoFrankie/YoFrankie.msi

The Linux packages have been updated since the last post. Currently the latest version is available through automatic downloading: go to one of the URLs listed below and follow the instructions on screen. This will download all required packages etc. onto your system and has the added advantage that the program can be kept up-to-date automatically as well - i.e. when a change is made, either to the game or CrystalSpace, the changed component is downloaded automatically (and only that) and used. (Note x86_64 users: you need a very recent version of 0install, 0.35 or newer, to run the package. That means you may have to install that manually on some distros.)

Available variants of the Linux packages:

• http://crystalspace3d.org/downloads/YoFrankie/YoFrankie.xml
• http://crystalspace3d.org/downloads/YoFrankie/YoFrankie-MQ.xml (no shadows)
• http://crystalspace3d.org/downloads/YoFrankie/YoFrankie-LQ.xml (no shadows or reflections)
• http://crystalspace3d.org/downloads/YoFrankie/YoFrankie-VLQ.xml (no shadows or reflections, reduced lighting quality)
• http://crystalspace3d.org/downloads/YoFrankie/YoFrankie-VHQ.xml (additional bloom and HDR)

You can now test the Linux (well, for Intel machines) packages for the “CrystalSpace Edition” of YoFrankie. There are basically two ways to obtain it:

• Automatic downloading: go to http://crystalspace3d.org/downloads/YoFrankie/YoFrankie.xml and follow the instructions on screen. This will download all required packages etc. onto your system and has the added advantage that the program can be kept up-to-date automatically as well - i.e. when a change is made, either to the game or CrystalSpace, the changed component is downloaded automatically (and only that) and used. (Note x86_64 users: you need a very recent version of 0install, 0.35 or newer, to run the package. That means you may have to install that manually on some distros.)
• One big package: download http://crystalspace3d.org/downloads/YoFrankie/YoFrankie_run.sh, set it to executable and run it. This is also the file that will go onto the DVD.

These packages were made using 0install which is really pleasant to work with. Also, check out their web page if you want to know what it does to your system (in short: nothing, it won’t mess with your installed software) or anything else.

Update, 2008-09-03: I added a 0install feed that runs YoFrankie without shadows: http://crystalspace3d.org/downloads/YoFrankie/YoFrankie-MQ.xml (this supercedes the tweak posted earlier in this space). Also, watch this space, more updates to the packages will follow. (No big package for now … a new one will be made later. Right now I don’t want to upload 100MB or so every time something small is changed, bear with me.)

Update, 2008-09-03, #2: http://crystalspace3d.org/downloads/YoFrankie/YoFrankie.xml was updated to use a newer (faster) build of the engine which also includes the Ogg Vorbis libraries some people found missing.

Update, 2008-09-10: Another engine update with a few fixes. Also, some additional “quality levels” are available: http://crystalspace3d.org/downloads/YoFrankie/YoFrankie-LQ.xml - “low quality” without reflections, http://crystalspace3d.org/downloads/YoFrankie/YoFrankie-VLQ.xml - “very low quality” with only per vertex lighting. On the other end of the scale, http://crystalspace3d.org/downloads/YoFrankie/YoFrankie-VHQ.xml adds some bloom and HDR.

Small note: if you use 0launch on the command line use the ‘-r’parameter to make sure you see the latest version. If you use the GUI, use “Manage Programs” and the “Update or change version” button to select the latest version. Just so you don’t end up with an older version while thinking you use the latest.

As on special request (thanks for the hint Bart!) I decided to organize a small party for the last Apricoters (Chris & Pablo & Brecht). Just intimous, for those who were involved and dropping in regular anyway! But nevertheless, it was awesome and give the team the right incentive and drive to make the final presentation a perfect premiere!

In the vimeo clip you can see a complete 6 minute walktrhough the main  game levels. This, plus more goodies is going to be finalized on the DVD. Hopefully in 2 weeks it’s ready for print. End of september we then can ship it to everyone!

by the way! you can start pimping your desktop with our quick-made wallpapers :), check them out!
This is PSP sized, needed to do it

Wallpaper: 800×600
Wallpaper: 1024×768
Wallpaper: 1280×800
Wallpaper: 1280×1024
Wallpaper: 1680×1050

Chris flies back tomorrow, Pablo the day after…. <sob>. Thanks Chris, thanks Pablo, you’ve been great to work with! Good luck!

-Ton-

As usual, we will thank the the early dvd-pre-sale sponsors with a prominent credit. There will be a special section on the DVD, but also in the game itself!

On the link below you can find the dvd pre-sale sponsors, who have ordered and paid before we started in February (but we’ve been flexible a bit!).

http://www.yofrankie.org/?page_id=316

Please check for errors! If your name is missing, please email me (ton at blender org), preferably with order ID from blender shop. Thanks!

-Ton-

(Note: some names don’t start with capitals yet, or are capitalized entirely, will be fixed. There will be also no nicknames, nor corporate names added!)

Here are the latest environment shots from the island and the lava levels, with shadow maps(shadows+ao), and props all around like grass that’s the wrong color green, flowers, mushrooms, logs, etc.. There are things that still need to be finished, like fx(note the lava platforms are supported now!), water, lighting, sky, and animated WATER. Make some noise if you’d like to see Brecht add a decent alternative to animation maps for animated textures! No promises, but he’s thinking about it.

I’ll finish up with these levels this weekend and then next week is a big week. Everything starts getting wrapped up into a complete package. Pablo starts working on documentation, Campbell is finishing up with enemy AI, and now we’ve even got pesky rats running around! Moraes Junior (aka mangojambo) has been making brilliant animations and will continue with this too. Next week we’ll be posting a video or two showing some special effects and gameplay.

So.. the project is coming to an end. Today is 10th, Chris’ flight is August 30th, and mine is 31th, that makes 20 days of work from now, we made a daily schedule till the very last day.

With the time we have from now, we managed to split it in a way we could continue wrapping up the game, and still have enough time to invest in the most important aspect of the Apricot Open Game Project, Documentation!

Basically, on my side I will be working one more week (next one) in the game itself, then move completely to work full day on Tutorials/Documentation (the week after), then the last week will be for making the design for the DVD and content. On Chris’ side, he will work on the game for a bit more, since now there is mostly work to do in the Logic/Python and special effects, something he is very good on with the online help of Campbell who is working from home back in Australia, he’s the most busy of all of us i think, among all the additions to Blender and fixes, he made literally magic with the logic, making the gameplay a charm, oh and by the way he already got the BlenderPlayer to work! So Runtimes are possible now with GLSL and complicated Python stuff (Mathutils), all in one double-click-and-run file!

So, as said before, the most important aspect of the project is Documentation, because “ok.. is very nice to have this little game and characters and everything, now you say we could make our own levels and expand the game with more episodes, but how do you expect us to do that?”, and not only that, because you, the people, the main sponsors, need to have something back for your support, not only the finished game but a lot of documentation and tutorials up-to-date with all the new features in Blender, and clear instructions in how to proceed to make new stuff.

At this point, thinking about the DVD content, what is the best way to keep this project as open as it is now? and make it *more* open?, let’s ask them what they want to have in the DVD!, we are not making it for ourselves, we are making it for them!.

So here is the list of tutorials we have in mind till now, tell us what you think about them and drop any suggestions for new ones. We have scheduled to work on them the week after this one, so there is time to think about.

Me (Pablo):

• Lighting: Baking Lightmaps, AAO, Shadows..
• Characters: Pipeline, how to make from scratch the modeling, texturing, simple rigging, shapekeys (ipodrivers) in real time, linking. Tips.
• Overview through new features (there are so many! in UV editor, mesh editing, animation wise, GLSL and sooo on). Tips & Tricks.
• Logo?

Chris:

• Trees: *huge* topic in Game development, making trees from scratch, texturing them, optimizations.
• Extend YoFrankie!: Explanation in what you need to make a new level, put all the assets on, enemies, power-ups, making ledges to grab on, loop-the-loops, and sooo on.
• Overview through new features in the BGE, GLSL, splatting, etc.

Campbell:

• Overview of Frankie’s logic - Explain each state, property and object in frankies group.
• Break Frankie’s logic into 5-10 blend files each with an element of frankies logic, so its not as confusing.
• Tutorial on adding a new action - we have tailwhip, kick, throw, you might want to add another
• Enemies, overview of their logic - how to use the same logic for multiple enemies, adding some variation.
• New features in logic bricks and python api, and now we used them.
• If this doesn’t take too long Ill go into details for the enemies and do some screencasts too.
• There is some overlap with game logic and level design, Chris and I will share this.

Now is your turn to tell us what you think about this list, and don’t hesitate in leaving your suggestions for more tutorials/documentation.

On the Crystal Space side, Dariusz and Frank already made tutorials, that you will find in the DVD, covering Scripting (main character, NPC’s, interaction), Linking, Shaders making, and so on.
But feel free to suggest/request CS-related tutorials anyway. There’s some chance Frank or Dariusz might have time for them.

Is your DVD! you choose what to have inside, and if it is still not yours, go grab your copy here! and support this project, by the way the new Yo Frankie! t-shirts are already in the e-shop, among with the brand new design for the Blender ones.

That’s all folks!
venomgfx

PS: First picture: my schedule, slowly starts to get more annotations on it, next to it is my Pocoyo toy I got back in Barcelona, and the reason why I’m awake most of the time.. Coffee!, Red Bull and the nice caffeine gums I got from the guys in Denmark (yes, they are legal).

Last weekend I’ve been out of the Blender Institute, spending it in what would be a presentation of Yo Frankie! on the Game Development Campus 2008, in the University of Aalborg, Denmark.

The goal of the Camp was to share ideas about games, get to know each other, make groups, and then each group (7 groups in total, with 6 people each) will have to develop a game for the end of the week, using Blender as the Game Engine where all the games will run.

It ended up being lot more than that!  met a lot of people and made very good friends over there.

But the good news are that they are releasing all the games under the Creative Commons license! quoted from the Press Release:

“Inspired by the open-source game project, Yo Frankie!, all the teams have decided to release their games under the Creative Commons license.
The teams decide on the specifics for the licenses individually. This means that the games created at the summer camp will be made available on the website, along with all the code, 3D models and textures. All the games will run on all operating systems (Mac, Linux and Windows).”

And is all thanks to you people for making this game as Open as it is, sharing characters, animations, textures, and helping with constant feedback.

Also, the Game Development Camp is going to be giving away each student in the camp a copy of Yo Frankie!, and the Essential Blender book. Isn’t that awesome?

Sadly I had to hop back to Amsterdam and couldn’t spend the entire week there, we have to finish a game here!, but I will love to attend next year

Here you can see the Official Press Release.

Games OnLine!:
Check them out here.

Each game have its own section there, where you can see:

• Group’s Blog (Danish)
• Download Source Code (.blend file)
• Download Game (.zip)
  It’s .exe, but they run perfectly under Wine, however you can always download the blend file and press P, or save your own runtime file.

Updated the Press section in this site as well.

Thanks to everyone there, I had a great experience and learned a lot, see you next year!
(charlieee!)

With a good Mexican dinner, and the Dutch premiere of WALL-E, we’ve said goodbye to four of the Blender Institute crew.

Margreet Riphagen, Blender Institute producer for a year, accepted a great job at the Institute of Network Cultures. It’s also in Amsterdam center, so we’ll see her around regularly!
Campbell Barton, Blender developer and TD , went back to his girls in Melbourne Australia. He’ll be working wrapping up Apricot remotely for a month, at least.
Dariusz Dawidowski, 3D game artist and level designer, goes back today to his hometown in Poland. He’ll help wrapping up the Crystal Space game level(s) during next month.
Frank Richter, Crystal Space 3D engine developer, already found another room to live in Amsterdam, he’ll keep coding on CS and is currently seeking for a game developer job in Amsterdam (know any? contact him!).

Thanks a lot Margreet & guys! we’ll miss you!

Currently still here: Chris + Pablo to wrap up the Apricot project, Brecht to do cool coding work, and myself… in a week I’ll leave for Siggraph, and when I’m back we should pick up the mythical 2.5 coding project…

Picture: see us walking to the restaurant in the cool new Apricot memorial Yofrankie shirts! People from left to right: Frank, Chris, Dariusz, Brecht, Campbell, Ton, Pablo (half), 2nd picture: Chris, Campbell, Pablo. More pictures in Gallery)

Grab the OGG Theora file (46mb)
Chris made this video of our latest level. We’re frantically finishing off as much as we can, adding…

• Tailwhip, (thanks William for the animation)
• Sheep that can bounce, explode, drown.
• Loop the loops
• Continuing level design
• Additions to Sheep and Frankie logic
• Effects and pickups

enjoy!

Meet Ramiro the Ram! our new character, actually it is there since a while ago but now is time to put it in game.
He is the male sheep, the Ram protector of all Mandy’s around, and will not hesitate in hitting if you get too close to them!

This week we got the sheep game (catching, throwing, animations, etc) working at a level we can move on to other games, like the piranha, rat, buck, turtle? and its logic.
But still there is a lot of things to do/tweak in our levels/hud/effects and here is where we can use your help, we have this character, the Ram, but no animations still, there are scheduled for the next week (not the one that starts tomorrow monday), so we thought that with the nice response we had with the “Animate Frankie!” post, we could try this again and let people contribute with their own animations so when the next week starts we have some already there, for tweaking/integrating and some nice extra time to work on the levels or make even more animations, we can always re-schedule

What are we looking for?, this character doesn’t have any animations yet, so we can use any kind, but most needed are:

• WalkCycle
• RunCycle
• Idle animations
• Hit / being hit (by a nut)
• Being kicked
• Death animation
• Drowning
• Charging to hit with the horns, pissed off animations, everything you think will fit to this character.

Grab the .blend file here. (Packed, ~1.2Mb). Animating at 40 frames per second (like Frankie’s) will work.
Nothing really fancy on it so should work with recent builds of Apricot, that you can find at GraphicAll, thanks to our build monkeys, also the Apricot branch (linux) have an special place in the “Automated Builds” section, under “Current Hot Branches”.

* You don’t have to leave your .blend file always, you can use Vimeo (good)/YouTube (bad) to upload the OpenGL videos (?) there, and we can ask for the .blend file later (you may want to do some tweaking before release or so).

As a side note, if you’re not an animator and would like to contribute with any other stuff (modeling, texturing, etc). Check the “Contribute your own stuff!” thread we created at blender.org forums and leave your questions/thoughts there.

That’s all! looking forward to what you blenderheads do with this character, hope you like it!
(Feliz Día del Amigo!)

There is an open ftp space on blender.org. It works like this:
ftp to: download.blender.org
user: anonymous
password: your email address

When logged in, go to the directory ‘incoming’. What you put there is visible here:
http://download.blender.org/ftp/incoming/
This upload space deletes all old files after a couple of weeks, so don’t use it for permanent storage.

The main priority for game engine drawing at this point is optimization. We’re trying to get the Blender game engine version of the game to run on as many computers as possible, as long as the graphics card supports GLSL. Different graphics cards and drivers can give quite different results, so to get a clear overview of where the issues are, we need your help! We’ve prepared a .blend file that outputs graphics card information and performance statistics. It’s the same as the demo posted earlier, with some small modifications, so it’s not indicative of the graphics or performance in the final game, but it tests the different features. All you need to do is open it in a recent Blender build of the Apricot branch, look for builds of revision 15606 or newer. Such builds can be found on:

• GraphicAll
• Zoo-Blender

Then it is simply a matter of pressing the “P” button and waiting for the test to finish, which should take less than a minute. Don’t hide the window or move other windows over it, this can influence the benchmark. If all goes well, a .txt file will written next to the .blend file. Then paste the contents in the comments, it should look something like this:

Blender: Built on 2008-07-15 23:51:45, Rev-15567:15576M
Platform: linux2
GPU: NVIDIA Corporation, GeForce 8800 GTS/PCI/SSE2
Driver: 2.1.2 NVIDIA 169.12
Window: 1919 x 1071 pixels
Multisample: 0 buffers, 0 samples

201.878466 FPS (glsl)
183.899693 FPS (glsl, lights)
176.714724 FPS (glsl, lights, extra_textures)
171.587703 FPS (glsl, lights, shaders, extra_textures)
166.894360 FPS (glsl, lights, ramps, shaders, extra_textures)
150.053853 FPS (glsl, lights, shadows)
100.538329 FPS (glsl, lights, shaders, shadows, ramps, extra_textures)

If something goes wrong, screenshots, errors from the console or backtraces are welcome. If you want to paste long texts, please use PasteAll. Let’s try to keep the comments clean to get a nice overview of the different graphics cards and do project discussion and feature requests in other blog posts. Thanks!

Download benchmark .blend file (57.4 MB)

Additionaly, some documentation on GLSL materials is now available.

Yo!, we got a name:  Yo Frankie!: A Furry Vendetta

People voted for this names (ain’t open source beautiful? =), and we sorted them out like: Yo Frankie! the main name, and “A Furry Vendetta” as the name of this episode, now is your time to start thinking/making the next episodes :)  Yo Frankie: “Point Blank Frank”, or “The Rise Of Frank” are the most voted, pick which one is going to be the name of your own level (s)!

You can download our new logo in all this flavours:
Big 3DLogo, with background - 1440×810px
Big 3D Logo, no background (alpha) - 887×670px

2D Yo Frankie! Logo - Small Size / Bully Size
2D Yo Frankie! Text - Small Size / Bully Size
2D Frankie Icon - Small Size / Bully Size

.zip file with all this (~2.2mb).

Peace.

Production with the bge is taking off. We’re really motivated by how enthusiastically the blender community received the news about using the bge in this project. I’ve had my doubts as to how many people were actually interested in the bge, but evidently there are a quite lot of you. Make more noise!

We’re making all new levels for the bge game, and we’re bringing in new characters. Campbell is finishing up the game logic for Frankie, and then shifts focus to implementing enemies and animals to bully. By the beginning of August we’ll be wrapping this game up into a complete package with menus, etc.

We’ve also gone over the animation submissions! The animations we decided on using in the game are:
Marcus Feital’s “Sleep Idle”
Mango Jambo’s “Show Off” Idle
Joshua Huf’s throwing and minor damage
Glenn Melenhorst’s run cycle

Thanks guys! Great work. Mango Jambo, for crediting you, is that your real name, because that would be awesome.

Now below are some wip screenshots from our first level in the bge. The environment is missing enemies, plants, ground props, special effects, and all importantly, shadow/ambient occlusion maps.

Today we setup a read only mirror of the database were using here in the studio that will be synchronized daily.
This contains all the content created for apricot so far. The initial download size is large but updating will not take so long.

Commands for getting our svn repository.

# Checkout entire repository ~950meg
svn checkout svn://download.blender.org

# Or for one dir
svn checkout svn://download.blender.org/pro

# Log of all the commit messages
svn log -v svn://download.blender.org | less

# Update, cd to the apricot directory
svn update

Windows users can grab. http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org

News feed from the SVN Server

Blender Game Engine

These files can be played with the blender game engine alone.
You’ll need a recent version of blender apricot branch - www.graphicall.org
Chris’s level “svn://download.blender.org/pro/bge/levels/level_1_home.blend”

VenomGFX’s level “svn://download.blender.org/pro/bge/levels/level_piranhaland.blend“

Franky model and game logic “svn://download.blender.org/pro/bge/chars/franky.blend”

Crystal Space

For theCrystal Space side you need the latest trunks (ie development version) of Crystal Space, CEL and blender2crystal:

# Crystal Space
svn co http://crystalspace3d.org/svnroot/crystal/CS/trunk CS_latest
# CEL
svn co http://crystalspace3d.org/svnroot/cel/cel/trunk CEL_latest
# Blender2Crystal
svn co https://b2cs.delcorp.org/svn/blender2crystal/trunk blender2crystal

For Crystal Space, building instructions for various platforms can be foundin its online manual. CEL requires a successfully set up Crystal Space. Blender2Crystal has its own installation instructions.

Also, once you have checked out the Apricot SVN, look into the docs/tutorials/ directory, it also contains instructions on setting things up in CrystalSpace.

(more…)

Project targets

As posted here four weeks ago, we have to be realistic about the deliverables of Apricot. A lot of our technical targets will be met, but the main target “create full functional industry quality game prototype” had to be reworded less ambitious… (depends on what you consider “industry quality” of course!).

The deal is that the team now works on two parallel content targets;

• a full functional level in the CS engine, focused on visual quality, speed and character-environment interactions.
• several levels in the Blender GE, focused on artistic quality and game play prototyping.

The reason for this was mostly because the pipeline from Blender to CS wasn’t efficient enough to give the artists a satisfying workflow. It proved to be more efficient to do design and game prototyping in the Blender GE.
On the CS side it was evident there was much more time needed to get the main character at playable level.

The re-found enthusiasm for the Blender GE was received very well by the Blender community. It is quite evident that this part in Blender has a lot of potential… but still more as an artists’ tool than as a final delivery platform for “industry quality games”. For that, a good export to specialized game engines like CS remains important, something we’ll have to keep working on to make that well possible!

A more detailed review with problem analysis and recommendations for future development will be delivered later, also as part of the Apricot docs on the final DVDs.

Current status:

• This weekend we will make Apricot svn available for everyone.
• Currently Frank and Darius wrap up the CS part, meaning a lot of documentation but also work on porting, players and installation issues.
• Pablo Martin has already left, by the end of the month Campbell, Frank and Darius will leave too (we’ll do a goodbye dinner with Wall-E visit!).
• Chris and Pablo Vazquez will stay another month. They want to deliver several playable levels in the the Blender GE, but especially will take care of a good quality DVD presentation of the entire project.
• Brecht also stays here, he will ensure Blender’s new GLSL will work on as many platforms possible.
• Darius will work from home during august on final game tweaks

Oh, and the game title has been decided on… wait for the logo and graphics to be updated soon…

[WIP - PRELIMINARY WORK] The implementation work on the GSoC AI project has commenced, however this is just to give people a more specific idea of the API the cpp file contains mostly stub functions. Certain features and other details are missing. This has not been committed to svn, because honestly i don’t think it is [...]

Here is short movie showing current progress of the game. You can see fishes for example, how they know where to swim ? It’s possible to make environment collision sensor but common solution in the gamedev world in this situation is navigation graph. Games are always cheating, don’t trust them Game needs to convince player that something looks natural but hidden method is always something easy to use/easy to compute. Fishes also trying to not to swim too close to each other, but not to far ! Sheep also using same herd algorithm included in the Crystal Entity Layer.

Navigation graph for sheep:

Movie:

Apricot: Crystal Space GamePlay (July 2008) from Pablo Vazquez on Vimeo.

Status Report 10/07/2008 Even though college exams have taken over my life for the time being, not all has stopped in the GSoC front. Here is an update of what I have done so far, and a workplan for the future weeks. During the past weeks since the official start of the GSoC project, i dedicated my [...]

“Hola!, this is Pablo..”, that’s the first thing I say in this video that tries to explain a couple of effects I came up with the last week, playing around with shading nodes in real time.

The thing was that Mist option is still not supported in GLSL, how can I work around this?, Nodes! the great “Camera Data” is an input node that let you use information from the camera view to play with, such as the View Vector, View Z Depth, and View Distance (which is the one i’m using in this video). After playing for a while, I found out that this method was much more better than the boring Mist!

I ended up using this method for effects such as:

• MultiColor Mist:  Color in front of the camera is more peachy, slightly noticeable, then more far away is a bit orange/red, and veery far away the color tries to mix with the sky.

• SunRays: Just planes with a bright alpha texture, the trick is made by the View Distance factor of the camera, changing the alpha to zero when you get close to them, or far away from them (you don’t want to always see sunrays).

• ChangeAlpha: for walking through trees leaves in a way that they don’t block the view, they have a node setup that makes them alpha zero when they get close to the camera, so you can see through.

Here the video:

Download the OGG version. (~30mb)

Nothing of this is actually new, you can do this for rendering since past year, and for GLSL is also there since weeks, so you can play with this by using any barely recent build.

* by the way, expect more videotutorials like this one (but better explained, better quality, etc), in the Apricot DVD!

That’s all folks! Enjoy!

Crystal Space has been nominated for the SourceForge Community Awards 2008. There are multiple categories and Crystal Space has been nominated in the ‘Best Project for Gamers’ category. If you like Crystal Space then I would like to invite you to take a little of your time to vote for us. If we win it would be a huge publicity boost and I think that would be in the benefit of anyone who would like to use Crystal Space for games. However, if you DON’T like Crystal Space then you can still vote for us. I’m not going to stop you

To vote for Crystal Space please visit this link and follow the appropriate steps.

Thanks a lot for your support!

Thanks to your support Crystal Space has been nominated as a finalist in the category 'Best Project for Gamers'. You can now vote for Crystal Space at this location. Thanks a lot for your support.

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Chris just posted a poll on blenderatrist for the game name, here are some we came up with.

• footloose frank -chris
• frankie does hard time -chris
• frankie raids the warren -campbell
• frankie’s ethnic cleansing -anonymous
• frankie’s jungle conflict resolution -chris
• frankie’s park of pain -campbell
• frankie’s reign of terror -campbell
• frankie’s tail whipping turmoil -campbell
• frankie’s war on everything -campbell
• frankie’s war on terror -chris
• frankie vs. the volcano -chris
• frank unleashed -chris
• furry fury frankie -dariusz
• furry vendetta -sago
• point blank frank -campbell
• the rise of frank -frank
• yo frankie! -ton

Vote for your favourite at blenderartist

Res making Franky on water.

Download the OGG Video (44 meg)
Venom showing his piranha level he made.

Download the OGG Video (22 meg)

Dariusz giving a short demo of Apricot powered by Crystal Space, coming soon!