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1

Game design / Re: Can anyone suggest a primer on 3D

« on: January 13, 2011, 01:10:19 AM »

Highly recommend the new 2.5x versions of Blender 3D (at time of writing, current version is 2.56a Beta) - it's still in beta release but extremely stable (don't go near the 2.49b version - the user interface is archaic and you will struggle even more).

For training, check out Blender Cookie and Blender Guru. Very good video training.

All are free so you haven't spent a penny, dime or whatever!

Hope that helps.

2

Software and games / Re: YouTube Adventure Game Reviews (mostly) [updated 16/03/10]

« on: March 16, 2010, 01:48:05 PM »

Adventurer4Life, these are phenomenal vids! Really great to watch and, despite your protestations, they're very professionally put together. You know your subject matter and it shows. What I really like about them is that you give a lot of background information (history, making of, key players, etc.) and it's done at a perfect pace with a nicely pitched voice over. Being a DVD extras junkie, this seems the perfect format to feed a similar habit of documenting the history of the games being covered.

All I can do is implore you to make more - you obviously know what you're doing!

3

Game announcements / Re: ● mif2000's Gamelet

« on: March 09, 2010, 05:31:23 PM »

Congrats mif2000! Takes a lot of dedication to make it to the end of a project. Look forward to seeing Gamelet in broad daylight!

4

Game announcements / Re: Fiona's fairy tale - dev thread

« on: September 18, 2009, 07:14:32 PM »

Fantastic artistic style Buchmaler. Eerie - I like!! Can't wait to see more.

5

Game announcements / Re: Gamelet

« on: May 15, 2009, 07:16:23 PM »

Your style is absolutely great, mif2000 - reminds me of Ren & Stimpy crossed with Samorost (and maybe even a dash of The Neverhood).

Is it using Wintermute as the game engine or is it something else like Flash?

Can't wait to seeing more on this. Looks nice and weird, which is never a bad thing.

6

Technical forum / Re: theora video with transparencies (alpha)?

« on: January 31, 2008, 03:26:16 PM »

Yup, I'm afraid so - it's one alpha mask per ogg animation. Make sure your alpha is 32 bit colour resolution.

See this thread for more talk on it (scroll down a few posts):
http://forum.dead-code.org/index.php?topic=1738.0
It has a code example, etc.

It's something you'd use for putting, say, rippling water or a rolling sky into a scene.

For your gun totting animation (I was going to add in shootin' tootin' but that seemed a bit too much ) you'd probably be better off drawing/rendering out each frame with a transparent background (PNG or TGA) and then creating an animated WME sprite with them. If it's a one off anim, you could have the character and object in the same image - no need to do two different sprites (just remember to remove the object from the scene once the anim kicks off). Think of it as a cartoon animation cell.

7

Feature requests, suggestions / Re: Gamepad support

« on: October 04, 2006, 06:18:03 PM »

Could be a good addition to WME. Don't know if it's widely apparent but the XBox360 wired controller is XP and Vista compatible (it has a USB connection). Looks like it's on the way to becoming the standard controller for PC gamers. Even though I don't have an XBox I got one of its controllers and it works great. It's not that expensive either.

Microsoft have an XP driver for the controller downloadable from their site. I had some issues with it on some games but I haven't checked back in a while and I'm sure there will be regular updates as soon as Vista comes along.

I'm currently using an alternative driver called XBCD (http://www.redcl0ud.com/xbcd.html).

There is even a way to convert existing games for use with any controller using a tool called ControlMK (http://www.redcl0ud.com/controlmk/). It allows you to map keyboard keys to the controller. You might need to restart ControlMK to make changes take effect but your games should play on the controller once you have it configured (you'll probably have to play around with the settings, such as

8

Technical forum / Re: Iterate Through All Entities in a Scene

« on: October 03, 2006, 01:08:45 PM »

Thanks Mnemonic - exactly what I was looking for!

WME didn't like the 'int' declaration in the for line.

Code: [Select]

for(int i=0; i<MainLayer.NumNodes; i=i+1)
Replaced it with 'var' instead and works a treat.

Code: [Select]

for(var i=0; i<MainLayer.NumNodes; i=i+1)

9

Technical forum / Iterate Through All Entities in a Scene

« on: October 03, 2006, 03:23:18 AM »

Hi,

Anyone have any suggestions on how I cycle through all the entities in a scene without knowing what they might be? I use a particular entity naming convention and want to apply certain code to all entities that, for example, have a name that starts with 'abc' (there could be 'abc1', 'abc2', 'abc_i_am_a_monkey', etc.).

Part of this will probably involve using the Substring method.

I've looked through the docs but nothing's jumping out at me. What I need is a collection or array or similar to work with. Is there some sort of a variation of GetNode?

Cheers.

10

Technical forum / Re: Theora questions

« on: September 24, 2006, 11:36:45 PM »

What colour depth have you saved the AlphaImage in? Try increasing it and see if that works any better (e.g. 32 bit depth). The AlphaImage definitely does work.

Yes, it's a wee bit odd that you're still getting borders with multiples of 8. I guess ffmpeg2theora is a bit finicky. I think it's a matter of playing around until you get something that works. It shouldn't really matter that much about the exact size because the good thing about using the mask is that you don't have to stick to the multiple of 8 for the video size - the mask can edit out the unwanted extra pixels.

11

Technical forum / Re: Theora questions

« on: September 24, 2006, 01:46:06 PM »

This may not be ideal but it is one way around your resize problem with ffmpeg2theora (which can only resize to output dimensions that are multiples of 8 even if you specify other dimensions). Try using an AlphaImage mask of the entity PlayTheora method to remove the unwanted extra borders due to the resizing limitation of ffmpeg2theora.

Open your favourite art package and create your alpha mask to the same 'oversized' dimension of your video (i.e. with it's unwanted black border). Use black for the video area you want to keep and leaving whatever area you want removed as the transparent alpha channel (possibly the very bottom and/or very right pixels). Save your image as a png and then specify it as the AlphaImage in your video entity's PlayTheora method.

Yeah, you might have a few extra pixels that are never seen but it shouldn't be a huge overhead (less that 8 pixels in width and height).