Omnimaga
General Discussion => Technology and Development => Computer Projects and Ideas => Topic started by: Builderboy on November 05, 2009, 12:57:42 pm
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So a contest has just started in a java community I am a part of, and I am planning to submit to it :) The due date is December 4th, so I have a little under a month to complete my game. I have already begun the engine and storyline, and some of the early releases can be seen Here:
http://greenfootgallery.org/scenarios/1035
The game will have a unique aspect involving realistically casted shadows, which will make up the a large part of the gameplay. The engine also sports a tilemapper to create large worlds. The characters and enemies will be driven by a bone based armature system which will allow characters to be composed of multiple limbs and objects. The objects can be connected via parenting and childing of objects, and parents rotation effects the childs. The demo scenario for this can be seen here:
http://greenfootgallery.org/scenarios/1034
The game is going to be a very dark game, with environmental overtones to fit in with the theme of the contest. I am going to keep in storyline until me and my fellow designer solidify the plot.
Unfortunately, the object system I have built into the shadow engine does not support rotation, which is imperative for the armature system to work, so i will need to do a complete rewrite of the object-shadow system and possible use the new features to expand the tilemapping shadow system as well.
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Mhmm very interesting, will you have something like Blinded By The Darkness for the TI-86? Where you could only see certain parts of the map depending of where you were?
Also your first engine seems to handled a lot of objects at once o.o. Here's what boredon caused below: :P
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Wow, nice! Thats a lot of objects O.O. How much lag was it getting?
I didn't know about that game! It looks really cool, and has kinda the same concept as this game is going to have. Altough I think this one is going to have a lot more action and such :) (and be faster, i heard that game was slow x.x)
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Nice work on this. I'm impressed.
Was fun to play around with for awhile even before it's an actual game.
I'm looking forward to more of this soon. =P
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Thanks ^^ I have a task ahead of me though, because i need to rewrite the shadow engine x.x
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On this one, I did not get random freezings every few seconds like your racing game. Also until it reached like 1000+ objects I still got like 30+ fps. At the time I did the screenshot I got like 10-15 fps, if I examined it in action carefully. Only some very small slow downs at times
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Wow, thats fantastic! Although I'm not sure the new engine will be as forgiving, it now supports object rotation and so will be able to support a lot less objects (still a fair amount though, and not all will need rotation).
So now I need to work rigging the character and getting his movements all nice and smooth :)
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I can't wait to see a game using the engine in action ^^
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Hooray! The character is rigged and has nice and fluid movements! ;D
http://greenfootgallery.org/scenarios/1034
It took a bit of time to get all the hip switching and strafing working correctly, but I really like the outcome!
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Nice ^^, now I see what you mean about rotating taking much more CPU ressources, though :(, I get max FPS, but every 0.5 seconds it seems to skip frames
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Wait, on the character scenario? It takes up a lot less resources than the shadow scenario, even with rotation. I am starting to think this frame skipping has a different cause thank high cpu resouces :/ I'm confused :(
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Well the stuff I tried in your first post seemed to run pretty smooth, but that last thing you posted runs at choppy framerate. I also tried your platformer here: http://greenfootgallery.org/scenarios/573 and every 3 or 4 second it would completly freeze for one entire second, making one of the level nearly impossible. I tried running it in high priority mode and it still did that, which makes me think it's just way too much for my 5 years old computer and 4 years old video card. I also tried to run it in real time mode through task manager instead of normal or high priority but that would completly freeze the computer
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D: Now I'm really confused, because one of the links in the fist post was almost exactly the same as the most recent link x.x Well, I guess Greenfoot is just a high priority thing :P. It sux that you can't run it though.
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Yeah I wish it ran faster, maybe the libraries or whatever it uses might be too much for my comp x.x
At least some stuff runs ok, it just gets annoying when trying to beat a level of something and you expect to succeed in jumping on the last platform then halfway through the jump, it freezes and you fall into the hole.
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Alright, I have been working on getting the bone class to extend my ShadowActor class corectly, so that i can use my bone system in The Darkness. it is going well, but I am trying to find a better solution to the rotation issue, possible involving custom filled polygons.
On another note, I may or may not be changing the name to: Death of the Shadows :)
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Cool ^^
Is it updated on Greenfoot now?
I can't wait to see a full demo in action though, instead of just engines :P
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Not yet. I am waiting until I get the mosters working to do an update :)
Me and my friend have been working on the opening cut-scene intro thing, and it should be awesome, as well as finaly introducing the story. I want to get it out soon so i can oficially enter the contest
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Ah ok, keep us updated :)
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I have bad news, I can't keep up enough speed to make this run reasonably with the armature class in place. With just 4 or 5 mosters, it starts to lag below 30 FPS, and this is on my new computer. Even with shadows disabled for objects, a new recursive shadow mapper that was twice as efficient, and polygon based shadow mapping, i still couln't get past 8-10 monsters. This destroys the type of gameplay i wanted, where monsters cast shadows, and you can't see beyond walls, and I can find no way to make this work. Even if i did, i don't have enough time before the contest is due.
I am going to switch games and work on a different/easier game. This project is dead until i can find out how to make it faster :(
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ouch that sucks :S, seems like the libraries or the language might be a bit too slow x.x (but again, I did saw complex java games before running at high fps). I hope you eventually find a solution, though. I also hope you have some time to enter something else to the contest
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Good luck with your new project. :)