Pixel Perfect

I'm no MS fanatic Lumooja, but nither am I so deluded as to believe that everything MS does is bad and part of some evil plot! If you're an example of what we are all to evolve into Lumooja then god help us all, the human race is doomed

Well thats exactly how I do it! I wrote a small function that takes two vec3s for the positions and uses pythagoras to work out the distance returning the float. Failing that, you could temporarily position a pivot entity at that position and use that in the EntityDistance function.

lol yet another pointless 'lets bash MS' statement from the king of pointless statements! It doesn't teach you to be a bad programmer at all. Who's in charge of the code ... you or the IDE If you are a bad programmer then you'll write bad code ... period

I suspect you may be treading new ground there Dozz, that's so specific I don't think you'll find anyone who's done that before! Good luck with it though and at least you have an openGL example. There are some examples around of integrating external GUI systems into Leadwerks, they might give you some insight regarding interfacing external code and using openGL directly. You might need to have a first stab at it and then post code so Josh or maybe MasterXilo or others can make suggestions.

Thanks wailingmonkey Progress has continued tonight and my initial setting up of the path finding and animation testing in my editor has been very successful. I'm really happy with my implementation of animation driven motion, it's working like a charm. Just need to slow her down a bit on the stairs. The proof testing is now out of the way and I can now start on the full level design. Although this is a major distraction from my work on my FPS stuff it’s proving very enjoyable and I've always fancied creating an adventure game so I'm going to stick with this for the time being and complete a playable level. Below is a short video of how I use path finding to allow the NPC to negotiate the small test level. Again, best viewed @ 720p resolution:

Showing lots of promise. Some fantastic modelling and game world destruction there. Nice rag dolls too. Looking forward to seeing some 'in game' action in the future Keep up the great work guys!

lol ... as he chases all the women round the square at three times normal animation speed ... that brings back memories

Thanks Krankzinnig and don't worry, I fully intend to finish this. Too much work has gone into it to not do so I've just dropped the scene into my engine editor for the first time and generated some navArea data for pathfinding. Takes only seconds and shows the advantage of spending time developing good toolsets:

An in game shot with female NPC. I'm going to test out the pathfinding before going much further with the Level design. Should have her walking around in this scene tonight hopefully!

That looks very impressive Michael! In games I never feel it needs to be totally realistic, just real enough to not have the player question it. I guess the same is true with Architectural presentations.

Thanks Brent. Great to hear you are still on course. Looking forward to seeing your entry With hindsight I set my sights a little too high given the time scales, but hey ... it's all a valuable learning experience!

After four solid days of converting hundreds of assets I am now finally starting the level design. Unfortunately, I've really under estimated how long this was going to take and as such now stand no chance of finishing the game by the end of the month as I still have to complete the level design, configure all the path finding and write the AI scripts for the NPCs and the overall game play logic. However, it has been a fascinating journey and I've learnt a lot having designed a UI and Inventory system from scratch and got that working. I will hopefully have finished the initial level design and have NPCs walking around it by Sunday. Despite clearly failing to complete a game in a month I will continue with this project now and finish it, releasing a playable demo as soon as I get there. It just leaves me to wish Brent the best of luck as I think he is the only person left in the competition now. If I get the NPCs up and running on the weekend then I'll probably post a short video but in the meantime here is a quick screenshot of some of the level design I started today:

The asset pipeline is a pain in the arse, I've just spent 2 solid days converting assets till I'm sick of doing it! I've ended up sticking with UU3D as despite there being quite a few user provided utils to aid conversion not one of them has been capable of doing the whole job without some sort of issue. Also, UU3D allows me to fix little things like missing texture assignments, issues with normals and also scales animated assets perfectly. It really is worth its weight in gold so no complaints there ... it's just the time it takes to do it all! Ah well .. almost done

Two subjects you need to read up on: Path finding and AI

Thanks Mike and yes you're quite right there is no lighting in that scene as I have yet to start the level design. Didn't seem much point until I'd got the game mechanics working. I'm hoping to devote a couple of days to the level design and a couple more to the AI

As promised a video of the new interface in action. Best viewed by double clicking on it to get to my You Tube page and selecting 720p and double clicking again to get the large screen: Unfortunately the conversion from 1024x768 to 1080x720 has resulted in some blurring of the text. It looks crystal clear in the game itself. I'm off to North Wales for the next four days to enjoy the great weather we are having here but will be hopefully be continuing development from next Monday.

Thanks for the update! You might want to up the screenshot size a bit though

There are still lots of 8800 and 9800 cards available on ebay, I just had a look. [EDIT] Just saw your post above. That would do nicely!

I would be very wary of this card as I suspect you could do a lot better for the money. Here is a quick overview from a review I found: If money is a limitaion I would try and get either an older 8800 card or a 9800 or 9600. I'm not sure what you can pick these up for these days. These cards or any more modern versions like a GTX260 will handle leadwerks well. The GTX460 is well recommended but still well above your £50 price range.

Thanks Paul, I'll try and maintain this thread as the game develops. I'll see if I can put a video together of this in action as static images don't really do it justice! I'm still not sure if I'll have a working game up and running by the end of the month as I still have so much more to do but it's been worth it for the experience alone and I will keep going until I have a playable release available for people to download.

Effectively yes. The external editor isn't written yet but very easily could be. It would be nice eventually to have an editor handle the entire screen layout and save a config file that just gets loaded by the engine. But it's not exactly hard to define it now to be honest! About 20 lines of code is all you need to add to define all of the inventory interface. Each pickable game object has a unique numeric identifier assigned to it, a game object type and a name. The book in the inventory slot above has the type 'readable' for instance indicating that it contains text that can be displayed. A separate text file contains sets of data for each unique item number, including a short description used when moving the mouse over the inventory slots and a second text block which can be of any size. However you lay the text out will be how it appears on the inspect screen (as shown in the previous screen shot). So this allows for fast input of text data. The screen allows scrolling of text line by line using the arrow keys or page by page using PageUp and Page down (although these are completely configurable externally too in my engine). It's all loaded and indexed by my engine for fast retrieval. All of the screens are completely configurable. You simply design an image for the screen and add it to the screen object collection specifying things like the start position, width and height etc. Selectable images for icons can be added and screens can be designated as containers with configurable slot layouts. The draw order can be individually specified too. Support is provided for a custom cursor and all mouse over support is provided automatically. It's all packaged up into a single User Interface Manager module and it should be fairly easy to expand this to cater for skinned menu systems too, but I have yet to code that. It's been a rush as this has all been coded this month but I'm really pleased with the way its come together.

Progress continues with my mini game. I now have the interface fully operational supporting a full inventory system with configurable screens and support for storing, inspecting, selection and removal of game world items. All pickable world items and associated data are fully configurable outside of my engine giving maximum flexibility. Below is a screen shot of the Inventory Screen with an item selected and the Inspect Icon clicked revealing the Inspection Screen and Item text:

Looking good! I'd be interested in seeing some of your space based scenes as that's something I need to turn my attention back to soon. Always nice to see what other people are working on.

That's an interesting article Laurens. I knew neural net type technology was not being used much in Games Houses, as I'd previously pointed out, and that goes some way towards explaining why. Very interesting!

Having started from scratch with no experience in games programming and design it’s been a long haul and I still have some way to go; but one of the benefits it has brought is an ability to now distinguish between the few who 'walk the walk' as opposed to the majority who just 'talk the talk'. Having followed your status updates over a period of time I can see you have been hitting all the critical areas that a serious developer needs to hit and as such have faith in your ability to pull this off. It’s great to see you have arrived at the point where you feel actual game development can commence (a point I have yet to reach) and I wish you and your team good luck and look forward to updates on your progress in the future.