Werdy World - A Childrens Game

[ToddMcF2002]

A basic 3rd person non violent platform type.  This is just a test level for framerate, lighting and some crude landscape models.  I did all the modeling except the "hut" which was a turbosquid freebie.  The framerate is about 70-140 on my Centrino IBM T60 with a Radeon x1400.  The test level is pretty large - the OC Tree size is 30800 for the landscape alone.

 

[EgonOlsen]

Nice and colorful...  I'll add it to the projects page on monday if you don't mind.

[ToddMcF2002]

Not at all.  The Werdy character was designed by my 6 year old BTW.  In crayon, not in Max.  That will stay - plus the trees with better textures.  Everything else may change but I like the heightmap look in general.

I should point out the game concept:  A kids RPG.  For example - a troll might block a bridge and demand an apple pie for passage.  Werdy will have to find the ingredients and make the pie.  I'll blit the requirements on the screen such as 2 of 6 apples found etc.  Werdy might have to do a side quest to get some NPC to give access to an oven to bake the pie.

That's the idea.  Basic main quest / side quest structure.  Lots of jumping and climbing to keep kids interested.  The roll advancement will be in the form of powerups such as jet packs and roller blades.

My kids were playing it this morning and really like it - since Werdy is rigged for running, jumping and back flipping etc.  Timed right he can jump while still falling and gain additional height to get on top of structures such as that hut.  Of course they are equally excited by walking through the skybox but hey its a start.

I installed it on my desktop 3.2Ghz x850xt and it gets about 60FPS.  The real levels will be more hemmed in but with lots of objects I think this test level is pretty indicitive of performance.  I was intentionally wasteful of the polys for the test level - you are only seeing about 20% of it in the screenshots and the plane used for heightmap is very dense.

[ToddMcF2002]

Just for grins and giggles - here is a low quality video of it:
http://s187.photobucket.com/albums/x132/ToddMcF2002/?action=view&current=0aeb5f30.flv

[EgonOlsen]

The video is cool. I've added the game to the projects section.

[ToddMcF2002]

Thanks.  Just so everyone knows, I'm actually am aware the level design is extremely crude.

It is just an early test to push the poly limit before reigning everything in for actual design and texturing.  Despite the simplistic look those hills are have some serious polys because of the highly segmented planes I used.  4 planes at 40x40 plus a procedural texture and and about ~20 structures.  I'd like the game to run on weaker hardware so I plan to load zones and swap them in and out of the world.  It seems pretty strait forward to detect a transition area and with precaching the transition should be painless.  I also think I'm going to swap out the water texture for 2 opposing moving planes.  I've been studying my son's Pac Man World 2 and they have some interesting tricks that look very convincing (in a cartoonish sense that is). 

I'll be laying out the landscape over the next few weeks and post screens and whatnot.  Once I get over that texture tiling problem I'm having things should go quickly.  I would like to get back to my wannabie ToEE RPG soon!  I'm glad I'm doing this though since most of these hurdles are better tackled on a simpler project such as this.





   

[Remo]

Looks nice man! Good job. The controls and the animations look just fine .

[ToddMcF2002]

Here is another test with some texture tiling refinement and the first real tree.



I've settled on the look I'm trying for - which is a pretty much Rose Online.  If you havent heard of Rose its an Americanized Korean RPG.  You could call it a WoW ripoff but it is far more anime oriented than that.  Anyway - I like the look and its very uplifting especially for children.  Here is a decent Rose cap .  When the first walking jelly bean tells you "I may never be a real Jelly bean but at least I won't be eaten alive" you know its pretty out there.  Its a wierd game.  Anyway - enough about Rose Online. 

I'm really starting to love Paint.NET.  developing that tree canopy texture was a breeze.  I started with photo of a real vine wall and simply applied some blurr and "oil painting" effect.  I think it looks pretty decent.  The bark started out as real limestone, and the paths 2 different real dirt photos.  The grass started out as a FRAPS screen cap from PacMan World 2 but then modified with hue adjustment and oil painting effects and blurring.  the only weakness of Paint.NET is the lack of an airbrush and the bizzarre attitude of the developers refusing to add one.  I don't get that.  I have to resort to the dreaded GIMP for airbrushing.  I havent needed it here though yet.  The memory footprint for Paint.NET is pretty bad too (~200MG).

That screen was taken with both 3DMax and Paint.NET up - the real FPS is about 190.

 

[cyberkilla]

Well done! It looks like a good idea:)

And, thanks for the image!
I was looking for something like WoW, but a bit more cartoony:)

[ToddMcF2002]

Just watch out for those Jelly Beans.  I installed it earlier tonight and I was running around the game hitting FRAPS F10.

Really great art design if you ask me.  I'm not going to copy it outright obviously just try to get the look and feel.

[raft]

its nice and really colorful
welcome onboard todd

[Klaudiusz]

You made it all allone? A piece of good work!

[ToddMcF2002]

The shed in the initial screeshots up top was a free download.  Otherwise yeah the modeling and coding is just me.  I started the level editor today using FengGUI.  I've only integrated the samples so far - and I spent most of my time struggling with mapping the keyboard and mouse events between LWJGL and FengGUI.  Basically, I have my own handlers for camera events and I need to filter those before allowing FengGUI to process events.  Same thing with mouse events.  To place objects the a level editor you need to do the 2D/3D projection so FengGUI can't eat all the mouse events.

I've got that part sorted out.  People say the GUI is heavy weight but for what I'm doing I think it is just great.  Only when I get a ton of objects on the screen do I see a hit on FRAPS.  Such as:



Why am I bothering with a level editor?  Because merged 3DS files have drawbacks, as I found out trying to make that tree canopy.  You lose opportunity to set culling and transparency.  Also, I don't want to hardcode interactive objects or guess placement.  I want to be able to dynamically load and place objects and assign attributes such as culling / transparency and save as XML.   Also, it is really hard to place compound 3DS objects because once you translate the mesh all the child objects lose orientation and its a huge hassle reorienting them.  The Level Editor will help persist coordinate offsets etc.  It won't take very long to get something useful working. 

[Remo]

Why am I bothering with a level editor?  Because merged 3DS files have drawbacks, as I found out trying to make that tree canopy.  You lose opportunity to set culling and transparency.  Also, I don't want to hardcode interactive objects or guess placement.  I want to be able to dynamically load and place objects and assign attributes such as culling / transparency and save as XML.   Also, it is really hard to place compound 3DS objects because once you translate the mesh all the child objects lose orientation and its a huge hassle reorienting them.  The Level Editor will help persist coordinate offsets etc.  It won't take very long to get something useful working.

That is also why most game engines use a special format to fit their framework .

[ToddMcF2002]

Yeah I know - but it may not be obvious to everybody.  It sure makes me appreciate the old UnrealEd I used back in the day.

I also wanted to say that FengGUI rocks.  I'm really impressed with the performance and ease of use.  The interface based design is so consistent that after using a few Widgets the pattern becomes obvious enough that you can pretty much guess the methods without reading the javadoc.  I love that.

One warning - I found a very useful undocumented function in org.fenggui.Display called fireKeyTyped.  Without it your key events are lost in translation between LWJGL and FengGUI.  Try the LWJGL demo, read the code and you will see the problem.

Anyway the dev kit is going much faster than I hoped.  I've got a few floating windows that allow you to set attributes on objects you select via PickPolygon translation.  Next up is loading objects dynamically with markers placed on the terrain and finally writing out XML to preserve state.  All the hard stuff is over so no biggie.