Blender Gun Models, etc

Last time I made a post here it was about some firearm models I was working on in Blender. It's been quite a while and these files have just been sitting around collecting dust so I've decided to release them.
The host for many of my links has gone down so I've also updated the Downloads section.

You can find the gun models and licensing information at OpenGameArt.org:
http://opengameart.org/content/various-small-arms-assault-rifles-sniper-pistol

Blender Weapon Pack Preview

I've been working on some guns and melee weapons in Blender lately. Ultimately I'd like to see them go into an RPG of some kind, but it might be a while. The projects I've completed have usually been abandoned and then picked back up later, sometimes more than once. Burnout is pretty common when you're working on your own time, but whether these models make it into a finished game or not, I'll release them all once they're complete.



From left to right, top to bottom: L85, Dragunov, M4, AK47, M1911.


I haven't even started UV mapping, but I'm actually tempted to just bake them shaded like that.
The bolt is animated for the rifles and the carrying handle iron sights can be removed to reveal a rail. I intend to add some modular accessories like a reflex sight, ACOG, SUSAT, etc.

The 1911 has been made from scratch and now has an animated slide and separate magazine.


The melee weapons I have so far can be found at opengameart.org.


My goal is to build a fairly robust library of weapon models and so far it's moving right along. I'm not going all out in regard to detail and since the firearms aren't texture mapped, making a new rifle takes about 2 hours.

Feel free to request any particular weapons you'd like to see. I may already have it in mind to add them, but requests will at least increase their priority.

Colt 1911 Revisited

Since there was a request for the blend file for the colt 1911 model, I figured I'd give it a little attention. I didn't put much work into it, but it's a little more clean and the non-manifold geometry is gone.
The texture is pretty rudimentary, but I didn't know anything about the source of the original image I used so I grabbed some from Wikipedia that were listed as public domain.


The original is available here.
The revised version is here.



If you don't have Blender, get it here.

sdltutorials.com 2009 Game Contest

I've been using the sdltutorials.com 2009 game contest as an excuse to dive into modern C++. Nevermind that I studied it pretty extensively about a decade ago, today it's a different animal.

Anyway, here's a preview of my entry. There's a lot to be done, but I think the hardest parts are over.




(youtube for better quality)

I'm not an artist, so you can expect a fair amount of particle effects in an attempt to cover my miserable sprites and textures.
The visuals are all lua driven and my campaign / mission system is pretty solid so adding the rest of the gameplay elements should be relatively simple. Of course, they won't be and if I finish in time it will be by the skin of my teeth.

Update:
I got bored and didn't make the deadline. It is likely that I'll come back to this and finish, but I doubt it will be any time soon since I'm not especially fond of side-scrolling shooter games. It did at least serve the purpose of getting me more acquainted with modern C++.

Crawl!

A friend pointed out to me that Crawl Stone Soup recently released v0.5.
If you're a nethack, angband, or general roguelike fan you're sure to enjoy it.
You can download a client or just ssh to crawl.akrasiac.org and log in as joshua.

http://crawl.akrasiac.org/

A++ would die alone and hungry in a hateful dungeon again.

Current Events

Unless you've been living under a rock, you are probably aware that Michael Jackson died. In fact, we've had a couple of celebrities pass on this week, but I just want to take a moment to honor a lesser known celebrity who also died recently.

http://www.roanoke.com/news/roanoke/wb/208832

Make A New Game

I do a great deal of hobby coding. If I'm not doing that, I'm playing games, which doesn't leave much time for blogging. It doesn't help that I also program for a living, so by the time I get home, gaming is much more appealing than hobbying around with code. Lately I haven't been into a new game so I've been thinking more and more about making another game myself. To date, my games are very simple, use a handful of 2d sprites and were easy to make. Limiting my games to 2d has two distinct advantages.

1. I can load up gimp and paint sprites, or as was recently suggested, load up Inkscape to make prettier sprites.

2. 2d logic is generally easier. You can cull to boxes instead of frustums and hit detection is usually trivial.

I could argue that you can get more depth out of a real 3d environment, but there are still a lot of really well done 2d games that knock the socks off of many recent 3d titles, not because they have more stunning visuals, but because they're just more fun. Even then, there are some 2d games with very impressive visuals.

Even though 2d logic is generally easier, 3d logic really isn't that hard once you wrap your head around the basics. Things like octrees, AABB trees and ray-triangle collision detection are actually not that hard to implement. Furthermore, there exists a wealth of open source 3d engines that solve a lot of these problems for you. (Ogre3d, Crystal Space, Irrlicht)

When I ask myself what keeps me from taking on a 3d game in any serious context, it's content creation. If my game needs people walking around, I'm going to have to model, UV-map, texture, rig, and animate human models. That's a lot of work, especially for one person or even a small team. Next our people are going to need to walk around on something, maybe enter buildings, swim and so forth. At least here we only need geometry and textures, but we need a lot of it. As I build my design document and flesh out gameplay ideas or story, I'm considering what kind of engine technology it's going to require and what kind of content I'll need.
How many game ideas involve a character walking around and interacting with other characters and the environment? Hint: lots.

Your story stops mattering at that point because it's not the bottleneck, it's not the hard part. Take a look at Fallout 3. I love the Fallout games. I even got some brief enjoyment out of that flop of a tactics game Interplay made. (This game marks the point where they officially jumped the shark.) Fallout 3 is immersive and visually impressive, a successful, although non-traditional resurrection of the franchise. Maybe everything is roughly the same color, but it still looks pretty good. The world is enormous and took a lot of time and work to make, but even in this professionally built game, they're repeating scenery and geometry.

All of this prattling on has been to lead up to the focus of some of my recent hobby coding. I've been tinkering with procedural terrain and procedural texturing of that terrain.
Thus far I've made a script that processes an 8-bit height map image into terrain geometry of the specified scale. You can even assign an arbitrary number of height levels with unique textures that are procedurally blended and 'baked'. In another mode it can use vertex colors to produce something more cartoony. Next I might look into using some Perlin noise to speckle the terrain with trees and rocks or other detail meshes.
My next post will be a more in-depth look at procedural terrain and my hope is that over the next few months we can explore some gameplay ideas and their accompanying implementations and requirements.