Worklog for Drak

Drak's RPG

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Screens(Posted 2012-12-01)










More features(Posted 2011-03-13)
1. Added shields to npc equipment lists. Shields have their own collision response.
2. Added 6 facial hair meshes each with 5 possible hair colors to the npc spawn list. This simply makes 30 possible mustache\beard combinations to diversify random npc looks.
3. Add those 30 different combinations to 7 different face textures, and you get 210 different face combinations.


End of Winter update(Posted 2011-03-10)
In-game world editor. DONE.
1. Ability to add, alter, manipulate, delete, scale meshes and scenery finished.
2. Ability to save those meshes to a file, and also load later finished.
3. Ability to add npcs, soldiers, etc, finished.
4. Ability to save npc locations, states, etc, finished.
5. Ability to alter atmoshpheric conditions finished. Time of day, lighting, ambient light, sounds, all changeable in real time.


Further animations and collision detection(Posted 2010-04-19)
Got the new animations done for dying. 1 is an instant kill animation where the npc\enemy collapses instantly and the other the target kind of stumbles a bit, and then collapses.

Improved collision detection and response for the "hittable" parts of the enemy meshes.

Reworked two animations. Draw bow and hold aim. The "hold aim" looks great but the "draw bow" animation I'm just not quite satisfied with. Will tinker more with that animation later.

I had a problem where I was getting a MAV when a killed enemy dissapears. I had trouble directly accessing the arrows stuck to the corpse, but have come to a sucessful solution. (The corpse would delete itself, along with the children, and then the function that updates the arrows would try to access the deleted arrows, and cause a MAV.)


Further breaking down..(Posted 2010-03-22)
I've further broken down the primitives attached to my characters into parts. I can now correctly identify which body part an arrow or projectile has struck, even while the enemy is animating.


2 years no update? wow(Posted 2010-03-13)
Wow seriously almost 2 years ago I posted my last worklog update. That's crazy. The fact is I spent about 23 of the last 24 months NOT working on this game. Been working on other projects.

You can throw away those npcs from posts below, I have new npcs, new models, new animations. Those npcs below in my other posts now look like garbage to me. I've been busy with seperate head models that follow the player. I have, just today, FINALLY (in like 3 hours) got perfect collisions with my animated characters. No longer will arrows stick in the air where the model is "posed" in it's base pose. I put some primitives in place on certain bones in my models, gave them a seperate collision response, then when an arrow hits one of these "parts", the arrow is then parented to the corresponding bone that is the parent of the collision box. Sound complicated? The complicated part was getting the primitives set up just right. In actuality the process is quite simple. The results though, are amazing.


Coding Inventory(Posted 2008-04-11)
Been working on the inventory system quite furiously. I finally have a working model that loads, adds, changes slots, deletes items, etc. Basically everything I was wanting. I do have to still implement a function to let the player willingly destroy\trash an item. Here's a screenshot of the demo program I created to test the inventory. This program can BASICALLY be imported directly into the rpg game with only a few minor changes. My game allows for a 20 slot inventory instead of 12, which will be very simple to change over. The inventory icons will be drawns over the inventory gui instead of black screen. :)




A few characters(Posted 2008-03-12)
This is a compilation image of some of the characters and/or npcs from 1 town.

The npc's in plain clothes have 4 animations: Walking, 2 idle animations, and die. (they cannot fight in this game)

The guard entity has 6 animations: Walk, idle, search, attack, attack idle (attack mode) , take damage, and die. Hm, I guess that's 7 animations.

The townsperson has 2108 tris, while the guard has 2304 tris, from the added helmet and weapon. This model does have a few less tris in the feet as he doesn't have toes that show like the shoeless, poor npc.




Under attack(Posted 2008-03-08)
Working on the guard system, which is also basically the same as the "monster" system. The only difference is the guards in each town have a "switch" that triggers agressiveness towards the player.




More Screenshots(Posted 2008-03-04)
This was the first photo I posted on the blitzbasic website. This is how dark it is at night without moonlight. You can also see the crappy 2d quick key icons I used to have, unlike the last post.



This photo is just a pic of some standards I have made that sit atop a large gate. This is actually an in-game screenshot, although it doesn't look like it. It's taken through a zoom feature that is just for debug/screenshots. I've gotten MUCH better at uv\texturing at this point.



Latest photos.(Posted 2008-03-04)
These photos are some of the latest I have.

Basically what I have done is ripped all the functions from my game directly into a new one. Most of them I have as include files so it was very very easy. This one is about a month old and I was beginning on day\night cycle and light level for the moon. When the moon is out, as the message box states on the bottom, this is how dark it is. It is MUCH darker when the moon is not out, which is about 30% chance for it to NOT be out.



This one is very recent. I have updated "Quick Key" icons, which no one probably saw the old crappy hand drawn ones I had. These are actual 3d models I created just for this and the inventory, which were then rendered. You are looking at a health potion and a chunk of Galena, which is the a mineral that usually contains high amounts of silver.



Adding placeholder enemies!(Posted 2008-03-04)
This is the last screenshot I have before I switched to my new terrain system.

Here I have added some placeholder enemies, the scary red squares! The squares roamed about the elven ruins there, colored green until the player got too close, then they turned red and attacked the player. This did 2 things: first it told me (or anyone) instantly that the square was pissed and something was going to happen. Second it told me my code was working and the square was going into attack mode.

I have also added message readouts to the message box as you can see.



This photo below is of a barracks I had in the castle in the old terrain system, and is much older because there is no message box.




An RPG takes shape finally.(Posted 2008-03-04)
In this screenshot, the game has grown from a survival game into a RPG, which is it's final state.

At this point I had been doing a LOT of modeling around this time.

I've added lots of houses, a castle, some mansions, etc. Also added since the last screenshot are a health and fatigue bar, direction display, and a message box. The message box took quite a bit of tweaking to finally get right, but it's the same exact message box I use to this day, although the font is changed.

This world, or terrain, or whatever you want to call it was huge, 4096x4096 blits units. It is WAY bigger than the terrains I use now, which are 512x512 I believe. In case anyone is wondering, the "iteration" text display is a readout I was using for ambient sounds, which fired off a various sound every 1000 iterations.

Also added a crude time cycle at this point, 24 hour days, each with 2000 "general times" in them. :)

This screenshot is about 8 months old at the time of this post.




More old screenshots(Posted 2008-03-04)
In this photo, I have added an actual terrain, complete with lots of new trees, added a basic sky,(which I believe I just changed the clear screen color and fog color), and added a few debugging texts to the screen.



Oh, and on the bottom left you can see I must have been working on my basic HUD, which is just an alpha'd sprite at about 30% transparency that I will draw over in future updates.

The game also has changed away from a FPS, which at this point you can see it's name is Pioneer: 1806. It had grown into a survival game at this point.

This screenshot is probably about 12-15 months old at the time of this post.


Posting older screenshots(Posted 2008-03-04)
Here I have modeled a crude gun, which was supposed to be a 1903, which I had the correct shape but I had not yet textured it. These last 2 shots are about 2 years old. Actually, you can see I screwed up this screenshot and pasted it over another screenshot. :)

This is a photo of the player looking down the actual sights of a modeled m1903 rifle. I HATE fps games that use the center of the screen for aiming. If you look closely you have a front sight that you have to actually AIM at your target. The gun featured a modeled bullet that was actually a small 3d triangle, (4 polys, you couldn't see it anyway, it shot too fast as in real life) which acted as a bullet and had gravity strictly based only on it's distance. Not true to life but if you were aiming at something far away you actually had to aim your rifle above the target. I also built in small imperfections into the trajectory of the bullet so it would never go perfectly straight, always just a slight angle (like .1 degrees at the most) to the left, right, ect. I may have to resurrect this as a new game somday.


I have also added some "enemies" which were basically cylinders, and removed the trees while adding some bushes.


Updating with Old screenshots(Posted 2008-03-04)
I've been working on a continous game for about 2 years while learning how to code and model. I've had some old screenshots on my hard drive for a long time and am working on posting some of these old shots.

This is my FIRST screenshot. At this time, my game was going to be a FPS, and in this shot I've got only basic movement and a few entities to look at, but it was a good start.