With a good Mexican dinner, and the Dutch premiere of WALL-E, we’ve said goodbye to four of the Blender Institute crew.

Margreet Riphagen, Blender Institute producer for a year, accepted a great job at the Institute of Network Cultures. It’s also in Amsterdam center, so we’ll see her around regularly!
Campbell Barton, Blender developer and TD , went back to his girls in Melbourne Australia. He’ll be working wrapping up Apricot remotely for a month, at least.
Dariusz Dawidowski, 3D game artist and level designer, goes back today to his hometown in Poland. He’ll help wrapping up the Crystal Space game level(s) during next month.
Frank Richter, Crystal Space 3D engine developer, already found another room to live in Amsterdam, he’ll keep coding on CS and is currently seeking for a game developer job in Amsterdam (know any? contact him!).

Thanks a lot Margreet & guys! we’ll miss you!

Currently still here: Chris + Pablo to wrap up the Apricot project, Brecht to do cool coding work, and myself… in a week I’ll leave for Siggraph, and when I’m back we should pick up the mythical 2.5 coding project… 🙂

Picture: see us walking to the restaurant in the cool new Apricot memorial Yofrankie shirts! People from left to right: Frank, Chris, Dariusz, Brecht, Campbell, Ton, Pablo (half), 2nd picture: Chris, Campbell, Pablo. More pictures in Gallery)

Grab the OGG Theora file (46mb)

Chris made this video of our latest level. We’re frantically finishing off as much as we can, adding…

• Tailwhip, (thanks to William for the corporate video production and the 2D animation)
• Sheep that can bounce, explode, drown.
• Loop the loops
• Continuing level design
• Additions to Sheep and Frankie logic
• Effects and pickups

enjoy!

Meet Ramiro the Ram! our new character, actually it is there since a while ago but now is time to put it in game.
He is the male sheep, the Ram protector of all Mandy‘s around, and will not hesitate in hitting if you get too close to them!

This week we got the sheep game (catching, throwing, animations, etc) working at a level we can move on to other games, like the piranha, rat, buck, turtle? and its logic.
But still there is a lot of things to do/tweak in our levels/hud/effects and here is where we can use your help, we have this character, the Ram, but no animations still, there are scheduled for the next week (not the one that starts tomorrow monday), so we thought that with the nice response we had with the “Animate Frankie!” post, we could try this again and let people contribute with their own animations so when the next week starts we have some already there, for tweaking/integrating and some nice extra time to work on the levels or make even more animations, we can always re-schedule 🙂

What are we looking for?, this character doesn’t have any animations yet, so we can use any kind, but most needed are:

• WalkCycle
• RunCycle
• Idle animations
• Hit / being hit (by a nut)
• Being kicked
• Death animation
• Drowning
• Charging to hit with the horns, pissed off animations, everything you think will fit to this character.

Grab the .blend file here. (Packed, ~1.2Mb). Animating at 40 frames per second (like Frankie’s) will work.
Nothing really fancy on it so should work with recent builds of Apricot, that you can find at GraphicAll, thanks to our build monkeys, also the Apricot branch (linux) have an special place in the “Automated Builds” section, under “Current Hot Branches”.

* You don’t have to leave your .blend file always, you can use Vimeo (good)/YouTube (bad) to upload the OpenGL videos (?) there, and we can ask for the .blend file later (you may want to do some tweaking before release or so).

As a side note, if you’re not an animator and would like to contribute with any other stuff (modeling, texturing, etc). Check the “Contribute your own stuff!” thread we created at blender.org forums and leave your questions/thoughts there.

That’s all! looking forward to what you blenderheads do with this character, hope you like it!
(Feliz Día del Amigo!)

There is an open ftp space on blender.org. It works like this:
ftp to: download.blender.org
user: anonymous
password: your email address

When logged in, go to the directory ‘incoming’. What you put there is visible here:
http://download.blender.org/ftp/incoming/
This upload space deletes all old files after a couple of weeks, so don’t use it for permanent storage.

The main priority for game engine drawing at this point is optimization. We’re trying to get the Blender game engine version of the game to run on as many computers as possible, as long as the graphics card supports GLSL. Different graphics cards and drivers can give quite different results, so to get a clear overview of where the issues are, we need your help! We’ve prepared a .blend file that outputs graphics card information and performance statistics. It’s the same as the demo posted earlier, with some small modifications, so it’s not indicative of the graphics or performance in the final game, but it tests the different features. All you need to do is open it in a recent Blender build of the Apricot branch, look for builds of revision 15606 or newer. Such builds can be found on:

• GraphicAll
• Zoo-Blender

Then it is simply a matter of pressing the “P” button and waiting for the test to finish, which should take less than a minute. Don’t hide the window or move other windows over it, this can influence the benchmark. If all goes well, a .txt file will written next to the .blend file. Then paste the contents in the comments, it should look something like this:

Blender: Built on 2008-07-15 23:51:45, Rev-15567:15576M
Platform: linux2
GPU: NVIDIA Corporation, GeForce 8800 GTS/PCI/SSE2
Driver: 2.1.2 NVIDIA 169.12
Window: 1919 x 1071 pixels
Multisample: 0 buffers, 0 samples

201.878466 FPS (glsl)
183.899693 FPS (glsl, lights)
176.714724 FPS (glsl, lights, extra_textures)
171.587703 FPS (glsl, lights, shaders, extra_textures)
166.894360 FPS (glsl, lights, ramps, shaders, extra_textures)
150.053853 FPS (glsl, lights, shadows)
100.538329 FPS (glsl, lights, shaders, shadows, ramps, extra_textures)

If something goes wrong, screenshots, errors from the console or backtraces are welcome. If you want to paste long texts, please use PasteAll. Let’s try to keep the comments clean to get a nice overview of the different graphics cards and do project discussion and feature requests in other blog posts. Thanks!

Download benchmark .blend file (57.4 MB)

Additionaly, some documentation on GLSL materials is now available.

Yo!, we got a name:  Yo Frankie!: A Furry Vendetta

People voted for this names (ain’t open source beautiful? =), and we sorted them out like: Yo Frankie! the main name, and “A Furry Vendetta” as the name of this episode, now is your time to start thinking/making the next episodes 🙂  Yo Frankie: “Point Blank Frank”, or “The Rise Of Frank” are the most voted, pick which one is going to be the name of your own level (s)! 😀

You can download our new logo in all this flavours:
Big 3DLogo, with background – 1440x810px
Big 3D Logo, no background (alpha) – 887x670px

2D Yo Frankie! Logo – Small Size / Bully Size
2D Yo Frankie! Text – Small Size / Bully Size
2D Frankie Icon – Small Size / Bully Size

.zip file with all this (~2.2mb).

Peace.