Production with the bge is taking off. We’re really motivated by how enthusiastically the blender community received the news about using the bge in this project. I’ve had my doubts as to how many people were actually interested in the bge, but evidently there are a quite lot of you. Make more noise!

We’re making all new levels for the bge game, and we’re bringing in new characters. Campbell is finishing up the game logic for Frankie, and then shifts focus to implementing enemies and animals to bully. By the beginning of August we’ll be wrapping this game up into a complete package with menus, etc.

We’ve also gone over the animation submissions! The animations we decided on using in the game are:
Marcus Feital’s “Sleep Idle”
Mango Jambo’s “Show Off” Idle
Joshua Huf’s throwing and minor damage
Glenn Melenhorst’s run cycle

Thanks guys! Great work. Mango Jambo, for crediting you, is that your real name, because that would be awesome.

Now below are some wip screenshots from our first level in the bge. The environment is missing enemies, plants, ground props, special effects, and all importantly, shadow/ambient occlusion maps.

Today we setup a read only mirror of the database were using here in the studio that will be synchronized daily.
This contains all the content created for apricot so far. The initial download size is large but updating will not take so long.

Commands for getting our svn repository.

# Checkout entire repository ~950meg
svn checkout svn://download.blender.org

# Or for one dir
svn checkout svn://download.blender.org/pro

# Log of all the commit messages
svn log -v svn://download.blender.org | less

# Update, cd to the apricot directory
svn update

Windows users can grab. http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org

News feed from the SVN Server

Blender Game Engine

These files can be played with the blender game engine alone.
You’ll need a recent version of blender apricot branch – www.graphicall.org
Chris's level "svn://download.blender.org/pro/bge/levels/level_1_home.blend"

VenomGFX's level "svn://download.blender.org/pro/bge/levels/level_piranhaland.blend"

Franky model and game logic "svn://download.blender.org/pro/bge/chars/franky.blend"

Crystal Space

For theCrystal Space side you need the latest trunks (ie development version) of Crystal Space, CEL and blender2crystal:

# Crystal Space
svn co http://crystalspace3d.org/svnroot/crystal/CS/trunk CS_latest
# CEL
svn co http://crystalspace3d.org/svnroot/cel/cel/trunk CEL_latest
# Blender2Crystal
svn co https://b2cs.delcorp.org/svn/blender2crystal/trunk blender2crystal

For Crystal Space, building instructions for various platforms can be foundin its online manual. CEL requires a successfully set up Crystal Space. Blender2Crystal has its own installation instructions.

Also, once you have checked out the Apricot SVN, look into the docs/tutorials/ directory, it also contains instructions on setting things up in CrystalSpace.

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Project targets

As posted here four weeks ago, we have to be realistic about the deliverables of Apricot. A lot of our technical targets will be met, but the main target “create full functional industry quality game prototype” had to be reworded less ambitious… (depends on what you consider “industry quality” of course!).

The deal is that the team now works on two parallel content targets;

• a full functional level in the CS engine, focused on visual quality, speed and character-environment interactions.
• several levels in the Blender GE, focused on artistic quality and game play prototyping.

The reason for this was mostly because the pipeline from Blender to CS wasn’t efficient enough to give the artists a satisfying workflow. It proved to be more efficient to do design and game prototyping in the Blender GE.
On the CS side it was evident there was much more time needed to get the main character at playable level.

The re-found enthusiasm for the Blender GE was received very well by the Blender community. It is quite evident that this part in Blender has a lot of potential… but still more as an artists’ tool than as a final delivery platform for “industry quality games”. For that, a good export to specialized game engines like CS remains important, something we’ll have to keep working on to make that well possible!

A more detailed review with problem analysis and recommendations for future development will be delivered later, also as part of the Apricot docs on the final DVDs.

Current status:

• This weekend we will make Apricot svn available for everyone.
• Currently Frank and Darius wrap up the CS part, meaning a lot of documentation but also work on porting, players and installation issues.
• Pablo Martin has already left, by the end of the month Campbell, Frank and Darius will leave too (we’ll do a goodbye dinner with Wall-E visit!).
• Chris and Pablo Vazquez will stay another month. They want to deliver several playable levels in the the Blender GE, but especially will take care of a good quality DVD presentation of the entire project.
• Brecht also stays here, he will ensure Blender’s new GLSL will work on as many platforms possible.
• Darius will work from home during august on final game tweaks

Oh, and the game title has been decided on… wait for the logo and graphics to be updated soon… 🙂

Here is short movie showing current progress of the game. You can see fishes for example, how they know where to swim ? It’s possible to make environment collision sensor but common solution in the gamedev world in this situation is navigation graph. Games are always cheating, don’t trust them 🙂 Game needs to convince player that something looks natural but hidden method is always something easy to use/easy to compute. Fishes also trying to not to swim too close to each other, but not to far ! Sheep also using same herd algorithm included in the Crystal Entity Layer.

Navigation graph for sheep:

Movie:

Apricot: Crystal Space GamePlay (July 2008) from Pablo Vazquez on Vimeo.

“Hola!, this is Pablo..”, that’s the first thing I say in this video that tries to explain a couple of effects I came up with the last week, playing around with shading nodes in real time.

The thing was that Mist option is still not supported in GLSL, how can I work around this?, Nodes! the great “Camera Data” is an input node that let you use information from the camera view to play with, such as the View Vector, View Z Depth, and View Distance (which is the one i’m using in this video). After playing for a while, I found out that this method was much more better than the boring Mist!

I ended up using this method for effects such as:

• MultiColor Mist:  Color in front of the camera is more peachy, slightly noticeable, then more far away is a bit orange/red, and veery far away the color tries to mix with the sky.

• SunRays: Just planes with a bright alpha texture, the trick is made by the View Distance factor of the camera, changing the alpha to zero when you get close to them, or far away from them (you don’t want to always see sunrays).

• ChangeAlpha: for walking through trees leaves in a way that they don’t block the view, they have a node setup that makes them alpha zero when they get close to the camera, so you can see through.

Here the video:

Download the OGG version. (~30mb)

Nothing of this is actually new, you can do this for rendering since past year, and for GLSL is also there since weeks, so you can play with this by using any barely recent build.

* by the way, expect more videotutorials like this one (but better explained, better quality, etc), in the Apricot DVD! 🙂

That’s all folks! Enjoy!