1st Prize to Moraes Junior’s Nut LevelMoraes’s level is really involved with a catapult, ziplines with baskets, lava waterfalls that makes up quite a challenging puzzle. The aim is to collect all the sheep in the level onto a counterweight that enabled a catapult to launch you to the levels end.
2nd Prize to Bruno Franci’s Lighthouse Level Bruno’s level is set on a stunning island with interesting areas explore. The goal is to get to the lighthouse were the game finishes.
3rd Prize to Bradley Wabbersen’s Underworld Level Underworld an example of what you can make with existing props. While its small and not as advanced as the other 2, I’m glad a level like this got in.

Download (complete data files including new levels 180mb)

Or separate levels that can be copied into the existing YoFrankie data files

1. Nut Level (11mb)
2. Lighthouse Level (9mb)
3. Underworld Level (0.1mb)

Installing the separate levels
Extract the zip and enter the directory, copy everything (levels, textures, etc) into the original YoFrankie BGE folder released on the DVD or downloaded on-line.
You can start YoFrankie from the menu and these levels will be available from the small level selector world.

These levels will be included with the next release of YoFrankie which will be updated for Blender 2.49.

Bugs
All the levels have some glitches that need to be resolved. Since this competition is for level design, I accept that level logic and scripts will need tweaking, this can be worked out before inclusion in the next release.

*Update* Created a list of things to fix in the levels.
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Org:Bf-institute/ApricotTODO
If anyones interested in helping with these edits and general level maintenance, please mail me ([email protected]).

*Update* The levels are now in the subversion repository with all the other YoFrankie files.
If you have svn installed grab them with “svn checkout https://svn.blender.org/svnroot/yofrankie”, or with tortoisesvn on windows.

Thanks for the hard work guys!

Its close to release and were finalizing the levels, cleaning up the files and removing smaller glitches. however there are some things that we didn’t post about because we were too busy.
Behind the exciting GLSL shaders, along with the funny animations and pretty scenery we did manage to get some gameplay in.
Here’s a video of the game Chris and myself recorded, showing some of the gameplay you can expect to see.

It might also come as news to some of you that you can play a second player – Momo – Thanks to Moraes Junior ‘mangojambo’ for making the character and all animations to match Frankies.

For more information on gamelogic and examples the DVD will include , see the ApricotBgeLogic Wiki

Apricot Gameplay

Download the OGG Theora (32meg)
Youtube video

As on special request (thanks for the hint Bart!) I decided to organize a small party for the last Apricoters (Chris & Pablo & Brecht). Just intimous, for those who were involved and dropping in regular anyway! But nevertheless, it was awesome and give the team the right incentive and drive to make the final presentation a perfect premiere!

In the vimeo clip you can see a complete 6 minute walk-through the main  game levels. This, plus more goodies is going to be finalized on the DVD. Hopefully in 2 weeks it’s ready for print. End of september we then can ship it to everyone!

by the way! you can start pimping your desktop with our quick-made wallpapers :), check them out!
This is PSP sized, needed to do it 🙂

Wallpaper: 800×600
Wallpaper: 1024×768
Wallpaper: 1280×800
Wallpaper: 1280×1024
Wallpaper: 1680×1050

Chris flies back tomorrow, Pablo the day after…. <sob>. Thanks Chris, thanks Pablo, you’ve been great to work with! Good luck!

-Ton-

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.

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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