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.

Just like you read it, Real Time Shadows in Blender’s 3D View *and* in Blender’s Game Engine!

It uses Shadow Buffers, so is only available for Spot lights now, and it works with the same settings as for rendering, like OnlyShadow (very useful!), or ClipStart, ClipEnd, SpotSize, falloff, Bias, etc. They are not filtered (yet!, so don’t complain : ) so no Soft shadows for now.

I don’t like to take attention from other’s blogposts but this feature totally deserves it.

Made a quick video showing how it looks right now in both our game demo from Chris’s blogpost and in 3D View, is speeded up a little bit also for not to bore you too much.

This feature was made by our code hero Brecht and is still under development, so go compile your apricot branch, test, and share your happiness here with a nice comment.
That’s all folks! 😀

Watch in crappy quality at YouTube
Download/Watch the  AVI Video

Just one and a half weeks since we started using the bge, and the progress has been insane. There’s way too much for one post.

GLSL is now integrated in the BGE, just enable it in the game menu to preview it in the 3d view, and it’ll look exactly the same when you press P. Support for nodes, multiple uv layers, all blending modes, stencil maps for splatting, color ramps for that precious falloff, and much more. One more week like this and my grin will be permanent.

Ever wanted shape keys to work in the game engine? Well support for shape keys has been added! There’s a brand new actuator called “Shape Action”. Grab yourself an apricot build and go nuts. And there’s been some really impressive speedups to the game engine. Just enable “Vertex Arrays” in your preferences and “Generate Display Lists” from the game menu for the fastest performance. Our test scene gets almost twice the frame rate. The devs helping us are really doing amazing things.. Things are really progressing quickly.

Have a look at our latest demo from the BGE, showing some new gameplay and playing with new features like glsl. Most of the main actions for Frankie have been added, plus a small environment to play around in while we work on the world for the game. Things are getting really exciting around here. We’ll post more progress this weekend, and, if anyone is interested, we may be looking for help soon. More info on that later. Of course one really big way to help this project is to pre-order the DVD!.

GLSL shading is now in blender, thanks to the work of our rockstar coder Brecht. Just enable it in your preferences under System & OpenGL, and change to the shaded draw type. Among other amazing things, this means normal maps in 3d view!

Along with this also comes the ability to paint multiple textures directly onto your objects using texture paint mode in the 3d view. Because with glsl blender can draw materials with texture stacks that contain stencil maps, splatting grass and dirt onto your terrain is as simple as using texture paint mode with a stencil map assigned to the uvs. It’s such a beautiful thing. Watch the video to learn how this is done. The idea is that this same texture stack will then be exported to crystal space for splatting for the game.

This video demos some additions to the apricot branch of blender for snapping, library browsing and baking.

Download the OGG File