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-

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!

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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… 🙂