Just a short note! DVD is done, we’re still doing some tests, and we need Campbell for final blessings, but tomorrow it will be ready to go to the DVD reproduction factory!

Printing takes 2 weeks, shipping will happen during weekend of 1-2 november, customers will then get the copy within 1 (europe) or 2 (rest of world) weeks. Exciting 🙂

• Blender 2.48a update: A serious bug in the GE requires a new build of the players/runtimes, which we want to include this on the DVD. Meaning our planning shifts with a week… sorry.

• Nov 7 update: DVD factory started printing! We expect the dvds in end of the week, and ship saturday 14th.

So.. the project is coming to an end. 🙁 Today is 10th, Chris’ flight is August 30th, and mine is 31th, that makes 20 days of work from now, we made a daily schedule till the very last day.

With the time we have from now, we managed to split it in a way we could continue wrapping up the game, and still have enough time to invest in the most important aspect of the Apricot Open Game Project, Documentation!

Basically, on my side I will be working one more week (next one) in the game itself, then move completely to work full day on Tutorials/Documentation (the week after), then the last week will be for making the design for the DVD and content. On Chris’ side, he will work on the game for a bit more, since now there is mostly work to do in the Logic/Python and special effects, something he is very good on 🙂 with the online help of Campbell who is working from home back in Australia, he’s the most busy of all of us i think, among all the additions to Blender and fixes, he made literally magic with the logic, making the gameplay a charm, oh and by the way he already got the BlenderPlayer to work! So Runtimes are possible now with GLSL and complicated Python stuff (Mathutils), all in one double-click-and-run file! 😀

So, as said before, the most important aspect of the project is Documentation, because “ok.. is very nice to have this little game and characters and everything, now you say we could make our own levels and expand the game with more episodes, but how do you expect us to do that?”, and not only that, because you, the people, the main sponsors, need to have something back for your support, not only the finished game but a lot of documentation and tutorials up-to-date with all the new features in Blender, and clear instructions in how to proceed to make new stuff.

At this point, thinking about the DVD content, what is the best way to keep this project as open as it is now? and make it *more* open?, let’s ask them what they want to have in the DVD!, we are not making it for ourselves, we are making it for them!.

So here is the list of tutorials we have in mind till now, tell us what you think about them and drop any suggestions for new ones. We have scheduled to work on them the week after this one, so there is time to think about.

Me (Pablo):

• Lighting: Baking Lightmaps, AAO, Shadows..
• Characters: Pipeline, how to make from scratch the modeling, texturing, simple rigging, shapekeys (ipodrivers) in real time, linking. Tips.
• Overview through new features (there are so many! in UV editor, mesh editing, animation wise, GLSL and sooo on). Tips & Tricks.
• Logo?

Chris:

• Trees: *huge* topic in Game development, making trees from scratch, texturing them, optimizations.
• Extend YoFrankie!: Explanation in what you need to make a new level, put all the assets on, enemies, power-ups, making ledges to grab on, loop-the-loops, and sooo on.
• Overview through new features in the BGE, GLSL, splatting, etc.

Campbell:

• Overview of Frankie’s logic – Explain each state, property and object in frankies group.
• Break Frankie’s logic into 5-10 blend files each with an element of frankies logic, so its not as confusing.
• Tutorial on adding a new action – we have tailwhip, kick, throw, you might want to add another
• Enemies, overview of their logic – how to use the same logic for multiple enemies, adding some variation.
• New features in logic bricks and python api, and now we used them.
• If this doesn’t take too long Ill go into details for the enemies and do some screencasts too.
• There is some overlap with game logic and level design, Chris and I will share this.

Now is your turn to tell us what you think about this list, and don’t hesitate in leaving your suggestions for more tutorials/documentation.

On the Crystal Space side, Dariusz and Frank already made tutorials, that you will find in the DVD, covering Scripting (main character, NPC’s, interaction), Linking, Shaders making, and so on.
But feel free to suggest/request CS-related tutorials anyway. There’s some chance Frank or Dariusz might have time for them.

Is your DVD! you choose what to have inside, and if it is still not yours, go grab your copy here! and support this project, by the way the new Yo Frankie! t-shirts are already in the e-shop, among with the brand new design for the Blender ones. 🙂

That’s all folks! 🙂
venomgfx

PS: First picture: my schedule, slowly starts to get more annotations on it, next to it is my Pocoyo toy I got back in Barcelona, and the reason why I’m awake most of the time.. Coffee!, Red Bull and the nice caffeine gums I got from the guys in Denmark (yes, they are legal).

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.

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.

“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!