Campbell (ideasman42) | 
07 29th, 2008
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!
Nice!
Is that annoying popping sound in the video from the game, from the compression, or because of my slow computer?
firsts! ^_^ sorry; couldnt resist.
looking awesome, i like the sound effects, will there be backround music? and enemies? also the water looks kick ass
Oh this all looks so great!
Can we maybe get some documentaion or tutorials to do with crystal space/ BGE, before the release?
Im so anxious to learn and experiment.
@mike6, not sure about the popping.
@daphzart
yep, enemies are close, but we wanted to finish off all interactions with sheep first. Sound needs work still.
Also those platforms WILL be supported by jets of lava 😉
Great!
Dude this looks awesome. You guys are doing a really great job. It looks so professional. Its really coming together nicely. The other thread is not dead. I am waiting on the warthog so I can texture paint it. I am also at the moment digging into the python to write some tools for blender. I am a technical artist so I am trying to help out with art and programming. You guys are just awesome. I really wish we could get you some more money beyond the DVD.
Cheers,
Nate Nesler
Beautiful work guys
(ahead of time). I continue to thank you for the work and effort you have put forward to the open source community.
“Hell, It’s About Time”
LOL
OMGOSH that looks freaking Sweet!!!!
You know how about some powerups, I know it’s an all natural enviornement though =)
But a speed boost before the loop de loop hehehehe xD
Cool, can’t wait for the release so I can make a jet-pack for Frankie.
Mods are going to be irresistible!!!
sheep throwing…hilarious!
WoW absolute Great.
Cant wait to get this game in my fingers. Hope there will be a lot of tutorial on how you guys did all this awsom stuff – so I can learn and do it myself.
Great Work
This is really awesome. I hope this game gets championed by the open source community. The controls look like they’re going to be easy to work with and it seems (at least from the video) like you guys are doing a great job of avoiding all the annoying control pitfalls that usually accompany platformers.
I hope everyone can keep the momentum going and keep developing for the game even after it’s shipped. I want to see this game turned into a flagship for Open gaming.
Nice work, men! 😀
Just have to say, great! Only gripe is that those are some really really small sheep. 🙂
Is it just me, or is the web site’s layout completely broken?
BTW, it’s looking very good. 🙂
@Justin, definitely, Ton wants to have apricot on SVN and accept artists/game contributers, as well as keeping up to date wiki docs, Chris is interested in helping with this also.
Once gameplay is more or less done would be really nice to get user-contrib levels.
Im trying to keep the controls as simple as possible, At the moment only arrow keys and 3 buttons- Jump, Throw, Tailwhip or Kick if your close to a sheep.
@Walter, Whenever edits are made in wordpress is breaks the video embedding grrrr… coupled with this the vimeo wasn’t loading so I couldnt get the HTML embed code…. fixed now.
@Browncow, early docs are not likely, we are still changing how things work and buisy with getting it done to write docs yet.
@BlenderLovingSquirrel, We first had the loop work at normal running speed but it seemed to lack some excitement. So I made it that franky runs a bit faster around the loop then on flat ground. However it cant be all that much faster else the loop is impossible to stay on. (unless we add walls) But a speedup before the loop would work too 😉
Nice looping! Going Sonic on their ass 😀
It’s amazing though, with the game nearing completion, how you keep the apricot shooting bazooka a secret 😉
Very cool!!!
Just fantastic! You guys are doing a great job!
Just one little detail… when throwing a sheep in the water I don’t see a splash?!
Really cool 😀
@MatrixNAN: the Warthog needs to be unwrapped still. I’m going to leave the shape as it is. I did rig it 🙂
are you still working on optimizing and adding features or you are just putting all the stuff (animation, models, textures) together so means no more progress will be done in Apricot?
“On the Yo Frankie! DVD you will find:
– The game itself, with installer, running in Linux, Windows and OS X.
…” I wouldn’t call that mere “putting all the stuff together”, but an essential feature! 😉
I like the landscapes very much, and the interactions like pushing, grabbing and throwing the sheep…
Can’t wait to test the “game itself” on the different systems of my friends to see the overall performance! Maybe, you could include something similar to Brecht’s benchmark file to get the sys specs and performance values from more potential users…
Thank you for your fantastic efforts!
@Pieter, a splash is on our todo list. along with other character effects like flashing red when characters are hurt.
@MrE, we have some secrets still… But not a bazooka AFAIK.
@SamCameron, We will probably be adding features and optimizing until the last week of August, however changes features will be smaller since we cant risk breaking stuff.
I’ll still be finishing off the game logic and writing docs from Australia until the end of August, which may include putting some python scripts into logic bricks as well as fixing bugs/glitches etc.
Brecht will be doing more important optimizations and Benoit seems keen to keep improving the BGE (new bullet physics library perhaps 🙂 ).
In short, no massive user visible changes, but there will definitely be improvements.
So was that using blender game engine or crystal space? looking good.. I liked the music. Will the BGE be getting an easier way to play animations for special effects etc? Thanks for all the hard work!! 😉
Awesome! 🙂
Kirado: “Demo Video Update (Blender Game Engine)” – “Was that using the Blender Game Engine?” — NO, it was using OGRE, you fool!
Beautiful stuff, guys — it’s fantastic!
Why are there no realtime shadows in this vid? I thought that was a feature that was being worked on.
Looking awesome guys! keep up the good work (please?) =)
Are we going to get a small demo of whats coming (in playable form) before release, or is that a no-no in terms of manpower?
Thanks !
@Walter.. yes I missed the bracket parts.. what with all the scrolling up and down.. and reading to fast in my excitement sorry 😉
Blender rules!!!!!!!!!! Apricot > Wii!!!!!
Kirado: No problem, I have my stupid moments as well 😉
@Campbell (new bullet physics library perhaps 🙂
oh you tease!
WOW guys! Great work!
I can’t wait for this game to pop up on the repository list of, let’s say, Ubuntu or something! This will be one of the best games in their list at least 😉
Wouldn’t it be great to add a funtion to the upcoming website to rate user levels, or make something in-game? ‘Cause this really is the strenght of open source; let the whole world contribute to make the best levels ever!
There are so many great possibilities and I think this game is a great platform to discover these 😉
Keep up the good work!
@fobsta, no this is something planned, but I cant speak for benoit.
@Centx, no time for that.
@oslo, there is no legal problems with including this in a ubuntu repo. I hope that happens.
@BrianH, shadows are working, just not withing DupliGroups when the video was recorded –
We use dupliGroups to link franky with his camera and lamp into the level. Brecht added initial support today.
The only two things are bugging me about the game at the moment is the movement of the player and the camera which seems very twitchy and uncontrollable and the lava, which just doesn’t seem very lava-ish to me.
However the rest is truly amazing, I love the little sheep bouncing and watching them fly through the air. They seem so cute and innocent 😀
That video looks very good! I sent the vimeo link to other friends working in the game industry and they just said: “..wow! now the game is looking even better..”
Congrats apricot team 😉
HAHA! You guys are awesome!
Looks boring.
@ Bmud – Boring ??? No way !!!
@AquaticPenguin, movement of player I’m reasonably happy with, however some of the animations don’t blend. Is there anything specifically which didnt look right about the player?
The camera isn’t final, we have an external developer writing our camera as an actuator, so this should be a lot better. If not I can always improve the existing one to make it less laggy and a way to switch out of “Behind Frankie” mode which is useful for throwing and gliding but you dont always want that.
To finish the lava and water we need animated textures and UV’s. if we cant make it in time theres other ways to get the effect that arn’t as nice. (layer planes and move them, fading them in and out could work)
@BMud, Cant tell if your serious or not. but we want to make levels less static, Chris and I just added a butterfly with sparkles for example which gives you 2x running speed for a short time.
hey Campbell thanks for taking time to anwer all the questions 😉
I think the camera and player movements are great, they fit with the landscape, and they fit with the wish to see the main character from other sides than the back from time to time.
Looks good!
One thing about the bg-music, I’d like to hear strings more and less the other, scratchy instruments. Maybe it’s just me, but while watching only this clip I already got the feeling that they were repeating too fast and started to annoy a bit.
Those animations look nice and much smoother. This is looking very polished.
Top notch.
You guys really are delivering a game of excellent quality, considering the time constraints and the plethora of features you added to the BGE.
Man, these Blender Institute projects just makes one’s life so much fun! Interesting new features, even more interesting games & movies, and a fantastic free & open source game engine.
Great work, can’t wait to see a video with the missing details of the game (spash, jets of lava, etc)!
realtime reflection + parallax mapping and alpha shadow and 3rd person camera movement needed
very very very good
Bmud is an internet hater
Rated T for Teen? Is it really that bad? Or E? Or E-10+? Gee, BBB is no longer kid friendly. 😀
@BlenderLovingSquirrel
Nah, it’s just the end of level monster Troll.
You can’t defeat it by feeding it though.
Hi !
Really really nice stuff there !
Great job !
You’ve certainly already answer to this question , so i’m sorry , but :
Will there be things to collect ?
peaches or things like that ?
Peace :-)!
Wow, fantastic work fellas. Really top notch, can’t wait to play. The optimizations seem to have done the trick too, the framerate looks smoooth! Do you have a LOD system implemented?
Pulling together. looks a bit bright, but I’m assuming that’s just the compression and what not, and it’ll look better in fullscreen 🙂 will there be music in the final version? I think it would add something to it. Guild wars is a prime example of that, the soundtrack is great.
wow! looks REALLY good. i am soooooo impressed you guys were able to follow a character through a loop the loop! spectacular. definitely will need a SHADOW though. in most 3d jump games it becomes critical in figuring out where you are while airborne. in this case, “straight down” is more helpful than “realistic”. also, the attack probably needs a sound effect. most japanese games and blizzard games are really good about “FEEDBACK”… everything you touch or do has an appropriate reaction… the attack right now seems a bit bland. but everything is coming along great! congrats everyone.
Apart from the lack of gameplay, just small points to consider. You cannot shimmy along non horizontal ledges in most games for a reason and the jump is far too high. The music volume is too low and if that’s to cover up back bg music then that’s bad practice. It’d be nice if spanking the sheep with your tail caused them pain XD
@ Kaeru: peaches? are you crazy?? apricots! :D, yes there will be powerups 🙂
@ Alex: no no LOD system implemented yet, nor “render distance” setting for the objects, so the frame rate you see in this demo is even rendering all the objects in scene all the time, at their original resolution.
LOD and limit the render distance of the objects is planned, so imagine the frame rate once we have that features on! 🙂
@ Eggyolk, yes there will be music.
@ jin choung: we do have realtime shadows!, not set up in this demo though but we do, check it here.
I agree with you with the sound effects, our composer Claire is working on that.
will the lava texture be animated?
Hello venomgfx, are they going to implement the LOD system before the official release of Apricot? or is it planed for later on?
It’s very good to see you’re answering all the questions. The movement of the player wasn’t about the animations – It was probably more a camera issue but the player seemed very difficult to control and was very twitchy using the arrow keys.
I’m loving how everything is evolving, I think this is an amazing game – definately industry quality
Nice guys you thought about any other platforms? (after its out ofc) maby at least an xbox release 😛
I love it, cool game, Blender rocks 😉
Great progress, but when is it comming out? I’ve been waiting 4 months for this.
@ Cyberdigitus: yep! animated textures is something that is being worked on.
@ SamCameron: YoFrankie! should have a LOD system when it is out, yes.
@ AquaticPenguin: The camera isn’t final yet, there are some improvements to be done in this topic. The control of the character is easier after a while (almost like learning to use Blender! ugly at the start, awesome later :)).
@ botanic: it is Open Source! whoever wants can do it 🙂
@ Taggerung: waiting for 4 months? you mean for the nice final release, because you can play exactly what you see here anytime you want, just grab the production files. 🙂
THANK YOU!!
hey!
very cool, to watch the features but… since the last updates the Level 1 and the Piranha Level doesn’t run anymore. Every time i start them i got an Segmentation fault Error and Blender crashes. Using latest Blender Build from svn. Anyway, great work and thanks a lot!
Turn down the audio volume to get rid of the popping noises and hear the background music.
venom, sure we can get the production files…
but erhm, can’t do anything usefull with it. It takes ages to load the level 1 blend file, ages to move around or select anything, or just freezes.
i have a p4 2.8ghz with 1 gb ram and a geforce gt6600… noty the greatest setup, but should be able to handle this right.
I’m not talking about playing the game itself, but editing it, how can we expect the community to do neat stuff with it when you need a supercomputer to handle it?
and concerning playing the production file… how do you select the camera attached to franky?
is there more documentation about how to work with the file? groups, …
@ cyberdigitus: even with the latest Apricot build? 6600gt is a good card and the models are very low poly, should be able to more around (don’t know in GLSL though..).
You don’t need a supercomputer to handle low poly stuff and can run perfectly with basic GLSL (no lights, shadows, shaders, etc). You can enable things as your computer can, and see what fits better.
About the camera, you dont have to worry about that, when you press P it will set automatically the camera (better to be in Perspective view).
About the documentation, not yet, but is planned to do an entire tutorial about how to make a level from scratch, put properties and all.
lol looks like Assasin’s Creed
thanks venomfx, i just figured it out before you wrote, i was still in the impression i had to set the main cam.
it does run okay with just glsl but no lights, and that is the bare minimum you must have since just multitexture doesn’t work
the game also runs better then the 3d viewport… suppose there is some editor overhead.
is camera clipping inmplemented so objects outside the view frustum don’t get rendered?
hey
excellent work, the graphics is really awesome and so are the details, especially on the trees.
even with the game is made with Blender it can match with others such as Rayman, Sly Cooper, Asterix & Obelix XXL…
really nice done
Sweet. Jess is going to love this game. Another KO for blender.
This demo looks really fun. I’m looking forward to more stuff from the BBB universe 🙂
Will the music in the game be based on Jan Morgenstern’s brilliant score for the movie?
Poor sheep.
I think that will be fine on next time much more games for kids!!! Thanks anyway for that idea.
Very Nice! Congratulations!
The best of the game, without doubt, the escenaries and the illumination.
Hi… This is not about the video, but, how can I get sound in the game engine on my mac? Please respond!!!
so like you know the squirell it moves with a keyboard but how do you get it to look like its walking?
Nice game, soooo funny. After I/ve downloaded it for Linux I’ve played it untill my eyes turned red, just like Frankie he he.
The thing is in Linux when I press excape it exits the game completelly, is that supposed to happen ? I mean if I want to go back and try another mission it’s kinda annoying, but it’s a small inconvenience to such a funny, cool good looking game. He he Frankie reminds me of Scratch, the ice age squirl.