Our focus for this techdemo:

• Better dialog system.
• Sounds
• Bigger room.
• (Dynamic) Lighting.
• Postprocessing (Edge Detection).

We haven’t established any goals for our next demo. Anyhows, the system requirements have changed a bit. A pixel shader 3.0 video card is now required to run the demo. Also you need to have the following frameworks installed on your machine. These are the same as the last time:

• Microsoft XNA Framework 3.0 (7.6 MB)
• Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 (22.4 MB, not required for Windows Vista

Download link: Cyl Techdemo #2

And of course, a gameplay video for the people incapable of running the demo themselves:

Hope you all enjoy it. We’re going to celebrate the holidays with our families now. Merry Christmas and a happy new year!

A few days ago I read about exporting Opaque Data from 3ds max/Maya to XNA (link). Till now, we interpreted the names of the objects in Blender for special objects (for example the spawn point of the player would be named spawn_player). The drawback is that the length of the name is limited, and the names will get very messy when using multiple tags.

When looking around in Blender I found that there is the option to give each object in the scene some properties. These options are located under the Logic Panel (F4). And looks like this:

Object Properties in Blender

As you can see, I’ve added a boolean property with the name “spawnpoint” and the value true to the object. Now I’ve modified the the FBX exporter modified for XNA to also export these properties (download available at the bottom of the post). All types, except for the timer, are supported.

Now I can import this model in XNA using a Custom Model Processor. The code for this example should look something like this:

[ContentProcessor]
public class CustomModelProcessor : ModelProcessor
{
	public override ModelContent Process(NodeContent input,
								 ContentProcessorContext context)
	{
		Vector3? spawnpoint = null;
		for (int i = 0; i < input.Children.Count; i++)
		{
			NodeContent child = input.Children[i];

			if (child.OpaqueData.ContainsKey("spawnpoint"))
			{
				bool isSpawnpoint = (bool)child.OpaqueData["spawnpoint"];
				if (isSpawnpoint)
				{
					spawnpoint = child.Transform.Translation;
					input.Children.Remove(child);
				}
			}
		}
		ModelContent model = base.Process(input, context);
		if (spawnpoint != null)
		{
			model.Tag = (Vector3) spawnpoint;
		}
		return model;
	}
}

Also, Blender’s Y-axis is XNA’s Z-Axis, and vice-versa. The exporter can also rotate the model, so up in Blender is up in XNA. I’ve just commented out the line, just edit the exporer script with your favorite text editor and uncomment (remove the ‘#’) the following line:
# GLOBAL_MATRIX = GLOBAL_MATRIX * RotationMatrix(-90, 4, ‘x’)

Download the exporter script: HERE

(Windows users: Put it in your %APPDATA%\Blender Foundation\Blender\.blender\scripts folder).

Special thanks to Lynch3 at #xna on EFnet for helping me out with the FBX file syntax.

Cel-Shaded Cyl

This does not mean the final game will be fully cel-shaded. We’re just exploring our possibilities .

When insanityensues started blogging a few weeks ago, I started to learn how to develop games in XNA. Since I’ve got no prior (3D) game programming experience, there was a lot for me to learn. We now have a small demo to show you what we’ve been up too.

Our main focus with this “Techdemo” is to show you how the game would feel like to play. After going through a lot of different options, we decided to go with a rather classic point and click interface, but in a 3D environment.

Implemented features:

• Point and click mouse control.
• Camera moving along a rail which has been created in Blender.
• Interaction with an NPC using a very simple dialog system
• Animation works, but we’re still using the SkinnedModelProcessor, example provided by the XNA Creators Club.

We’ve not yet implemented any kind of special lightning, postprocessing, particles, sounds, etcetera. This is going to be the first of many techdemos, to share with you our progress in creating the game engine.

Fair bit of things to know:

• Lots of bugs to squash and no, there’s no special points or thingy when you get them all.
• It comes with an editable config.ini, where you can set your resolution and a bit of settings. Yes, in notepad. We’ll work on that too. Don’t make any spelling errors. It’s quite a delicate little config file.
• There’s a little bug with collision detection. If you try hard enough, you can walk through the big floating head. But we’ll be overhauling the collision system anyways soon, so, suck it up and deal with it! Heh, nah, we just wanted to give you this now, we’ll fix it in the next techdemo.

Download!

Okay, now you want to get it. But hold your horses, you need two extra applications to be able to run the demo:

• Microsoft XNA Framework 3.0 (7.6 MB)
• Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 (22.4 MB, not required for Windows Vista)

(Yes, I know, sorry, it’s windows only)

The techdemo can be downloaded: here. Just extract it and run CylTechDemo1.exe.

Video

For the non-Windows users and the people who just don’t feel like downloading, have a youtube:

If you have any question feel free to reply to this post, or email me: michiel |at| emon |dot| nl

Enjoy the demo!

On a completely different note… I made a cockroach. Not sharing that though.

I also made Cyl into 3D, textured and well! Now, I take it you all want a look, so, here goes:

Cyl in 3D

Hope you guys like it! Hopefully more soon, both 3D, as storywise, and engine-wise! Keep reading,

-InsanityEnsues

Mood board

Click it to see the full thing. It’s quite… big. Hope this’ll help!

Keep looking everyone! Thanks for checking up on us.

lou(at)fadingdream.com

Anyways, here goes:

Cyl's Concept Art