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Messages - leuat

Pages: [1] 2
1
General Anim8or Forum / Re: Polly 3D engine-not finalized???
« on: March 19, 2009, 04:35:19 pm »
Well. Sorry for giving too much hope, but trying to get things finished by march has been impossible. As previously stated, I am paid to work on my PhD thesis, not Polly. Polly has only been a weekend-hobby, but started taking too much time off my actual work. So these months I've been focusing on my PhD, hopefully finishing up some research by june!

Another thing is the fact that the userfriendliness / core game engine of Polly is harder to do than I thought. Alot of the code needs rewriting, new stuff needs implementation, and endless amounts of testing is required. Until I find proper time for this (during the summer!), I will not release anything half-done. Let's just hope the coding kick returns!

Anyway, there are some new not-so-special screenhots at the homepage, for those interested. Sorry about giving too high expectations, but I'm such a lazy bastard =)

2
General Anim8or Forum / Re: Polly updates
« on: December 31, 2008, 10:43:50 am »
Well. There is alot of work to do, and what you are describing will be included in future versions. The first version will support keyframed objects only, which means non-interacting cinematic objects. But at least they will be moving! When all is well, and bugs are fixed, then *boned* objects will be supported. With bone-meshes, it will be possible to add real physics to limbs to support gore and other effects. But remember that coding all this stuff takes way much time - i've now spent 5 days trying to get the terrain shadows work, and there is still a major bug...

3
General Anim8or Forum / Re: Animated models for Polly needed
« on: December 16, 2008, 05:55:15 pm »
Ah ok, I misunderstood then. Anyway, first things first, i'll see how the keyframing works. When this is going swell, I'll start working on the bone and skinning implementation.. I just need time to sit down and go through the An8-to-MS3D-code..

4
General Anim8or Forum / Animated models for Polly needed
« on: December 16, 2008, 02:35:28 pm »
So! During a 2 day code frenzy, I've managed to implement stale support for animated objects in Polly. However, as liban8 (not yet?) supports bones, I decided to implement the simplest possible thing first: keyframes. This is done by "compiling" several .an8 or .3ds-files to a Polly resource-file: .ply. This chunked file format will be the base 3d/terrain/item/whatever resource for polly, but is still in early development version.

Anyway. This ".ply compiler" can be used for adding several (euqal-sized) objects together, where the user can define "key"-paths. These paths tells Polly which objects to interpolate between (for instance in a walk, death etc)

Hence, my problem. This preliminary version now works like a charm, but I am completely incompetent when concering 3d object design. And i really need animated objects for debugging and testing the game engine. So if any of you chaps could supply me with a monster or two, I would be very thankful. Heck, this monster might even be included in the final first version, if it doesn't suck too much.

Note: ALL objects must contain the SAME amount of vertices / the same faces. They should only be different
poses of the same object, preferalbly done with bones!

What I need is the following:

 A "walking" cycle: at least 3 objects
 A "dying" cycle : at least 1 object
 An "attack" cycle: at least 2 objects

the object should contain about 500 polys, no more than a thousand... can contain as many materials as you wish.

Also, the name of the texture used should be typed in the "diffuse texture" box in the materials settings. This
texture name will be the identifier within Polly for this specific texture.  You can choose your own name, but try to make it unique ("HI" is not unique. "Flesh_red_gory_001" is unique).

leuat

5
General Anim8or Forum / Re: Polly updates
« on: December 15, 2008, 08:50:01 am »
xalener: I added a small vid, but I don't have a clue about video editing. So the vid includes bugs and other crappy things. It can be found on the front polly page.

Well, I need to cool you guys down. The engine is still *far far* from complete. Even though the fun parts (graphics) is implemented, you still cannot really *do* anything with polly. Add some objects, script a static spider to run around and scream "hell yeah!", but that's it. In order to be able to create a proper *game*, there are lots of things that need to be added, like an item editor, AI-system, conversation editor and XP system. And before that gets done, I need to sit down and find motivation to implement animations, reimplement sound (ALut doesnt work for mac), finish the object editor, think about shadows and *puh* wrap it all up together.

The good thing is: xmas holiday is soon starting. which means way more time for coding!

6
General Anim8or Forum / Re: Polly updates
« on: December 08, 2008, 02:13:32 pm »
Ah. Indoor. That's a good question! I really haven't thought about that. Right now, I've implemented various collision detection stuff for objects. Like, trees are cylinders, static buildings are boxes. I also implemented a "full" collision detection system, where I've tested a 500-poly church (the one in the images), so you can run inside, collide with walls and ceiling and such. However, "large" indoor buildings will *not yet* be implemented, that is, portal-based BSP levels and so on. At least not for the upcoming version.

Alas, in the beginning I'll only be focusing on outdoor scenarios, scattered with small houses, caves and such inserted by the user, without any space partitioning of these. And then we'll see what happens =)

Right now I'm working on user-friendliness. I am not a particularly user-friendly guy right now, because I have to create listboxes and buttons and labels and blah need find good ways of presenting the stuff. And at the same time fix bugs, bugs, soon implement a dropdown-list-fontex-object, fix more bugs, all while I should be producing cosmological PhD-work =)

Last week I even brought Polly to bed, which upset my girlfriend more than usual.


7
General Anim8or Forum / Re: Polly updates
« on: December 03, 2008, 05:36:03 pm »
Well, there's the rub!

The problem with Polly right now (that is, developing 0.095), is that it is really incomplete and user-unfriendly. I haven't tested anything yet on other computers, there are weird bugs, still hard-coded stuff and lots of hard-to-do-things that needs to be moved from scripts & code to a better-behaved GUI. Even more, lots of important features are not yet implemented.

The only "real" difference between 0.095 and 0.1 is going to be *user friendliness*, and I will have to spend a month or two working on this. And when 0.1 is released, you guys will all download the new version, find it buggy, crashing and full of faults. This will be the crucial part - the part when I listen, tear out my hair and spend the entire spring trying to fix bugs. But eventually, we will agree, and a stable version 0.11 will be completed.

And then the fun begins: Do *not* expect version 0.1 (or version 0.11) to be "fully" usable. But when a stable, working release based on user feedback has been established, we can start working on the fun parts: implementing new and awesome features.

8
General Anim8or Forum / Polly updates
« on: November 30, 2008, 10:59:49 am »
Development of the Polly 3D engine with anim8or support has been resumed. Information, screenshots, comments and free women can be obtained at http://www.irio.co.uk/polly

9
General Anim8or Forum / Re: The terrific Polly game engine thread
« on: November 11, 2008, 05:59:19 pm »
ehm yeah. the competition is called "NGA08", so ehm, confused. I'm not too good with numbers you see =)

10
General Anim8or Forum / Re: The terrific Polly game engine thread
« on: November 11, 2008, 02:47:22 pm »
The recent months, I have been unable to work on Polly due to PhD work. However, I'm thinking about competing in http://www.gameawards.no, and I'm therefore continuing working on Polly. However, there will be some changes:

One of the reasons why the development of Polly was paused was due to a laptop crash. Now, with a new laptop, even a Mac, Polly runs even smoother (will still support Windows, naturally). However, I will be focusing on bug fixes, user friendliness, stability, the editors and tutorials and such instead of features, for a while. Hopefully, a beta will be released within march 2008.

Anyway. For the following version (that is, after the user-friendly-beta-version), I will focus on the following features: physics engine, animated (skeleton-based) characters, normal mapping & shaders

information and updates can be found at http://www.irio.co.uk/polly , but still a bit sparse.. the site will be heavily updated when I *really* get to start with the development in mid-december.
 

11
General Anim8or Forum / Re: Where's Polly?
« on: November 06, 2008, 01:49:16 am »
Well. Maybe you guys should be worried.. there have been three negative trends:

1) the recent months, I've had to work my ass off with my PhD, and haven't had time to do any stuff on Polly. The less you work on a project, the harder it gets to start on it again
2) then my computer broke down, and I need to buy a new one  (all source is backed up, naturally).
3) I tried to raise interest, but seemed like very few people were actually intent on *doing* anything to help with the project

Anyways. When xmas closes in, and I hopefully finish a paper, I can go back to Polly for a while.. but I am having trouble defining a motivating goal, what features should be implemented, which can be dropped, and how to get there. Not an easy thing to finish a task when you have to push yourself.


12
General Anim8or Forum / Re: Polly: Game Engine with Anim8or Support
« on: July 10, 2008, 03:02:25 am »
ah, nice to see people are interested in Polly =)

welly, right now I'm doing scientific non-Polly work at Caltech, California, and I won't be back in Norway until next month. So there really haven't been advancements in Polly during the past month.. as some of you might have noticed, there are still no terrain shadows, no animation support, the engine is still not very user friendly, and I have a zillion things to add / bugs to fix.

regarding the movie: i don't really know how to capture movies, I used Fraps but the video obvious doesn't work on anyting but VLC, I'm afraid. And another thing, I only have a laptop computer - so everything is developed/tested on a crappy graphics card, so things might seem slow. I'm going to buy a new computer at home this fall, to support better-looking graphics (and faster compile time.. damn source is getting big)

But yes, the engine supports bloom (and god-rays), if you have a fast enough graphics card. And, there will be support for anim8r animated scenes, and terrain shadows, but I haven't really gotten into that yet. I also plan to add proper volumetric clouds and dynamic weather. The user is also able to define the how everything should look - the Lua-scripts that controls a "game" defines which landscape textures to use, which objects are defined as "environment" objects (such as grass, shrooms and bushes), and the terrain editor controls which parts of the landscape should generate what kind of scenery (eg, mountainous  landscape generates more stones and ferns, while a meadow-landscape generates more grass and stuff. It's all defined in the scripts by the user).

All in all, the current 3d objects in polly suck because I don't know anything about 3d design, but I generate objects with tree generators and hunt for textures on the net. So if somebody bothers to invest time into creating more proper objects and textures, things will certainly  look better!

anyway. the trees you guys see now are like ~1000 polys each, but there is no upper limit on objects. But larger objects (like, 20000 polygons) will slow the engine down, naturally. However, I'm about to implement a normal mapper - firstly, for ground textures, but later for objects as well - and this will enable great-looking objects with few polys (as doom 3, etc). ALso, the engine supports (defined in scripts as well) a LOD-object world - for instance, trees that are close to the camera are rendered as a high-resolution mesh, while further-away trees
are rendered as low-resolution (or billoboarded) trees, making things way fast.

Anyways, developing everything from scratch takes time - and Polly will not be complete in many years. The first public release (hopefully in october) will probably be no more than a "technology" demo, where one can create simple games without much depth. But if people are interested, and if I continue existing without having much of a social life, Polly might actually get somewhere one day...

so, thanks for all the interest!

13
General Anim8or Forum / Re: The terrific Polly game engine thread
« on: May 26, 2008, 04:39:33 pm »
The stuff with the tutorials is a pretty good point. A software bundle is crap if there isn't any good documentation / tutorials. During the summer, I'll make a dedicated web page crammed with tutorials and how-to's. At least that's the plan =) . Anyways, I'm always interested in models, but right now models are not a priority - making sure the code works & implementing new features are.

14
General Anim8or Forum / Re: The terrific Polly game engine thread
« on: May 23, 2008, 04:10:51 pm »
Ëh. Sorry for abusing the notation. Right now, I mean bump mapping. That is, adding a normal texture that will bump the polygons + added specular / diffuse light. But I'm planning on (hopefully) being able to create a normal-map-converter later on. In theory it's not that hard. And that would be thoroughly sexy.

But proper normal mapping is not yet a priority: implementing a solid, simple working 3D engine is.
^L

15
General Anim8or Forum / The terrific Polly game engine thread
« on: May 23, 2008, 08:05:44 am »
So. Noticing how some people might be eager to try out the Polly engine whenever it will be released, I decided to start this new thread in order to set up som commuication between the omnipotent coder (yours truly) and  eventual future users.

For those of you who are yet blissfully ignorant, Polly is a home-brewed OpenGL 3D terrain engine written in C++ by a disgrunted PhD student who really should get some proper work done soon. Some screenshots can be found at a preliminary site here : http://www.irio.co.uk/index.php?page=polly

Now, Polly currently uses .an8-files to populate the world with monsters, forests, houses, more monsters and mushrooms. Unfortunately, the author of Polly is *not* an adept 3d modeller, so the game world is currently populated with (free) .3ds-objects from turbosquid and a couple of eggplant forests / badly designed monsters. However, Polly employs various anim8or object propertes such as bump mapping, specular lightning, ambient etc etc, but does not yet support object animation. I have a todo-list from hell, and will hopefully release version 0.10 for public download within this very summer (which will be very very user friendly + support object animation + opengl sound and other usefull stuff)

Until then: if you have questions, wishes, ideas, comments, tips, requests or women to share, please do so in this thread.


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