Hello all! With the recent changes to BGE I think a number of people may be looking for an alternative game engine, and thankfully Armory just became freely available to everyone. Not only is it a great Blender Game Engine alternative, it’s a great game engine in it’s own right.
I’ve started a full game engine tutorial series covering Armory. The series contains both long form text and video tutorials and will eventually cover all aspects of Armory game development.
As the series continues on, the complexity will increase, but hopefully it covers the engine at a level that anyone with Blender ability and a willingness to learn should be able to follow along, no prior programming experience required. I am covering both scripting logic using Nodes in the logic editor, as well as creating Haxe based traits. The video series will generally lag one or two tutorials behind the text version.
Let me know if you have any comments, questions or have any requests for things to cover.
If you prefer video, the YouTube play list is available here.
I definitely liked the tutorials. I appreciate that you talk about both nodes and scripting when adding traits. I have no experience in programming, so I could use Logic nodes crash course - simple loops, adding and checking variables, etc.
BTW, I can think of using Armory 3D for showcasing Blender projects - like walk through created room, street with buildings, or using different lights on created models - exported to HTML.
Glad you’ve enjoyed them, I’ll see if I can figure out a good node primer tutorial in the future. Might actually be able to do a generic programming for visual programming languages that teaches basic programming concepts as applied to node based languages (useful for UE4 and other engines with similar approaches).
Once Blender 2.8 drops, Armory has EEVEE support built in, and it will be great for exactly the scenarios you are discussing, demoing projects, prototyping etc.
The first shows how you can create your own logic nodes for use in Blender with simple Haxe code and a splash of python. Don’t worry, you can mostly get by with copy and paste. The second shows how you can control the camera in Armory3D, as well as illustrating a character controller from the logic pack.
@Serapth We need better videos on using haxe. I’m completely lost when trying to use haxe. Even looking at the examples I’m lost. I tried to figure out how to spawn a object or spawn a random object and never could figure out how.
Yeah, that’s certainly the case. Way beyond the scope of what I can cover in this series though. What I can do though is show you how to accomplish what you are looking for. Generally Armory is set up to work with or interact with an existing scene. Here is an example Trait where I spawn multiple copies of an object named (note, named, not the type… this is assuming you’re using the default scene) “Cube”. It also goes on to illustrate how to create an empty object in the game world.
package arm;
import iron.object.Object;
class MyTrait extends iron.Trait {
public function new() {
super();
notifyOnInit(function() {
// Spawn another Cube
iron.Scene.active.spawnObject("Cube",this.object,function(o:Object){
o.transform.loc.x = 0;
o.transform.loc.y = 0;
o.transform.loc.z = 2;
o.transform.buildMatrix();
});
// Create a generic empty object in the scene
var object = iron.Scene.active.addObject(this.object);
object.name = "Object name";
});
notifyOnUpdate(function() {
});
}
}
Added a new tutorial this one covering animation. Have another one in the works that shows creating a simple animation in Blender for use with Armory, that will be up soon.