For our cyberpunk game, the first stage will be, one large city full of buildings ranging from normal houses to skyscrapers (all of which will be built with our tile system). Probably not more than 100 people on at a time, if even that.
If your tile system is good enough at only showing tiles that are close to you, and you can keep the number of objects below 200 or so, than blender should be able to handle it. When the sources are released, maybe we (meaning coders who want to code for the realtime engine) can work on fixing the framerate problems.
You’ll have to keep polycounts low and avoid using a lot of add of alpha textures.
TorQ
I thinking a distance of site that can be set based on how good your card is, or maybe eventually and system that watches and when you start to lag it reduces your distance and brings it back up when you’ve got extra power. The only problem with this is that when we got the the round world stage of the game I want people to be able to see the moon, which will be an actual orbiting object. But that’s far enough that we can come up with something later. The problem with the distance system in the near future is, what about people taveling at high sppeds (like on a motorcycle) or high above the ground (a plane). I want to add both to the game, but if you can’t see the ground, or you can’t see fr enough ahead to pilot, it will kind of suck. Maybe some kind of system to reduse the amount of pixels read from distant objects (or somethinmg like that, a scaling engine) I know there are games that do that. Maybe Atriarch is supposed to. Any programming geniuses out there who want to take on the challenge?
By the way, does anyone know if other programing langueges can be used with blender (esp. basic/vb, since many of the team already know some VB?
No, right now python is all that can be used; but if they know VB it wouldn’t hurt for them to learn python and python is about as easy to learn as VB is.
As far as the moon is concerned, it could be a special case object that is always displayed (your always gonna see the moon).
This sounds like a long enough range project that you don’t have to worry TOO much about the speed (the speed in blender right now is pretty bad, and it doesn’t handle a lot of objects well) as hopefully blender development can add some speed boosts. If not, there are ways to work around it. As for flying, the distance would be based on the xy plane only, meaning that it wont change if you go really high. That’s how I would do it anyway. Also, if you have problems, don’t have any of the insides of buildings: instead, when you go inside a building, THEN it unloads the outside, and loads in the inside. This will increase the speed a lot, and allow you to have extremely elaborate interiors.
Doing distance of site on just the xy plane is a good idea.
As for the buildings, we were plannig to put the insides of buildings as part of the actual world. We don’t want you to have to go through loading time to go into a building. Did I mention there will be stuff in every building? Maybe a line of sight system too, so that you can’t see the insides of buildings unless you stand right at the window. We ae planing on making windows seperate objects so you can break through them. Well, have to work on it. We have to see what kind of server/client model we come up with before we can say for sure how everything works. But I’m thinking, as you move your character, your client keeps track of your own position, and sends it to the server, the server then transmits out the postion/model/animation/frame of animation that everyone in your line and distance of sight is at.
I guess we’ll just have to learn python and work on stuff.
Hello Skanime
Download this demo( 900 ko) here:
http://capsulemag.chez.tiscali.fr/ImaginaryLove003.zip
there’a a little town on it with animated characters and vehicles.
My advice is: you can’t do a HUGE level with Blender, i guess
So do a TERRIFIC little one 
Good luck
António
You could also have TWO distance checkers. Distance checkers for outside objects, and distance checkers for inside objects. The distance away that it loads interiors will be much reduced from the distance it loads outeriors. This way you can see big buildings from far off, but it doesn’t actually start loading the inside of the building until you are pretty close to it.
it says the page is forbidden.
Also, I was thinking about the only xy distance of sight thing and the problem there is buildings will be made of tiles put together and stacked on top of each other. I though of one way to reduce the stress caused by the tiles though. I originally, I planned to make tiles have a width, not just length and height. But if it is just a single surface, that more than cuts the polygon count in half.
Right mouse click over the link and choose Save Link!
António
That’s possible but, it will be difficult to define inside/outside objects as you can move them in and out, not to mention a line of site system allows for not loading the other side of a building. I was thinking, assign all objects a vertex in its center as the viewable vertex, basically, if it is in your line of site, the object loads. This way it doesn’t load objects that you only see the corner of. For very large objects, more vieable vertecies could be assigned. Thanks for the suggestions everyone.
Blender can handle anything. Your creative problem solving is what determines what the limitations will be. So, blend on!
Okay, so I’m thinking of making an official, “we’re looking for help” post. Where should I make it, besides blendergames.com since I never got my confirmation e-mail.
Well, I was thinking and since this is our first game project and all, we really don’t have to have one big seemless world, or windows that you can break through, or a tile system allowing players to build buildings from the ground up. Instead, we can do this. Use the city gen program to create our cities, saving tons of time, and then just have sections of cities 64x64 buildings (if you’ve used the city gen, you know that cities are up to 64x64). Then just link the different section of cities together, but as seperate level. The insides of buildings can be seperate areas (or each floor for that matter. You just walk up to the door of a building that has some thing in it, press a key and you make the transistion. Using city gen will also make the cities less graphically intensive (I think each building is basically a cube; 6 sides and some textures). This way, we can focus more on cool game play and less on create a server/client model that can handle a ton of polygons. Players will still be able to own buildings, or even just floors. Find a building or floor you like, and put in a request to the admins (us) and they’ll create blank level for each floor and set up a way to get there. You have to pay, of course, so save up your creds. Then you can just buy furniture/equipment and you’ve got an apartment, or labs, or corporate offices, or a store, or whatever. What do you think?
Hey, that STILL sounds pretty cool. I mean seamless worlds and high polygon counts, and flexible city systems are all good, but as it’s your first project you should start small. It’s really the gameplay that matters most, and while breaking out windows etc is cool, it’s not totally necesary is it?
Worry about the game first, and cool features later.
The first stage of the game will be basically a glorified first person shooter/swinger. No skills or character development. Once the skills and stuff are implemented, we are gonna have tons of career paths, such a technichian (weapons, armor, vehicles, robotics, cybernetic), genetic engineering (what do you get when you mix a dog and a cow? find out), merchanting, and tons of other stuff. Suggestions are very welcome.