Cartoon dragon RPG'ish type game...

Game Engine Works in Progress and Game Demos
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Hey all,

This is pretty much my first game in Blender. I made a simple ship game that allowed you to shoot an enemy about 10 years ago in Blender, so this is like my first go all over again.

The area is pretty big, it was just over twice the size compared to the characters, but I was having issues with the Sun lamp’s shadows clipping out and having to use a very large sample size, and its still pretty pixelated. There is an outdoor area, an interior area (Castle), as well as a cave system thanks to Exanimis’s cave Tileset.

http://www.blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?284725-Tilesets

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The Dragon has a walk, walk-backwards, run, run-backwards, jump, idle, and shoot fireball animations, I still need to do the strafing. I used Aniruddha’s World of Warcraft style character navigation script, it works awesome.

http://www.blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?274753-World-of-Warcraft-Style-Character-Navigation-System

He can shoot fireballs, the shader I borrowed from a youtube video and download. It’s a great BGE fire shader and can be adapted into other things, say into fireballs… :slight_smile: It will probably shade my other planed special fire moves.

The fireballs also explode on contact with something, right now only enemies, but I just have to hook that up to the walls, trees etc…

The enemy bees have simple AI, and an agro distance, as well as a fire distance where they shoot their stingers at you. They also have basic animations, idle, attack, knock-back from the fireballs etc…

There is also a basic XP system set up, right now each bee you kill gives you 3 XP which will triger a level up when high enough.

Anyways, I’m having a blast learning the game engine, just trying to keep the frame rate down as best I can while still making it look decent. Not sure what the frame rate will be after all of the “set decorating” I have to do yet, as well as a lot of other things. Thanks for checking this out.

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Other pics…

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Awesome!! It looks very neat! I’m glad my script is helping you out!

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It’s looking very good so far, the only thing is that you probably want to make sure that the fire-breath material is set to use the ‘billboard’ orientation type (you might only need one or two faces and have a circular bounding type to take care of collision).

As for the sun shadows, this is an issue that can only be solved if the BGE devs. implemented parallel-split shadow mapping, otherwise, the sunlamp shadows will be limited to a frustum region like the spotlamp but with a different projection. A possible alternative is to have a separate sunlamp that focuses on creating lower-resolution shadows at a long distance ahead of the camera, though it’s important to try to make do with as few of those lamps as possible to avoid too much FPS hit.

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Heya Ace,

Thanks, I’m glad you like it.

The fireball is animated to spin, the material acts on the viewing angle, so it ripples and flows kinda thing, the still screenshot doesn’t do it justice. It looks much better when animated, I’ll try and see about recording video of it, I’ve never done that before.

It’s a shame about the sun lamp shadows, I did try a few things like multiple suns, but that just washed out the other’s shadows. I also tried a shadow only, but this gave it a negative exposure look rather than black or darkness, negative lights would be a great asset for shadowing things like corners etc…

Right now there are just 3 lamps in the level, one sun and two hemi lamps, I wanted to keep the lighting simple and not drag on the engine too much.

Thanks for checking it out! :slight_smile:

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Not so fast, because of the aliased nature of the classic shadow buffers, it’s actually possible to line up more than one sunlamp buffer in a way where the seam becomes virtually invisible.
bge_longDistanceSun.blend (540 KB)

The trick is to have a sunlamp that does not cast shadows at all, and then have two shadow-only sunlamps at various distances parented to the camera. In the .blend, you will noticed that the careful positioning of the sunlamps means that you see a virtually seamless transition from the higher-res buffer for up close objects to the lower-res one for objects further away, there is no shadow washout and the shadows can be made as dark as needed by adjusting the power of the two lamps.

EDIT: Updated the file to have a simple object hierarchy instead of a straight parenting to the camera, the idea is that the cube is parented to the camera (which the lamps are then vertex parented to) to prevent the lamps from rotating with the camera.

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Awesome! That’s brillian Ace, thanks for sharing that with me. I will try to give it a go in my game and see if I can get it working. I’ll see if I can get that alignment, great way to fake long distance shadows. Cheers!!! :slight_smile:

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Of course, when I tested that trick I was like, “wow, something that variance shadow maps can’t do” :wink:

For the record, you really can’t do this all that much with the variance shadows because of how the long distance shadow would become a bit softer. Also, I updated the file with a slightly different parenting setup that should prevent the lamps from rotating with the camera.

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This looks like a cool project. I want to say more but I can’t really dig into it right now. Mostly commenting so that I’ll get thread updates so I will be reminded to come back.

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Ace: Thank you for your help and the improved parenting setup on your file. I still have so much to learn about so much stuff, Blender is an endless education it seems! But, that’s what makes it fun, discovery and application! :slight_smile: I really do appreciate the help, cheers!

Kastoria: Thank you for your nice comment, take all the time you need… hehe :slight_smile:

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Me like it ! Good job on it :wink:

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Thanks BlendingBGE! :slight_smile:

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Very cool! It will be awesome to see more!

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Pretty cool stuff.

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This looks quite cool. When can we get some gameplay videos?

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Wow! Looks really cool :slight_smile: Reminds of the PS1 game Spyro. :yes:
Good luck!

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Thanks guys, I’m glad you like the work so far.

I guess I really need to learn a lot more to continue on this, so will probably mean me bombarding the forums with questions on how to do this and that. lol

I will post more, hopefully even video, once I get to another decent milestone. Thanks for the support! :slight_smile:

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This reminds me of the second harry potter game. (except the enemies made me sell my copy >:( horrible design in that area). My point is the cool open world. You could find “lost items” around the school grounds. By the lake house or on the roof. That part was cool.