How to make walk through for fantasy world

Hi. I write fantasy novels, and I’d like to use Blender to create a 3D world for prospective readers to visit. Eventually, I’d like this to be an interactive world where they could either walk around or go my horseback or dragon to visit various caves, forests, etc. I also want the visitor to be able to interact with objects (click on a map; open a scorll; pick up a sword).

A few questions as a relative noob:

  1. Can I do all of this with the Blender game Engine?
  2. Would there be any difficulty posting this “game / waltk through” to my website and having people “play” it from there (eg - will this be computer or bandwith intensive)? If anyone can spell out the steps to doing this, I’d appreciate it.
  3. Would it be useful to try integrating Blender with Adobe Flash?

Thanks,
Rob

Having started blender a couple of months ago I probably have no place to say this… but…

Well, you can definitely do this with blender…but depending on how big the world will be, it’ll start going pretty slow. (The blender GE isn’t the best) But blender isn’t exactly noob friendly on creating whole worlds…Again, depends on how big its going to be. But still a great feat. (Again, depending on how complicated you are going to go)

I’d say it’s doable! Although an RPG isn’t exactly the best thing to start with, but definitely yeah doable…

Sure, you can do all of that, but you need to spend a lot of time and effort on making it all work out. Be sure to get discouraged a lot, but if you work hard then it’s possible. You’ll also have to use python scripts to do the more complex stuff, although moving around the world, riding mounts and sword fighting can all be done with logic blocks. I would also suggest you practice working with simple cubes and spheres as characters/environment to get used to the game engine and add in your actual characters when you get more confident. You could probably have people play the game dirrectly from your website, however it would take up a ton of bandwidth so I would suggest letting the people download a .exe from your site instead. Anyway good luck with your project and I hope everything works out the way you want it to.

Well, it’s not easy to do all of that, but it is much easier than what many people want to do for their first BGE project. Here are a few pointers:

-You can’t make a web-embedded game with Blender unless you are willing to use Blender 2.25 to make it (which is a very old version). There is a web plugin for 2.42a, but it is IE only, and it is in alpha. I believe there are serious restrictions to its capabilities (no audio, doesn’t support some of the newer materials features).

  • Blender does not integrate well with Flash. I’ve seen some short animations made with Blender converted to .swf files before, but there is no known method of making Blender games into Flash games. This is most likely because Flash is not really intended for making 3D games.

There is one very good method of exporting Blender content to a web plugin that I know of, but it will require your users to install a non-standard plugin. It is a very capable plugin, though. Read about it here: http://www.gameblender.org/modules/news/article.php?storyid=24

Other than that, I’d say a walkthrough is a very good place to start, and Blender is rather capable (not “the best there is”, but very capable). If nothing else, Blender is a great modeling program for you to use, because it can export to so many common formats. When making your models, remember that less is more when it comes to game modeling. The more polygons your models have, the slower your game performance will be.

Thanks for all the replies and suggestions.
Hellfiresniper - I’ll definitely take your advice in getting the basics down with simple objects (like cubes) before tackling knights, dragons, etc. As for bandwith, I was afraid that might be a problem. Not sure if I want to require visitors to download the game. What I’m looking for is a way to hook new visitors in an immersive experience (while loyal readers might be eager to do this, I think most new visitors would just click through).

Blendenzo: thank you for the detailed response.
Bummer about Flash since it’s a great program; hopefully Adobe will make it more 3D oriented in their next release.
Think I’ll avoid the older versions of Blender, though i appreciate you mentioning the possibility.
The plug-in you recommended might be a possibility. I visited the site and plan to go back to research it more thoroughly as soon as I get some time.
If it looks good, I might try to post a very simple game on my website to get the logistics down.
Rob

For something of this magnitude I highly recommend Crystal Space .
The way you want the player/visitor/fan to be able to travel around in a 3d world would be totally insane to complete in Blender game engine.

With Crystal Space you get all the Goodness of Blender 3d, Plus all the real time rendering power of Crystal space. Crystal space has gone as far as to implement many common tool’s into their game engine.

The biggest thing I think you will appreciate is The terrain system, you can have literally thousands of polygons for your foliage in view at any time without lag.

Another feature you mentioned is the ability to go seamlessly indoors and outdoors, CS has what is known as a portal system, so your players can walk up to a cave and see the nice details inside, when they are not looking right at the portal, it is not rendering anything. This saves lots of CPU power.

As far as your visitors being able to launch the client from a web browser, this can be done with pretty much any game engine, you have to just use Active X controls to launch the client. (for windows only)

Another nice thing about Crystal space is the Cross platform capability, in its current state the blender game engine cannot port the sounds to linux or Macintosh without some serious tweaking and re-distributing python libraries (this means your game would have to comply with the libraries licensing) .

To save you time, CS also will automaticaly bake all your “thing” meshes to a light map for you. In the BGE you need to manually do this yourself (not very hard, but it is quite time consuming, and in some cases requires you to make further UV maps for all your meshes onto 1 lightmap texture)

As far as ease of use there is a great plugin for blender that will allow you to create every thing in your world including player models , environments,lights,scripts (XML,and python), and emitters.You then simply hit a button, or hotkey… a few seconds pass, and you will be walking around in your 3d world.All from blender 3d, no other software needed.

Another nice feature is the way CS handles the bumpmaps and paralax shaders, you simply apply the materials and bumpmaps in blender with the CS plugin. Blender game engine requires you to write a GLSL shader

there are a few games that already use an older version of crystal space.
One is called Planeshift, which is open source. This will make it easy to see how they implement the protocol in both the client and the server for a massive multilayer game. (please ignore the graphics, they where defiantly made by novice artists, and should not reflect the power of crystalspace)

Well, before I end up writing a novel here, I should just link you to the CS website:
http://www.crystalspace3d.org/main/Main_Page

Here is the installer page to make it easy to get it up and running:
http://b2cs.delcorp.org/index.php/ArtistInstall

For tech support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week you can come to the IRC channel here:
irc.freenode.net
#crystalspace

Hello and welcome to the magic world of Blender

Sure, you can do all this in Blender!
But maybe if it looks quite simple, its still a big amount (and long) of work.
Specially if you’re quite new to 3D work

In the other side the “Blender world” lacks “content people” tremendously!
I understand that maybe you want to do your world by yourself ( the big “problem” of
Blender’s easiness :slight_smile: ), it’s that most of us do, anyway!
But if you make a complete document, with the story, the interactivity, the characters
and even the “style/look” you want and you propose it here, you’ll find, probably, many
people interested to participate, including me.
Bye

Hey blendpenc You could do this with BGE I have worked with Blender for 4 years and I have made something sort of like what you want to make only not as big. I think if you spend like an hour a day then you could do it pretty fast. I think Mmph! is right that Crystal Space is probably better if you want to put it online.
If you need help you help then you can ask me.

I too would be interested in the making of this world of yours.

To Mmph, OTO, Spastigaga, and Farthioner:

Thanks for the replies and the offers to help; if I decide it’s plausible to create this online world to go along with my novels, I’d certainly welcome the assistance of those in the Blender and Crystal Space communites who actually know what they’re doing.
A couple of questions:

  1. I read through the documentation on Crystal Space, and there seemed to be a great deal of coding. Is this just an explanation of the source code that’s already built into Crystal Space (and Crystal Entity Layer) or is the end user (me) required to produce a similar amount of code to create and run their game and walkthrough.
  2. In terms of workflow (creating character meshes; armatures; animations for walk cycles or pointing to stuff), can anyone describe which parts would be best done in Blender and which in the Crystal Space or CEL environment?
    Thanks for the help and advice,
    Rob

Hello again
1- Yes, frightening huh?! :slight_smile:
With Crystal Space you must code ( or call already made functions I guess? I’m not
a programmer) “everything”!
With CEL much less.
2-Well, Blender can be ( lucky you) a tool to make characters, objects and even
entire levels for CS.
Bye