Pixie Development Thread - Now Divided into 2 Parts (Scroll Down to Bottom)

Game Engine Game Engine Support and Discussion
1

After 3 months of work, I’ve finally almost nutted out my RPG style game. Well the beta anyway. I don’t think I’ll make it very big, since it already takes a while to load. I’ve renamed it Pixie rather than Paladin, because Paladin sounds to close to Pavilion, or Pavlova. Let me know if you also get a message saying the programme encountered a problem and must close when you push Esc. I always get it when I’m viewing my main scene. Originally, I was making a 3D Zelda fan game, but then, I decided to make something original, so I didn’t have to follow the guidelines the Legend of Zelda series follows.

Basically, you’re a little knight dude with some serious bling, (I thought it would be amusing to mix modern day with the world of the 1500’s.) Huge storyline, I know, but I find that bit boring, so I usually don’t do it. =) I made up the little guy 2 years back when I got bored in English. And since then he’s popped up in the margins of my books in every lesson.

The file is about 5mb as a .blend. So, for those who either, can’t run it, or can’t be bothered to, I have some screenies! Just so people know:

  1. No, I’m not planning to release anything commercial because the graphic quality is so out of date it would make customers vomit.
  2. No, I’m not making a mmorpg an want u pples ta mak it 4 me. Although, some help with the enemy AI would help alot.





Feel free to poke around with the logic or models. Here’s the file:

http://www.savefile.com/files/857976

Pixie requires a video card with a GLSL shader in order for you to view the lava.
The poly count is quite high (mostly because of decoration.) It does take a while to load, but works fine after that.
Running in full-screen will temporarily change your resolution to 600X800. It will return to your regular setting once you close the game.
The lantern seems to make it darker rather than lighter. Not meant to happen.
The terrain texture was done using texture paint, among the most useful tools in Blender.
The life system does work, however, the only thing able to hurt you at the moment is lava. It does 2 hearts so watch your step!

Controls

W - move forward
A - side step left
S - move backward
D - side step right

1 - assign bomb
2 - assign lantern
3 - enter first person bow view
4 - (Will be a large mallet)
5 - empty
6 - empty

Left mouse - Unsheathe or swing sword
Right mouse - Use assigned item
Middle mouse - throw (bomb or pot), pick up pot
Mouse move - rotate camera

Known bugs

All these bugs are simple little frustrating things I’ve become aware of through testing
my game myself. I’m working on fixing them.

Sometimes when the game starts, the player becomes stuck and cannot move
The player has a tendency to move very slowly when walking off the west end of the bridge
The bomb jitters in the players hands
If the bomb explodes while the player is holding it, the player will shudder, then fly off
There is no overlay when the player walks underwater, so it looks like above water
The arrow doesn’t hit the exact centre of the aimer
The player doesn’t fall fast enough

Other than that, it works quite fine.

And finally some credits, and special thanks:

Modeling, Animating, Texturing, Coding
Ashley Mannix

Fluid Shaders
3D Penguin (lava & deep water)
Larryboy (shallow water)

Special Thanks
Erwin for his great contribution to the game engine. Also
to p00f, Braveheart, Ititrx, and others who I cannot
remember the names of, for their general
FAQs.

Please post any bugs you may encounter so I may fix them, and any Critique and Comments are welcome. Have fun and keep on blending!

2

i’ll try to download it, but Dial-up sucks, it looks really cool.
i’ve tried using the Lava\Water shaders, but not much.

3

Hope to hear from you tarkata14.

4

Hi Dakka
Looks good but not sure you’ve got the ground rendering properly because it doesn’t look like your screen shots. Here’s what the blend looks like on mine.http://www.weedicom.co.uk/temp/Dakka-1.jpg
Almost looks like the ground plane is the wrong way up as when you drop below it it renders ok. (or is that the moody look in which case I’ll shut up)
Also crashes a lot… mainly on exit.
appart from that it looks really good.

5

I like it. Only problem would be the lighting. I find it very annoying. What you should do is give the land and objects a material with the spec turned off. Renderbaking the land would also help, alot.

6

You’re face count is waaaay too high.

The terrain says that it is 8000 faces, and your hero is 2000 faces - and performance is taking a pretty big hit.

I think you could reduce the terrain down to about 200 faces without losing much detail. And also the hero could be reduced to less than half

other than that you are showing a mastery of the GE that is admirable =)

7

79k polys, not really that high for a larger game, but too high for what is in the game at the moment.

I get 23-24 fps while playing, it’s smooth and the ground renders fine for me. The game crashed though when i was killed from the lava.

8

That fun little camera glitch seems to only occur when the camera is zoomed to much. I’m not sure why it would crash though. It always seemed to do that. Now I’ll put the materials in to remove the unwanted spec. Big job.

9

It runs fine when I turn the materials off, except the lava shows black tex instead of lava. Can I have some things with materials, and most without?

10

Not too shabby…pretty buggy and the performance was pretty low, but I liked the look of it. I think the knight could be lightened up a bit though.

Keep working; get those bugs ironed out and optimize your performance!!

~~Stu

11

That’s right folks, I’ve started hunting and listing bugs (like before,) but now, I’m starting to fix them. I’ve removed the spec from all the models, (by turning off materials.) It looks great to me, except, I had to ditch the lava shader which was a real shame since I thought it rocked.


Oddly enough though, the player still seemed to retain its materials, maybe it had something to do with the ColR IPO. I’m not complaining though. Next bug to fix:
The many thousands of faces that have absolutely no purpose what-so-ever. After that, the physics problem where the player can float, should just be a simple ray check for a prop called ground.

I’ll post another version once all my bugs are fixed. I’ll put together a duplicate-proof enemy after my bugs are gone.

Can someone please tell me how to check the poly count of my scene? And how many polys are a good amount?

12

Pixie has now been divided into 2 parts.
The first I call Simple. This is where the game uses no materials or bump shaders. It has the same amount of polys, but runs faster.
The second is called Full. In this version, there are bump maps applied to the scene, and dynamic lighting. The player has a nifty effect to make him look metallic.

The lava shader is back in both versions, but in the Simple one, it’s like the water except with a lava texture.

There is no longer any spec where it isn’t due in either the Simple or Full versions. I’ll post a new version once I finish ironing out the last of the bugs.

            Full                                  Simple






These screens don’t give you much to compare with, but the Full version does actually look about a thousand times better. The only problem is, it runs about a thousand times slower.

You may be wondering, why on earth would this guy make 2 copies of his game when I’m probably download it only for it to be deleted the next day. Well the reason is:

I’m bored.

Will post a .blend of both in about an hour or 2. Happy Blending