I made this star shuttle. It is just a basic thing…nothing fancy… I am going to upload the blender file…If anyone could check it out and give me some feedback. Or improve on it. It has no textures, nor is it a game yet. It is a ship that moves in all directions. I use the number key pads…num 5 is go (y) 7 is turn left and 9 is turn right. 6 is roll right, 4 is roll left. 8 is nose up and 2 is nose down. 1 is go down and 3 is go up. 0 is photon torpedoes.
If you improve on it, please tell me what you did!first star shuttle3.blend (824 KB)
Did anyone upload this?
Its hard to control and isn’t very stable (i can get frame drops from 60 to 50fps with a high end pc) while firing torpedoes and moving forward which shouldn’t happen:(. Its great though that you have got started with something:D! so here is a list of things that you can improve with your game!
1- NEVER EVER use subdivision surface modifier in the Game Engine!!! (setting it to 2 quadruples the amount of vertices) 10000 verts + subdiv surf = 40000! == LAG!
Don’t be lazy with your modelling!, even though its tempting when starting out in blender to use subsurface to make things smooth Don’t do it! select smooth in the toolbar (t) and Move the vertices of your mesh to match the rounded shape!!! Make them flow through your model making sure you use them efficiently.
2- Use each vertice sparingly like a drop of water in the desert. Try and use as few vertices as possible! Use Normal maps and other textures to make your model look good not vertices!
3- Use some Textures!! Games without textures are boring and usually look very bad just using materials! Go on CGtextures.com and find some textures you like (maybe metal for the space ship etc.)
4- Use GLSL shading (under render panel) makes everything look better unless you have too much lighting (which you have) you only need one hemi lamp to light your whole scene!
5- Make bullets and projectiles as low poly as possible! You Don’t need a subdivided cylinder at 3 (octuple the vertices) to be a flame or bullet/projectile. Use Alpha mapped textures on a plane (only 4 vertices!) you can easily paint yourself a flame texture (in gimp or photoshop) for the fire out the back of the rocket ship! For your torpedoes you could do the same or use a textured cube.
6- Use Better controls! the numpad controls are hard to work with, try using common controls (arrow keys or W,S,A,D) and possibly a 3rd person mouselook script (plenty of tutorials on how to implement that on youtube) You could make left mouse button shoot torpedoes instead of numpad buttons.
7- Make sure you change from Solid to Textured View before you press P!
8-optional - use normal dynamic for the player (without ghost selected) also make sure anything that doesn’t need to collide is set to no collision! this can also save a lot of processing power.
In short: Try use as few vertices as possible! use correct shading and framerate (all in render panel) and maybe use some textures to make it look nicer
BUT you did make the effort to get started making a game which i think is awesome!
I just spent 1/2 an hour writing this so hopefully its useful to you!
Feel free to look around on my youtube channel, i have lots of tutorials on how to do heaps of stuff.
Thatimst3r
Yeah, had a little play around with it and it does need some working.
I can see you’ve subsurf’d the ‘particles/bullets’ which will dramatically drop the framerate of your game. As Thatimster said never use subsurf when working with the GE. Put a little bit of effort into making a low poly version.
The controls I also found weird. Operating with the numpad is unusual and semi hard to work with. Although I can see where you’re going with this as you tried to make a ship operate within a 3D area, instead of just a simple ‘walk’ motion on a plane. To be honest I have no clue and have not thought of a way to efficiently and practically control the pitch, yaw and roll of an aircraft in 3D areas. It’s something you’d have to tweak a lot. My best guess is to play around with other 3D flight sims and try to work out how they movement system works.
Another thing I noticed was that the camera can’t render past a certain distance, this is because you’ve set the scene way to big (probably, correct me if I’m wrong as I am basing this off my own observations). To fix this scale down all objects within the scene.
Anyway, other than that it’s on the right track. Keep up the effort.
Thank you for your time
I understand more now
No worries man, all the best for whatever you plan to do with this