Very nice work! I love your textures too.
On the topic of making blender as good as commercial games only depends if blender can become more secure.
CS allows for nice eye candy, thats for sure, but using all the special effects would ratchet up the GPU requirements. So if you were to develop on a machine running a Geforce 6 series, and you employ bump/normal/spec maps, and some higher end shaders (which CS allows afaik), then the game looks great, but if anyone plays it on a Geforce 2 series (if it will even run), it will probably look like crap.
Now, you could take advantage of the speed that CS provides (right now quite faster than ketsji), but just use it to employ some higher res textures, and still have the game available on lower end hardware, running at a decent speed. You wouldn’t need the physics because for something like Sokoban, scripting the entire movement process should be a simple task.
That said:
I think the graphics look quite nice as they are, and I would much rather see this game run on the BGE, as opposed to anything else.
p00f>
Hey p00f, what happened to your “better text for the BGE” project? I mean from what you said in that thread, I got the impression that the “mystery programmer” already had things well on the way, and that the whole thing would be out in a matter of days.
Did you already release his work? Maybe I missed it.
As it is, the game runs at about 10-12fps on my machine (that’s acceptable, considering my PC). I wouldn’t want to get it much slower than that. I’m sure that there are plenty of ways that we could improve the look and decrease the stretching, and we’ll certainly look into it, but there’s going to be a certain amount of “programmer art” because we are aiming for a balance between looks and performance. A game like Sokoban has a market outside of the hardcore gaming community, and it is important for us to consider that in design. Gamers who play puzzle games are not generally expecting “Half Life 3: Sokoban,” nor do they have the GPU to support it. Rather they want a playable, challenging game that is fun and looks nice. My rule of thumb here is “As long as it still runs on my PC, it will run on most computers.”
I’m confident that we have already blown the competition out of the water with what we have, and while we are certainly going to improve aspects of the game, we are not going to spend an unreasonable amount of time on it.
p00f, the main reason we don’t use CrystalSpace is that it hardly runs on my computer, and I get a worse framerate with it than with Blender. Ideally, I would like to use OGRE Blender, but I don’t think Charlie has armature support coded yet, which is a featuer we need. I do appreciate your comments, though, and you sparked a wonderful conversation about texturing that I’m sure will help us all in the future. I hadn’t considered many of the things that were suggested before (probably because I’m more of a programmer than an artist).
Anyway, I appreciate everyone’s comments and I hope we’ll have more progress to share with you soon.
@ social,
Pfft!
hahaha, once a troll, always a troller. you really need to move out of your parents house and get a real life… your constant noobie bashing is getting really old.
As far as me hiring you, it did not happen because of your child like mentality…
and your lack of experience… I only conciser people who have actually made a game,
please get over it. I am not going to give you any money. you need to go get a real job. leave me and my programmers alone.(ever heard of the word slander?)
I think McDonnalds is hireing , you may qualify there… but I am not making any promises.
they discriminate childish people too.
as far as p00f games is concerned , we don’t hire children,idiots, or forum trolls…
3 strikes you are out.
morons are totaly out of the question. so please get over it.
@blendenzo
yea… CS still has some major bugs in it… sorry it did not work out for you and your system…
the things I mentioned are still fixable in the BGE… just try to make every thing that is textured the same UV map scale.
I bet you can fix that entire scene in under 10 minuets…
Good luck on this game, I am rooting for you and your developers.
if you guys need anything just say so… I can donate some stuff under the CC licence so you totaly get it for free…
seems very nice, I would download this for free, but not pay for it… If u really wanna earn cash on this, relase a shareware or something, and let gamers pay a little for a full version.
Yea, your point about children, idiots and forum trolls…really obvious from your post there.
If you didn’t want to answer the questions I actually asked, you should have just said so. There was no need to freak out like that.
:no:
mr_yeahman:
We’re definitely going to release a shareware demo.
I just fixed a major bug in the game, so we’re moving closer to being able to share something with you guys (like a .blend).
quote:
Yea, your point about children, idiots and forum trolls…really obvious from your post there.
endquote:
well, it takes a real man to admit when they are wrong… I withdraw the childish remark.
that comment proves me wrong.
have a nice day, and thank you for understanding 
poof, social : nm…edit
One of the big rules to texturing levels is trim. Trim is normally a thin strip that separates larger texure areas. It can really help to bring very different textures together that would otherwise look strange when touching one another. I’ve yet to play with this concept but it seems like a golden rule to level design or design in general. Just look around you, were the wall meets the floor, or how steel grates have a secondary lip where they meet concrete, windows, etc. All that good stuff. It may help you punch up things if you can find time to incorporate it.
Hmm, you didn’t see the counterpoint, interesting.
Well, anyway, this was what I asked (since it seems like you missed it the first time):
Hey p00f, what happened to your “better text for the BGE” project?
^
Yea, that was the original question (the one I actually asked…nicely). Notice that there was no name calling, or unprovoked anger (in contrast to your initial response). It was just a question. If you don’t want to answer it that’s fine, but it’s no reason to be rude.
Relax. 
This is pretty solid advice, I’ve studied a lot of game architecture over the years and the trim concept jessegp refers to will help you a lot when working on level designs. Here is a prime example of “trim”:
Nexuiz Screenshot:
I know you’re not really shooting for the HL2 look, but it’s good advice to take when getting your creative juices flowing.
I still find different aspect textures annoying. It just always makes me think the texture artist was lazy, or they didn’t expect me to hang out by that place. I am talking about games I have played. Not ragging on your game. Are you guys still working on it?
First a little eye candy:
We’ve still got a lot of work to do on this thing, but we decided to go ahead and release an alpha demo anyway. Here are a couple of links:
http://teambio.blendenzo.com/Sokoban…lease411.blend (5MB blend)
-or-
http://teambio.blendenzo.com/Sokoban…Release411.zip (4MB zip)
To start playing:
- Click “Play” from the menu, then “Select” (even though there is nothing to select…)
Controls:
- Arrow keys to move
- Click and move mouse to rotate view
- Mouse scroll wheel or + and - keys to zoom in and out (keys give more fluid result)
There is only one map, and I hard-coded it into the .blend for the purposes of this demo (we’re still working on bugs with accessing external files on Linux and Mac). The menu is still very far from being finished, and I am aware that there should be more of a transition between clicking “Select” and the game loading. Also, in-game I am aware that the crates move in discreet steps instead of fluid motion. I haven’t fixed that yet, but it will be changed for the final game.
Right now we’re looking for comments and suggestions on the main Sokoban interface, as well as the updated textures. Personally, I’m wondering what you all think of the control system.
Control system is fine, only thing that is a tad bit annoying is the sensitivity of the rotating camera (When you hold down the mouse and rotate the camera around). Other than that it was pretty fun game
very nice look and feel!
menu rules. gameplay and controls are good!
beautiful…
It’s on the right track !.. I would just put some attention on the main character, adding a little fake shadow, and maybe checking the animation for the rest pose and in between movements… but it’s details …
Maybe also for the background scenery, I think that giving some more intense contrast in the (high)lights/shadows could be good to make the ambiance stronger …
But appart from that, I would put a “approuved” stamp on this demo if I had one 
keep on blendering like that !
Hi
This game really looks cool - with those menus & starting animation. (Man i can’t win the game yet)
Just one thing is that you could add more colors - black color is boring and dull. This is just a fun game - so why not more nice colors. Even a cartoon like environment will make it nicer.
Very nice.
The graphics look great; I wouldn’t change a thing.
Fixing the transition issues (as you noted), and working to make the walkcycle a little smoother would make it all perfect imo.
Keep up the good work.
Well, it sounds like you all liked the mechanics of it, and nobody found the “I enter moves faster than the robot can handle them” bug. Not that it matters, since I’ll be fixing that before the next alpha release anyway…
I don’t mind this theme being so dark, since it’s supposed to have that type of atmosphere. Some of the other themes will be more light-hearted. I’m planning the warehouse theme to be more comical/cartoonish. The penguin theme will also be more “cute and colorful”.
Of course, I agree that the main menu shouldn’t be black. I’m not exactly sure what I want to do with that yet…
Thanks for the comments, everyone.
Olm-Z: I’ve got a shadow for the main character made and ready to go, I just keep forgetting to send it to Blendenzo so he can integrate it. I’ll try and make sure it’s in the next release.
About the animations, I’ve thought about redoing them before, but that has been pretty low on my agenda since I don’t like the rig I made. It’s only got 12 bones, which, I think, makes it fairly speedy within the game engine, but it’s slightly difficult to animate.
I’ll see what I can do about the lighting, as well.
Vimal: As Blendenzo said, the mechanical theme is supposed to be rather dark, but the monochromatic feel that it’s got right now is kind of irritating me, so it may be changed slightly in the future.