Thread: New to game making

To be fair to mcotter he is referring to GameBlender, which makes it possible to create interactive games using Blender models and animations using Python scripting and logic bricks.

"Game Blender is used by inserting "logic bricks," "controllers" and "actuators" to control the movement and display of objects in the engine. Game Blender is also able to be extended via the Python programming language. Game Blender is bundled with Blender 3D which can be downloaded freely from Blender's official website, http://www.blender.org/."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gameblender

He's not interested in coding the game engine, he's simply interested in learning how to use Python and logic bricks inside GameBlender. This is akin to modding or using a pre-built engine, so I really don't think it's useful to keep telling him how hard it is to code an engine from scratch.

With that said, I don't really know how much use we will be. The experienced people on these forums tend towards writing the actual engine themselves, relying upon more 'universal' mathematical conceps. Using another program requires somebody with experience specific to that application (GameBlender in this instance), and I personally haven't created anything with GameBlender.

The only reason I even have Blender is to have a wider range of file formats that I can fiddle with (e.g. to export and import, such that I can convert models to my own .ntmdl format).

There is nothing wrong with any of the posts in this thread. All of them are very truthful and if we told you this was easy or what you want to do inside of blender or whatever you use was going to be easy we would be lying to you.

If you really want something easy then I suggest you forget about game programming. If you don't mind researching, reading, coding, and ultimately failing quite often then you just might have a chance. We see your type a lot around here and enthusiasm is great but without the skills and knowledge to back it up it will get you just past the opening title screen and thats about it.

Nothing about programming and/or creating a game is easy. However it is very rewarding, can be fun, and during your journey you will learn a great deal. Programming games is really still a black art that has few manuals that show how to do it right. It is a different brand of programming that has much different challenges than what you may face in a non-game oriented code line.

Even using someone else's engine goes far beyond just plopping down objects and throwing scripts at them. Eventually you will have to get into some 3D mathematics to do what you want. After all the research and time invested I have a fairly decent terrain renderer, a decent start to a 4x space game, a 2D tile engine, and several little 2D games like Asteroids and side scrollers. Keep in mind all that took a great deal of time and I'm still dissatisfied with most of the results. Others on here have had similar experiences so we are not just being pessimistic we are being realistic. Pessimism is being negative without due reason or just for the sake of being negative. Realism is not blind ignorance of the facts but rather facing them head on, addressing them, realizing their impact or relevance, and using creative solutions to resolve the issues they present.

if I need help, this would be a bad place to ask then?

I personally do not have experience with GameBlender, or even the Python programming language.

I also have to add though, that I pointed out that I was using blender game, and I got more pessimism
...
Okay, so now that we have gotten of the pessimistic page

The misconception was mostly your fault, as you don't currently know enough to properly ask your questions (e.g. your opening statement should have clearly said 'I am not interested in coding the engine from scratch'). Also, when you refer to 'Blender,' not 'GameBlender,' you are technically making a reference to a modeling/animation package, not something for making interactive software. We're not out of the 'pessimistic page' (which I found to be a rude comment), we're out of the page where you now know the difference between coding your own engine and using somebody else's. Bubba does in fact use Blender (not GameBlender) for producing models. If he wanted to, jumping into Python and logic blocks would be a trivial task compared to the heavy duty programming he's used to. If you got on his good side I'm sure he'd still be able to help you.

In the meantime I've found some tutorials for you:

http://ltc.smm.org/gamestudio/tutorials/blender

http://www.ncsu.edu/project/stemgaming/blender.html

http://www.ingiebee.com/tutorials/Bl...e%20Engine.htm

the key in programming is to learn new peices of code each day , its along process but there is alot to learn in this field , just practice with small code and try and think of creating something , and if you can , take 1 step further and add more things to it , thats how i am learning to program games.

i started with first
createdevice
render vertices
transformations
camera
lights
materials
textures
mesh

i still need to learn pixel shader , but the rest above i learnt very slowly
i dont use blender , i use 3dx max and export my .x with panda exporter

Anddos, he's not looking to write the engine.

I'd say too many people dive in to the rendering without actually understanding the maths. That's like building a car without knowing how to build.

Originally Posted by zacs7

I'd say too many people dive in to the rendering without actually understanding the maths. That's like building a car without knowing how to build.

It can be done. IMO, it really only becomes a problem when you want to move beyond what the API can do without you knowing.

Okay, so I henceforth conclude arguing on the basis of mutual benefit through forgiveness. Though arguing can create strong debates and lead to the passion of challenge, growth is best found when sought by a whole.

Ok?

Anyways.

1. The guy needs to move (blender can easily manipulate coordinates), and that shouldn't take too long.

Then it shouldn't take long to figure it out in Python if you know the language. Normally you have an up, right and look vector. Moving along the look vector equates to walking forward and backward. Moving along the right vector equates to strafing left and right. Moving along the up vector equates to flying up or flying down.

2. The guy is gonna need to shoot. I know how to get the barrel fire, but I have no idea how to have the bullet land where he is aiming.

This is a simple vector operation. You can do this several ways. One way is to raycast the bullet instead of having it become an actual object in the world. The raycast is the simple parametric form of a line or P(final) = P(origin) + shoot_vector * distance. Normally you could use the shoot vector to perform a ray intersection test with the bounding volume of your object. Once that passed you would then do a triangle intersection test on the mesh itself to see which ray the triangle hit. Once you computed that you would then compute the barycentric coordinates of the ray intersection within the triangle. From there you would then fire off some type of 'hit' message which would then deduct health, etc.

3. The camera angling will be parented to his gun, and that needs to be controlled by the mouse. Again I have little idea, but I think my friend might be able to help with that.

In an engine this is handled by the camera class. The player's gun is pointing down the look vector of the camera. To translate the gun to the correct world position you would have a vector in local space that represented the location of the gun relative to the local origin. Then you would multiply the inverse world transpose matrix of the object with the local translation matrix of the gun to move it to the correct location.

4. I will need enemies who shoot back. There I am utterly clueless.

Enemies will have to 'rotate to face' your player and fire. The rotation can be done via quaternion slerp or it can be done via euler angles and axis-angle rotations. To do this you first find the up vector. This can be done by creating a ray from the player to the target and crossing it with the player's look vector. This will give you the up vector relative to the current player orientation. Once you have this you compute the dot product between the look vector of the target and the ray to the player. This is the amount of rotation or the angle of rotation you will need. All that is left now is to find the axis of rotation - which just happens to be the up vector. So if you rotate (target.look dot rayToTarget) about the up vector you just computed you will snap to or rotate to the player and vice versa. To smoothly rotate you linear interpolate between the current vector and the target vector you just computed. Once this is done you can set a flag that the target is now ready to fire. You fire the gun of the target at the player and use the bullet calculations I provided above in the previous answers. To add some randomness you would add a vector offset to the actual vector to the player. The offset would be a direct representation of the accuracy or skill level of the attacking object.

5. And I need to do health, witch will be easy with Python.

Health can be done via simple scalars. Reduce the health on hits by a constant amount or by an amount based on which bounding volume of the player was hit. The head bounding volume would obviously reduce or completely eliminate any health thus killing the player. Other bounding volumes would have a lesser damage amount.