Sunday, July 31, 2011

Link Dump: Bits and bobs

Miscellanouse bits that I found interesting:

- Bioshock Pitch
- Orchestra treatment of Woven Variations from Journey
- The numbers of mobile gaming (for you mobile game devs)
- This year's GDC Game Design Challenge: Bigger than Jesus (Features Jason Rohrer, John Romero and Jenova Chen)
- Board Games with comedian Tommy Dean
- ABC radio on the changing shape of the Australian Games industry and new opportunites Download the mp3

Friday, July 29, 2011

Graduating with Griffith

If you're the kind of person that wants to avoid talking to people or queing up then this might be for you. I give you Griffith's online details about checking your graduation using the Griffith Portal. This feature will probably become available around Monday 1st of August. I'm sure you can always talk to Admin if you're not trusting of anything I happen to spout.

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Wreckless Conduct: Debuggery

Unity
It has been a long time between updates but I spent a lot of it debugging my level builder and associated scripts. It contains less bugs than before and few more options.


This a quick tool that I wrote to make using Inicus' Cube Interpret System easier to use.
It snaps cubes (any prefab) to a sizeable "tile grid" (Wreckless uses 3x3x3 metre scale), lets you scale the selected items by the scale (+n in x,y,z) and lets you add a tag to the selected. Which is important so the Cube system knows what to turn cubes into.

Road Intersections can align (it's a little buggy) before they generate roads and there's highways happening. I will be working on getting ramps and barriers on those intersections up.

Prop Zones are little areas that will be scattered around the levels that generate props for you to crash into. It saves me time having to place the props in manually. There are a variety of options for how props are spawned inside the zone. It's still a small work in progress, I have yet to find an elegant way to code it.



Skybox Progression
Although it's not apparent, Wreckless is meant to be full of hive city environments so the skybox should reflect it. I dislike matte painting but it's just how I've decided to get something up.




A shot of an unfinshed 3D version.

If there are any artists around who'd like to do some modelling or matte painting, it would certainly save us some time and look 1000 times better. Feel free to contact me or Inicus if you want to work on a cyberpunk environment.

Mel scripting
I got tired of having to set up all my default scene cameras' near and far clip planes so I wrote a mel script. I could add more functionality to it but this is good enough for me.

I spent a lot of time on the break trying to script a tool that will copy animations from 1 rig to another. So far no dice. But hopefully I can get back into it once I've picked some brains of far more intelligent people than I.