Blender 3d fighter game.

The game discussed in this blog is available here: http://www.3dvia.com/kiml/models/61890657697B4D5F Click on download, then original blend file.
Yesterday I started to make a game in blender, I was going for a little game where you move some sort of rudimentary car around, but I ended up with this. I'd say this is about a 0.3 release, so don't expect perfect functionality. I'd like to hear any sort of feed back, especially if it helps me make the game better. I've added the instructions and description at the end, so I'll just show you the video.







You'll need Blender to run this game, which is free, open source and works on most operating systems.
Just open up the game and press p to play.
The controls are as follows:
arrow keys - turn the ship
space bar - fire main thrusters, also acts to stop rotation.
w,a,s,d - move camera.
q,e - roll ship
z - fire guns
x - fire main engine
c - detonate all bullets
left Alt - reverse (Alt and space together work quite well to keep you stationary)
m - start the music... which won't have been included, sorry.

The aim of the game is to destroy the asteroids without getting your ship broken. You can shoot 'em, ram 'em, hit 'em with the traps, whatever, if your ship still works after what you did was fine. When you've got all the asteroids, well done, it doesn't say it, so just pat yourself on the back.

Damage; This game doesn't have any sort of damage meter, but you can be damaged. The engines are not connected to the ship at all, you'll see them moving around in little boxes. If you hit something too hard (or something hits you too hard (beware the spinny and the crushy things) an engine might get turned around or come loose entirely and fly around on its own. If you do loose an engine you can still manoeuvre with the other ones, but you can't get that one back. If you loose all four engines all you can do is move forward and shoot, but you'll never be hurt any more.
It's sometimes an interesting challenge to try to manoeuvre when damaged.
The gun is a bit odd. It looks normal enough when you fire, a continuous string of bullets come from it. The odd part is that they explode when they hit anything, or if you press c. But after they've exploded they're able to explode again and again until the cease to exist after a certain time. These bullets are the thing that can most easily damage you ship, so don't fire at too close range.

If you're more familiar with blender, you might want to try viewing from the lunar lander view and using layer one and the one beneath it to play the lunar lander variant of this game, all controls are the same, but I haven't set up the camera. You'll also want to set the world to one with gravity (in the materials tab) or just put the gravity slider up a bit.
In this game the aim is to get the three coloured spheres back to the pad you start over. If anything touches the pad beneath the sphere it'll jump to your location and move with the ship until you touch the home pad again. Logically you'll go and land on the goal's pad, but there are other ways to do it. The third one is a little different. You have to fly all the way down the tunnel and through the sphere to pick it up, which is easier said than done as there's and endless stream of balls rolling down with you.
Oh' and with the gravity on, be careful of shooting straight up, you have been warned.

I've only run this game on my computer which has a 2GHz dual core processor, and it's frame rate sometimes gets a bit low, so if you're running on a less powerful computer you may have to be careful how many shots you have flying around at once, or even delete a few objects to make it simpler.
I hope you enjoy this game, all forms of feed back are welcome and encouraged.

Don't stop me now!

Hello my highly numerous readers.

This blog entry is about inaccuracy, and how things can still be truely awesome enven though they are actually full of scientific holes. I will be considering the song "Don't Stop Me Now" by Queen.

Tonight I'm gonna' have myself a real good time
I feel alive and the world turning inside out yeah! (if the world were to turn inside out, I very much doubt you'd be feeling at all alive.)
And floating around in ecstasy (Emotions have never practically been shown to cause levitation.)
So don't stop me now don't stop me
cause I'm having a good time having a good time

I'm a shooting star leaping through the sky (Shooting stars, meteorites, certainly aren't leaping, they're actually falling very fast.)
Like a tiger defying the laws of gravity (Tigers have always been shown to exhibit full compliance with the laws of gravity as they are currently understood by modern physics.)
I'm a racing car passing by like lady godiva (I believe she was a human on a horse, not a car.)
I'm gonna' go go go
There's no stopping me

I'm burning through the sky yeah!
Two hundred degrees
That's why they call me mister Fahrenheit
I'm travelling at the speed of light (It's likely an object moving at the speed of light within a planet's atmosphere would be heated to a much higher temperature by the friction with the air.)
I wanna' make a supersonic man out of you (The simplest way for an object travelling at the speed of light to accelerate another object to a supersonic velocity would be by a collision, both objects would almost certainly be vaporised by the energy involved.)

Don't stop me now I'm having such a good time
I'm having a ball don't stop me now
If you wanna' have a good time just give me a call (Sending a transmission to a person travelling at the speed of light would be impossible by any conventional means of communication as the photon would never catch up. A transmission could be sent using particles in quantum entanglement, but overcoming the time dilation effects would be very near impossible, unless the person giving the call was also travelling at a similar velocity.)
Don't stop me now (cause I'm havin' a good time)
Don't stop me now (yes I'm havin' a good time)
I don't want to stop at all

I'm a rocket ship on my way to Mars (I guess we are to assume this line is from the perspective of a sentient, integrated ship's computer.)
On a collision course
I am a satellite I'm out of control (Satellites, by their very definition cannot be on a collision course, or out of control.)
I am a sex machine ready to reload (most sex machines don't expend ammunition, and therefore will never need to be reloaded.)
Like an atom bomb about to
Oh oh oh oh oh explode

I'm burning through the sky yeah!
Two hundred degrees
That's why they call me mister Fahrenheit
I'm travelling at the speed of light
I wanna' make a supersonic woman of you (A woman would have the same problems with acceleration as a man.)

Don't stop me don't stop me
Don't stop me hey hey hey!
Don't stop me don't stop me ooh ooh ooh (I like it)
Don't stop me don't stop me
Have a good time good time
Don't stop me don't stop me ah

I'm burning through the sky yeah!
Two hundred degrees
That's why they call me mister Fahrenheit
I'm travelling at the speed of light
I wanna' make a supersonic man out of you

Don't stop me now I'm having such a good time
I'm having a ball don't stop me now
If you wanna' have a good time just give me a call
Don't stop me now (cause I'm havin' a good time)
Don't stop me now (yes I'm havin' a good time)
I don't want to stop at all

Staying cool this summer.

When I'm rendering an animation, I often have the problem of my computer overheating while I leave it on over night. Last night I found a software solution to this problem. I Have used a program called "GKrellm" to monitor my system temperature, But until last night, all it did was flash when Sparky got hot. Now when the temperature goes above 80 Celsius it runs the command to throttle the cpu, and when it drops below 80 it puts it back to normal. To do this I set the alarm command to "powersave-l" and the warn command to "powersave -A" (the 'A' has to be capitol). Now I can leave my computer on over night without fear of overheating, or having to leave it throttled down so it's like trying to render on a sloth.

Water test

I've tried using blender's fluid physics emulation in the past without much success. I realised this morning that I could probably emulate the desired effect using the wave modifier. Please tell me what you think.

Yay for doom finger!

My favourite, okay third favourite, pet has had a couple of happy victories this week.
Firstly I finished the first cut of a video featuring her.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbryouzkvko

And secondly she made it to the weekly top ten on 3Dvia!

http://www.3dvia.com/blog/2009/03/10/3dvia-top-10-models-017/#

embed test

Blender basic animation tutorial.

There are many different ways to do an animation. I'll tell you the one I find easiest.

1. Where it says "SR:2-model" (on the bar near the top.) click the arrow button and select "SR:1-Animation". Three more sub windows will appear.
2. On the sub window below the 3d view click the red circle button a drop down list box will appear beside it. click its arrow and choose "Add/Replace keys"
3. If you move, scale or rotate an object (by object I mean object, camera, lamp etc.), a lines will appear in the far right window, the "IPO curve editor" The object is now set to be at that position, scale and rotation for the currently selected frame. The current frame is shown on the "buttons" window and the "time line" window as a number (probably 1 at the moment) with an arrow either side of it. It is also shown as a green line on the "ipo curve editor".
4. Move forwards a few frames, the left and right arrows go backwards and forwards (respectively) by 1 frame, the up and down arrows, by 10.
5. move, scale, or rotate the object again, to set its ipo curves for the new frame. You should see that the "curves" are no longer straight lines, but curves, constrained to two points.
6. keep doing this until you've told the object how it's meant to move for the entire animation.
7. if you want to change the length of the animation change the number in the "start:" or "end:" buttons.
8. you can click the play button, or press Alt and A to play back the animation. To get the best idea of ho it'll look rendered, set the view to camera before hand.

Ipo curves can be selected and edited in a similar manner to meshes.


Rendering an animation.
1. In the "render" menu at the top there is an option, render animation, click it. A window will appear and render each frame of your animation. the frames will be saved as jpegs in the default directory. if something's not right, press Esc to quit the animation.
2. to change, or find out, the directory it saves the renders to go to the "Scene" tab in the buttons window (or press F10). The first directory selector in the little panel on the left shows where it saves the renders.
3. To save the animation as a video file rather than a series of pictures, look to the little panel on the right of the buttons sub window. Where it says Jpeg, click the arow and change it to a video format. I tend to use AVI Jpeg.
4. Now if you render the animation it'll save it as a single video file in the selected directory called something like "001-250.AVI", you're now ready to do what ever video processing you want, or just upload it straight to you tube.

There are far more complicated things you can do with ipo curves and animation, but this should be enough to get you started.
If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask.
Good luck.