Eskil Steenberg just updated the Love client with an option to export the entire game world, all 300MB’s of it.
He’s also supplied the texture file, so you can have your own model.
Someone on GL has already gone and dropped it into unity.
http://gaminglove.net/forums/showthread.php?t=1179
Exporting nif files from C4D has been a massive pain, anyway, got it working.
First, I need to install Blender, in a correct way, otherwise it won’t work.
Then, export the file as a .obj from C4D. Import than file into Blender, and then, finally export as .nif
An awesome article by Jim Rossignol about Chernobyl and how the charged narrative found in both the film and the game are a result of the history behind the zone.
During the period in which 3D videogames began to use textures imported from photography, rather than hand-drawn pixel tiles, it became common to hear game developers discuss their photo references.
Drew Markham, director of Return To Castle Wolfenstein, spent the 2001 pre-release press tour for his game talking about the time he had spent in Europe, sourcing textures from “real” locations that had played host to the war. Crumbling French flagstones, Teutonic concretes, and other useful built surfaces: these details would add a certain level of authenticity that other games lacked. When the Wolfenstein sequel finally arrived, British gaming journalists were amused to see the ubiquitous British “H” fire hydrant signs scattered deep within the occult bunkers of Himmler’s SS Paranormal Division.
Some good images I found from a recommended post on my Google Reader.
This is the level in question. Mark probably shouldn’t watch it, lots of flashing colours.
I just came across an incredibly interesting article that’s making me want to rethink my proposal for the Virtual Space module, here’s a short excerpt of the article.
The game we were playing was Action Half-Life, an immaculately balanced mod built from a dream of FPS multiplayer combat that was more cinematic and less twitchy than what was offered at the time. AHL was our Counter-Strike, except it was slower and had more room for heroics and villainy.
But AHL was also the favoured mod of a mad cabal of mappers who obsessed over easter eggs. What had started as the routine addition of little secrets which l33t players could show their friends quickly spiraled out of all proportion as AHL grew in popularity, and soon levels were being unleashed on the community with entire levels hidden inside them, mazes so big, inventive and intricate that the PC modding scene hasn’t seen the likes of them since.
And if the AHL community was the mecca for crazy mappers, then Hondo was God. The immaculate deathmatch maps Hondo constructed were dwarfed by the secrets buried underneath them, areas so cruel, opaque and imaginative they felt like claustrophobic expeditions into a broken mind.
Two of Hondo’s secrets even tied together into a single epic saga where players traveled through time trying to defeat an inter-dimensional beast known as Hgrethedelon, who appeared as a giant, unblinking eye. To look upon Hgrethedelon was death, and one of these two linked secrets ended with players marooned on a floating island that gradually broke apart to reveal a city-sized eye staring up at them. Players were giving no choice but to fall into the inky iris, and drown.
AHL_5AM was Hondo’s swansong- on the surface a cramped city downtown intelligently designed to facilitate action and player motion, few of the players who dived around it blowing holes in one other knew what lay beneath their feet. Behind a secret portal in 5AM was a labyrinth so nightmarish that the only person who knew the way through was Hondo himself. No player had ever seen the end of it, and trying to decompile 5AM to look at it in a map editor would crash whatever software you were using.
So, of course my friends and I had to try and beat it.
Full article over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun.
What I find so interesting about this is that it’s just absolutely crazy. At the face of it, Hondo was just making Deathmatch maps, but when you dug deeper, there was this absolutely insane easter egg hidden deep inside and, well, it’s just not something you really get to experience in gaming, and that’s a damned shame.
Here’s a video of the first part of one of his maps.
As a few people probably already know, I’ve been playing a lot of a game called Love recently. It’s developed solely by Eskil Steenberg, a programming genius and all around nice guy.
I think Love is relevant to this module because it revolves around a procedurally related world, it’s very much the definition of a virtual space, which you can edit almost to your hearts desire.
The game world is constantly changing, with AI bases springing up and then being destroyed all across the globe, players build settlements which inevitably get wiped out by marauding AI.
It’s very much a virtual playground.
Virtual Space
Assignment 2
Concept Proposal
Jacques Corby-Tuech
Proposal concept for an interactive game environment.
My proposal for the assignment is to create an interactive experience within a video game using either an external engine or a game’s modding tools. We looked at the Unity engine at college, which I thought was incredibly interesting. It was full of features but involves a great deal of scripting to create anything that resembles a game.
I then looked at the UDK (Unreal Development Kit) which recently became available to use freely. It’s an incredibly powerful piece of software, but far too complicated for my needs at this moment in time. I then looked at various games that could be easily and quickly modded. These included Valve’s Source engine, which has very powerful mod tools, but again, it looks too complicated. I then looked at the Morrowind and the Oblivion engines. At first glances, both are very similar, they both come with an incredible powerful tool called The Elder Scrolls Construction Set, which would allow me to add simple scripts and add my own game artefacts, while still being able to keep the existing game code and libraries. I’ve experimented with all of these engines and the Morrowind Construction Set is by far the easiest to use, while still maintaining the ability to create complex artefacts.
Because of this, I’ve decided to use the Morrowind Construction Set. Because what I’m creating is going to be a mod, and not a full experience, it needs to fit within the scope of the existing game. Within Morrowind, there are three joinable Great Houses, each of which has an incredibly distinct visual and architectural style.
House Hlaalu live within relatively modest looking houses with multiple stories.
House Redoran live within houses shaped like the insects that inhabit the continent of Vvardenfell, their headquarters are built within the hollowed out shell of a giant crab.
House Telvanni are again stranger, their houses and strongholds are built within giant mushrooms, grown from the earth, often using existing Imperial architecture as a central point to grow their own housing.
These architectural styles are a central point to the game, and it’s largely because of them that Morrowind is so fondly remembered.
Because of these reasons, I think it would be interesting to create my own town or stronghold within the game, keeping the architectural style of House Telvanni, whose giant mushroom and crystal buildings allow for a truly interesting space.
Another important feature of Telvanni buildings is that they are incredibly difficult to navigate, requiring player characters to be able to levitate to reach certain areas, with deep pits and wells throughout the structure that the player can navigate through. This serves to make the space more interesting, making it almost labyrinthine, and making the space an interactive environment the player can get lost and engage with.
Another way to make the space more interesting will be to add characters, and artefacts that create an ambiance within the game. They should of course, still keep to the same style as that already established within the game, so that immersion is not broken, while providing dialogue and an interactive environment. A way to achieve this would be to make this environment an abandoned stronghold, overtaken by the central enemies within the game, the objective would then be to recover the area, while discovering what it’s fate was.
With this in mind, I set about creating a chart to detail the questline that would bring the player character to the central stronghold.
This is relatively simple, and there is plenty of room for improvement, at the moment, with the quest as it stands, the potential story is incredibly dull, and not very engaging. To make it more interesting, we need to make more things happen. The stronghold falling as a result of betrayal would be one way to achieve that, with the end of the quest consisting of finding and killing the perpetrator. Another way to make it more interesting would be to allow the player to reclaim the stronghold for their own, requiring vast quantities of money and certain resources. This would then allow further expansion by adding retainers once the quest is completed.
With this in mind, the new quest progression would look like this.
In this manner, we’ve now created a new quest which has a lot more depth, and more reward for the player.
More importantly though, there is now a direct reason and benefit for exploring the space, which otherwise may have remained unexplored if there had been no reason to go there.
As asked by Mark last Monday, here’s some research on Perry Hoberman, in particular, his Bar Code Hotel art exhibit.
From Perry Hoberman’s own site.
Bar Code Hotel recycles the ubiquitous symbols found on every consumer product to create an multi-user interface to an unruly virtual environment. The installation makes use of a number of strategies to create a casual, social, multi-person interface. The public simultaneously influences and interacts with computer-generated objects in an oversized three-dimensional projection, scanning and transmitting printed bar code information instantaneously into the computer system. The objects, each corresponding to a different user, exist as semi-autonomous agents that are only partially under the control of their human collaborators.
Each guest who checks into the Bar Code Hotel dons a pair of 3D glasses and picks up a bar code wand, a lightweight pen with the ability to scan and transmit printed bar code information instantaneously into the computer system. Because each wand can be distinguished by the system as a separate input device, each guest can have their own consistent identity and personality in the computer-generated world. And since the interface is the room itself, guests can interact not only with the computer-generated world, but with each other as well. Bar code technology provides a virtually unlimited series of low-maintenance sensing devices (constrained only by available physical space), mapping every square inch of the room’s surface into the virtual realm of the computer.
The projected environment consists of a number of computer-generated objects, each one corresponding to a different guest. These objects are brought into being by scanning unique bar codes that are printed on white cubes that are dispersed throughout the room. Once brought into existence, objects exist as semi-autonomous agents that are only partially under the control of their human collaborators. They also respond to other objects, and to their environment. They emit a variety of sounds in the course of their actions and interactions. They have their own behaviors and personalities; they have their own life spans (on the order of a few minutes); they age and (eventually) die
Guests can scan any bar code within reach at any time. Each bar code is labeled (verbally or graphically), letting the user know what action will result. Each time a guest scans a bar code, contact is re-established between that guest and their object. However, between these moments of human contact, objects are on their own. This allows for a number of possible styles of interaction. Guests can choose to stay in constant touch with their object, scanning in directives almost continuously. Or they may decide to exert a more remote influence, watching to see what happens, occasionally offering a bit of “advice” to their object.
This piece of work sounds very interesting, and definitely ahead of it’s time. The idea of a room which you can enter, and then create an interactive artifact which changes are you interact with the room is very appealing. The fact that the generated artifacts are only ever partially under human control have some interesting connotations considering the nature of barcodes, subtly hinting at the fact that consumers are never in as much control over products as they’d like to be.