[Nephilim]

Sorry; nothing too sexy to report this time. Lately, I've been doing some research on how Shockwave3D does its scenegraph. While a lot of things are intuitive with the way Shockwave3D works, this is one of the things that is not as intuitive as it could be.

I was looking into this because I wanted to improve the skyboxes I create, and because I want to have as many options open to me for overlays as possible.



The result is a quick and dirty test to learn exactly how Shockwave3D deals with multiple cameras rendering to the same sprite. As I go, I'm going to try to write up short little articles on the tricky things that people shouldn't have to figure out by themselves. Here's the first such article on multiple cameras, although it's probably of interest only to Shockwave3D developers.
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Visit the Sacraments web site to play the game and read articles about its development.

[Nephilim]

I haven't been doing as much work on Sacraments 3D lately as I would have liked - you know how life goes - but I did manage to get some work done on a nice, flexible game architecture and 3D loading system which will keep things nice and organized. I'm also trying to write articles about what I learn as I go so that when I'm done, I have a nice guide for others wanting to do similar 3D projects.

Here's a screenie from the current thing I'm working on: the intro animation for the game. Right now, it's just a Bezier curve driving a camera between four waypoints, but it's a nice effect.


You can see the animated version at my Bezier article. It doesn't look all that different, if you've been following along, but it does have a lot of cool new stuff under the hood - for instance, this one has the multiple camera stuff implemented that I mentioned in the previous post. There's also some new forest and town geometry in there. The music is freeware from FlashKit, so I can't take credit for that, unfortunately, but it is the sort of music I'm hoping to get into the game.
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Visit the Sacraments web site to play the game and read articles about its development.

[Nephilim]

I've been tinkering with Sacraments 3D some more lately, and I've made some good progress. The walkaround engine is much more robust and smooth now - you can no longer walk through walls where they come together in an acute angle, and when you go into such a tight corner, it no longer jostles you around as you push into it.

Also, as shown in this screenshot:

...I now have it working with "nudges" (press the space bar to try to open a door or otherwise investigate whatever you're standing in front of) and generating dialog boxes. Yayzers! It actually kinda feels like an RPG, now that you can bump up against things and see text to read.
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Visit the Sacraments web site to play the game and read articles about its development.

[LeoDraco]

It may becoming cliche these days, but it might be interesting to make your dialog boxes slightly translucent: that way, you do not obstruct anything interesting on the screen.

Or you could always have customized window frames, ala the Suikoden series.

Still, that's a neat bit of progress.
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"...LeoDraco is a pompus git..." -- Mandrake

[BadMrBox]

Wow. Sweet progress. :). Keep it up. And like always, I would like a... demo(!). Would like to feel the change myself.
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[Verious]

Keep the updates coming, interesting stuff.

[Nephilim]

[BadMrBox]

I like pants! Looks good :)
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[Nephilim]

Yay! Another tech demo! Now with pants.



This one includes the aforementioned features - the "nudge" and "trigger" systems, loading screen, better collision detection, etc. It also lets you move back and forth between two environments - the forest town and the cavern.

What do you think?
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Visit the Sacraments web site to play the game and read articles about its development.

[Nephilim]

More work tonight, this time on a new interior area : the apothecary shop. You can now access it in the tech demo mentioned above by nudging the door of the first building on your right. (The one with the apothecary sign on it.)


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Visit the Sacraments web site to play the game and read articles about its development.

[LeoDraco]

After having spent a few minutes in the tech demo, some observations (I apologize if these have been mentioned; I am a bit too tired right now to go searching five pages for observations):

• Manual camera control would be a terribly Good Thing; the wonky auto-follow and rotate scheme is rather annoying (as I have to manually turn the girl around to look at things, rather than move a camera around). But, ah, I don't know how good mouse movement detection --- which would be my suggestion --- is in Director.
  
• I, J, K, L seem relatively wonky for direction buttons (this is a minor observation; everyone has their preferences, but I had thought most of the (computer gaming) world had moved on to WASD since the first FPSs which used it used it).
  
• Nudges are a bit awkward, as you seemingly have to be almost directly facing the object you are nudging, rather than simply next to it and facing along it. (Say, for example, you run up to a door, and stand by it looking in a direction parallel to the plane of the door; the nudge, in my most brief of perusals, seems to not work.)
  
• The color seemed dark and dingy; presumably, this might have something to do with the PC/Mac gamma problem commented upon earlier in some of the images you posted.
  

Still, all things considered, good job.
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"...LeoDraco is a pompus git..." -- Mandrake

[BadMrBox]

I cant start the tech demo. Something weird about a playback error. :(
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[Nephilim]

[LeoDraco]

[Nephilim]

I've updated the tech demo with some new stuff:

A shopkeeper in the apothecary shop (no commerce interface yet, though)
Mouselook - hold down the mouse button and drag left and right to swing the camera around the avatar
WASD instead of IJKL
Translucent dialog boxes with a decorative border

The walkaround engine is getting to the point now where I can drop content in pretty easily, which is nice. A small under-the-hood tweak is that I can now position models on a sub-tile basis, yay.
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Visit the Sacraments web site to play the game and read articles about its development.