Some people are curious how everything works, so I’d like to explain how we combining every piece together and putting life into it.

What is the biggest obstacle in the typical development process ? Well - let’s divide that process to 3 stages: planning, implementing, watching results.

1) Planning: It’s a very cool stage, you can sit in comfortable place, take a favuorite drink, piece of paper and now you thinking and inventing, nothing is wrong here, you need a good plan.

2) Implementing: So before you start Implementing your brilliant alghorithm you spent a lot of time already, but can you do the same with implementing ? Well, better not too much. It is also nice stage, many people enjoying programming for example, but if implementing stage is harder than planning - then something is wrong. Tool serves for human not human for tool.

3) Watching results: Worst case is when you need to wait too long between implementing and seeing results. It’s a waste of time, really nothing interesting happens there, so perfect time for this stage is 0. Now we have much modern tools but in the 70’s you waited for a result a couple of days waiting in a queue and converting program to punched cards. Later in the 80’s you need to write program, compile, link then see result so it takes a couple of minutes. In the 90’s during game development people need to export 3d model, put into right directory, write in code loading and displaying, initializing etc, then compile, so still a couple of minutes. But today we have 00’s (?) So in our tool this time is Zero. We can see results imediatelly.

When you see on screenshot:

Left-top corner: working game using external engine, you can play there.

Right-top corner: blenders 3d window, you can add, delete, translate and edit objects,just blender.

Left-bottom corner: visual scripting using logic bricks.

Right-bottom corner: python console so you can program in realtime and everything changes in the same time in the game.

After reconsidering the level design we settled on the more practical and beneficial approach to split up that massive terrain into a set of 5 ‘islands’, each of them themed, and, perhaps one for the community. Here are some basic level shots of the first island in blender. We’ll have some in-game screenshots posted soon. The ground textures are not splatted yet, just blocked in. You’ll hear more about this later, because there’s actually a lot of exciting information to share.

There’s also Mandy, the latest addition to the Apricot cast. Fur is something still to be worked out, so no texture for now. We have big plans for Mandy.

What can you do to make Happy Blender Institute much more happier ? You would order a cake for us ! An Apricot cake. Today one person from Blender’s community surprised us with apricot and rise cakes ! Thanks a lot ! Really appreciate What community can do for us except coffee machine and cakes and of course DVD-pre orders ? Well.. we accepting also beer for example

Hmm bazooka you say…

I’ll be at Libre Graphics Meeting in Wrocław/Poland (Thursday 08th May - Sunday 11th May). This is third edition of this event where people interested about free graphic tools like for example Gimp, Scribus, Krita, Inkscape and ofcourse Blender can meet together. You can expect Blender workshop also Apricot and Peach presentation.

Apricot presentation will be in Saturday 10th 15:30 - 16:15 room D-20 B, so don’t miss it ! But if you do - not a problem because we will show full report here too.
More info: LGM 2008 page.

If you want to help Apricot and are not afraid of Crystal Space, C++ code, and in particular Crystal Space’s C++ code - take a look at the Development page, I slightly expanded the Crystal Space section.

Lighting things is pretty well covered in Crystal Space* right now; multiple lights can be rendered in one pass, and materials can have the usual assortment of properties such as normal maps, specularity maps etc. giving shiny visuals. However, for a truly convincing environment you also need shadows.

Crystal Space actually supported stencil shadows for a while, but they’re not with out issues: the algorithm inherently can’t support any transparent textures, and extra care must be taken by the artists to produce “closed” models, otherwise the shadows will mess up. Also, the Crystal Space implementation has some issues: they need some effort to set up and animated meshes are not supported.

Thus I implemented shadow map support. Without going into too much technical details, they can support binary transparency (aka alpha test), don’t need special care for the models (just throw anything at them and it’ll look as it should), and due simpler implementation, they work on animated meshes in Crystal Space. Within the render manager framework they can easily be utilized by either using a stock render manager with shadow support or some lines of code in custom render managers.

Now some screenshots on how they look in that well-known small test level:

Shadows test, from a distance

  
Some close-ups

Shadows also work on somewhat larger levels:

(Ignore the missing textures etc. Focus on the shadows

Some implementation details: Parallel-Split Shadow Maps on top of a plain normal shadow mapping. (You can see the shadow maps displayed for debugging purposes in the lower left corner of the shots.) The”soft” shadows you see are actually provided by the NVidia hardware - so real soft shadows is still something left to be done.

* Well, render manager branch.

(note the 2 (!) exclamation marks in the title, i’m excited)

yay! I hated that green background
The other day, talking with Chris about ApriStuffs, we agreed that the old theme wasn’t the better, at this moment we all know that its gonna be a Frankie’s game, so.. why we have 3 rodents in the banner? lets give Frankie what he deserves! a big and *rendered* header

Was all made in The GIMP, Inkscape and Blender, was just playing around with the old logo in Inkscape, then imported the .svg in Blender as curves, added a material, rendered, and composited.

I’ll be making a splash for our brand new and shiny ApriBranch! we have our own branch! like the one that the Orange project had years ago, we will be adding and testing lots of features we need in this project, before going to trunk.

That’s all for now, hope you like the new theme, is not a big change but i just don’t like white-eye-killing backgrounds.
If you find a bug or something weird just drop a comment please.

Many people asking what is what in out development toolchain.
So… for graphics we are using Blender and Gimp (unexpectable huh ? ) Read the rest of this entry »

hey ho! my very first post!, luckily WordPress looks the same everywhere =)

Oookay, what to say.. today is a week and a day since i’m here. Got to know all all the Peach team, I even assisted to the Premiere! (pretty awesome btw), but they are almost all gone now, Sacha and Williams are still here in nl, yesterday Nathan went back home (told me to give 1 hug per person a day!, i’m on it). So that’s it, all the institute for us, is Apricot Time!.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here follows some explanation of how we’re working on the game logic.

The idea is to give an initial picture to the uninitiated, so that you’ll get the basic jargon we use, while also talking about some apricot specific stuff more towards the end of the post.

Read the rest of this entry »