Video

Just as a follow up to Ben's post, I captured a video of the character in the game

I finally got it to work by using 3ds Max 2009.

First, I installed the trial version of the program and then installed the matching Gamebryo plug-in. Then I realized that I needed an additional plug-in called Autodesk FBX, (which had versions to be installed for both Maya and Max) in order to import and export my .ma file without losing all of the mesh, texturing, rigging, and animation data. Having never used Max before, it was extremely difficult to get the hang of doing simple procedures that I have been taking for granted in Maya. With the time that I had, I was able to recreate the Sequences and character root with the proper editors and export the NIF, KF, and KFM files. The texturing from the FBX file was a little wonky, but I was more interested in getting the files to work with our code. I swapped in the character KFM and miracle of miracles, it worked. Then I simply tweaked the character node scale, translation, and orientation sections and added a header with the animation sequences. So now I know it is definitely something with Maya. An Emergent employee responded to my question, but his only suggestion so far was to check the filepaths, which Mark and I did yesterday. Hopefully he has some other ideas. It would be a lot easier to get it to work with Maya files rather than having to learn the entire Max package from scratch.

As Mark and I mentioned before, it's unfortunate that the Gamebryo documentation is not written for first-time users. A lot of features that were advertised as being simple ended up taking much longer to implement because of missing or hidden information. We definitely learned a lot from this crash-course semester with a powerful toolkit.

After Mark and I finished up compiling our files and documents, we took yet another look at the KFM loading error. Again, no luck with Maya-exported files, so we decided to see if their only Maya sample was implemented in any demos. No. It is not used once.

So in a final act of desperation, I'm downloading a LEGAL free trial version of 3ds Max. Then I'll just install the Gamebryo plug-in and try to export it from there. Wish me luck!

Not having much luck with this. I went back and started to comb through the Documentation and 5 years of forum posts to try and figure out why functioning Maya KFM files refuse to load through the program. After testing some workarounds unsuccessfully, I left a question that will hopefully be answered sometime in the near future. In the meantime, I spent a few hours constructing a sound class, since Dr. Badler wanted to hear some explosions. After trying to resolve some linking errors, I found this in the documentation: "Customers wishing to use this implementation must separately purchase a license for the Miles Sound System directly from RAD Game Tools, Inc." The MetalWars demo uses this, but of course, it won't compile on the system so I can't take the license from it. The documentation suggests that there are demos that use a different system, but I will have to look for them later. The issue seems to be that the NiAudio core library isn't included in this version.

Well, long haul is complete, presentation is done, and yet there's still so much more I want to add.

Here's a video of where the game was at for the project presentation on May 1st:



It's working much better then it has in the past, as I've worked out almost all the bugs. It doesn't have many features I'd like to add, but perhaps I'll have time this summer to expand on it.

Hopefully Ben will get the animation exporter to work correctly, so we can get rid of the gamebryo sample character featured in this video. That would also let us add the correct model and animation for the rockets.

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

new video up... bit more complex video with some interesting slingshot action :-)

need to fix the camera still, and the projectile code results in a wierd bug.

camera and collision detection

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg5NZaLH4rE

new video up on youtube which seems to work right.

I've got the collision detection working correctly now, so the character knows when it is flying or on the ground. The camera now has different controls based on flying/grounded, which are fairly intuitive to control. The transition between states needs work.

Hopefully, the next video I show will have a decent environment and (maybe) a character instead of a ball.