New 3D Game

[Yarg]

Hi,

Thought you may be interested in trying out a game I made for a Streatwear label called FLY53R135. All modeling/animation is done with Lightwave.

screen snap (http://www.fly53r135.com/home/cause/games/images/s1.jpg)

F-Racer (http://www.fly53r135.com/home/cause/games/games.asp)

Yarg.

PS - I did the rest of the site too ;-)

[Noclar7]

excellent, I like the intro with the "birds eye" veiw happening.
Did you lingo script that so it checked for system requirements then set the graphics and video to high quality?

Cheers,
RJ

[Yarg]

Nope - the graphics options are to set manually with the settings options.

I had limited time on this ;-)

The bird drove me crazy! After hours of 'messing' with bones in LW I got out something 'similar' to what I did in lightwave - nice in LW but it exported a robot bird ;-)

Yarg

[mdoyle]

Cool racing game, there isn't many out there which actually handle that well. Is the track built in lightwave or is any of it genenrated by code and splines?

What is the minimum spec it can run on?

Mark

[Yarg]

All built in LW. I spent a lot of time tweaking the controls. Hey is that you at number 1? 'Neuspeed'? Amazing time!

The hardest thing for me is to work out the world scale for havok! Any idea how you're supposed to work out this from your LW models! Drives me mad!!

I'm working on a Moto GP now and after working out all the quirks to exporting bones from LW I'm up against the scaling problem.

Is it true that 1 W3D unit = 1.25 LW units?

Keep playing - Moto GP soon ;-)

Yarg

[mdoyle]

I don't actually know for definite. The scale that we I sorted of worked out was either 10:1 or 100:1, I don't really remember. I'll need to go back and check. (thats for both havoc and models in general) the problems I was having was tweaking all the options when you had to scale high or low, it became quite difficuilt to get things right. We created a monster truck racing game which in essence was a bit flat but you could build and create your own tracks as well as add your own obstacles and hazards. It only ran well on a pc that was over a gig because of this, in retrospect I have ideas as to how I could still make it better but I just don't have the time just now.

M

[Sam_Horton]

That is the best shockwave 3D Game I have seen yet! You should really send that to macromedia if you haven't, they are hurting for some real 3D content.

Excellent work!

[Yarg]

Thanks :D

Not bad for a first attempt... I did contact shockwave.com and they never got back to me. But another games site did (in under 2 hours after I emailed them ;) )

So now I'm working on a moto gp game which as you can guess is much harder to do. I've dropped Havok altogether and have at last cracked how to get bone animations out of LW - the exporter is quite robust - it just needs you to be very careful about map names and scaling in layout. And don't use skelegons!

I'll post a link to the gp game when it's done.

Once you've cracked the exporter LW kicks *** for sw dev ;)

Later...

[beissert]

verry nice game. maybe i like to try shockwave for game creation to but I have heard lw doesn`t works good with shockwave. Can you tell something about the workflow??

Thanx

NICE GAME

[Yarg]

Yeah everybody winges about the shockwave exporter (including me in the past to Newtek support) BUT once you play about with it it is fact pretty solid. It's a shame that there's little info in the manual on the exporter and if you surf the web there's so many tricks qoted or errors in the exporter. A lot of the tricks quoted like baking the animation are rubbish. You don't need to and you end up with a huge file.

The truth is you can export pratically anything IF you don't do any of the following.

Bones - create them in layout not in modeler!

Maps: each bone's map must be unique to that bone. DON'T use duplicate map names (eg. add another model with the same names!) This caused grief till I found it (don't forget maps stay in modeler even if you close an object so it's easy to get duplicate names - even if they just show up once in the list adding models with map names that are already in layout causes fx like in the film 'the thing!')

Keyframing: DON'T change scale in Layout!! Do it in modeler or with lingo

IK: The bird in f-racer uses it so it IS possible though I had to help it by adding in extra keys. The animation is exported as if you did it manually anyway. You can delete or leave the goal objects with lingo. Came out slightly more 'wooden' than in LW. I'm just moving bones manually now as for short character movements i don't need it.

The worst thing about the exporter is it has a huge memory leak! After exporting it hog all your ram till you quit Layout. It also exports everything as transparent so you have to turn that off for most textures in lingo - turn transparent off for all models with a repeat loop and then turn it on for the one's you want.

One day I might put a tutorial on Rayamedia's site because I lost a week on my current project sorting out all the quirks - due to lack of info!

But follow those guide lines and you should get results.

My current project uses bone animation and I save out just the animation data for all the moves. Works perfectly now I've got it going. Modeler's layering system as great for SW develpement.

BUT the main thing with SW development is to know Director and lingo. If you don't know these start there. Don't jump straight into a game. Make little tests just for yourself. It's easy to get carried away with Havok too. Look how many half finished 'games' are about! So many people just drag and drop the havok driver handler on a model put it on the web as a demo. You need to know a lot more of lingo to do all the game logic and adjust the driver handler if you use it. F-racer does use havok but with a custom drive handler. My current Moto GP game doesn't. D2 - the big version of f-racer won't use it either. Unless you need lots of collisions don't use havok it just causes headaches!

Go for it :-D

[beissert]

Thank you for all the infos ;)

[mdoyle]

Yarg,

I was just cheking through this forum again and was reading up on your thread. I checked the gp game as well, quite nice handling!!! U have certainly go that bit worked out :D

What I was going to ask about is a couple of things. You said you managed to get IK working with goal targets. It never worked for me at all. It always seem to crash when I left the goal targets in which makes it quite diffifcuilt to get a good rig for a character setup. The only way I managed to get the idea that IK worked was to bake the keyframes and export it once I deleted the goal objects and have baked the animation. The 2 problems I have with this, is that there are far too many keyfrmaes for the animation which is bigger in file size and more processer intensive. The other was that in a good character setup for animation you really need goal targets in lightwave, and majority of the type if its a complex motion then the objects which use goal targets etc do not bake as they are not "technically" rotating but using goals as a reference which in end will not make it work. I had problems exporting goals and was wondering how you got it to work.

I had a character setup and the motions for the legs etc was quite complex and would take forever to try and rcreate without using goals and in the IK (using heel, ankle and followers etc) So i could not bake the animation. Have u manage to do this?

In the end I was lucky enough to find someone who wrote me an acutaly plugin that can bake a bone value after IK and using goals which would then let me delete the goals before exporting but I would prefer not to use this setup.

Whats your thoughts?

[digimassa]

:cool:

collision still doesnt work, hit the wall with 60° and look

[Yarg]

it's a long time since I played with ik and the exporter! Haven't had reason to do it again yet. If your method is working but you have too many keyframes try setting the interval to a higher number in the exporter animation tab.

Yarg