A few weeks ago I posted my first demo of an animated 3D ninja. At the time I had high hopes of creating a primitive Virtua Fighter styled game. But there were several obstacles to overcome. The poly count was a bit too high, the scene only had one model in it, and it took Away3D a fair time to parse the MD2 data for the key frames.

So last night I decided to revisit the code and see what could be improved. Here is the result – I dropped Away3D and decided to run a test with ND3D instead. It’s a much more light-weight 3D library, and doesn’t include features like lights or shaders. But what it does do, it does very well, and very fast. The MD2 parser in particular kicked several bails out of the Away3D one.

This, combined with an optimised MD2 model (many thanks to Adam Biles for help) allowed me to get two fighters in the scene, each independantly animated and textured, with a ground plane and free roaming camera. I did have a skybox in as well, but the camera perspective didn’t look right and made the fighters seem as if they were floating in space. So I’ll save that for a different project.

Feel free to have a play with the demo.

I had a desire to see if it was possible to create a simplistic “Virtua Fighter” or Tekken style game in Flash 10. The biggest initial hurdle was getting a convincing model displayed and animating it. And then seeing if the frame rate shot through the floor like a dead weight, or was actually playable.

After a lot of messing around with Milkshape, md2.qc custom files and the Away3D MD2 parser doing some really weird shit, I finally managed to assemble this tech test (click the picture to launch, FP10 required):

Ok so it’s not going to set the world on fire, but I was genuinely surprised at the speed, even when running a full animation sequence. And the model could be optimised significantly too.

More tests will follow as time permits, but this is very encouraging at least.

I had an idea for a game where you had to restore colour to the world, by speeding around in a boat and dropping colour bombs onto the greyscale picture below. I thought it’d be fun if the images were pulled in from Flickr dynamically, creating a constant ever-changing sea of levels.

A few hours and a prototype later, and I realise it’s not actually going to work after all. There’s just no easy way to control what comes back from Flickr – you can’t search for images which just have “Big” sizes available, and you can’t easily exclude black and white images, which totally ruin the painting part of the game! There are also commercial issues with the Flickr API Keys needed to search and request images. So in the end what was a nice idea in theory, turned out to be a bit crappy in reality.

However I was left a random but pretty prototype. I’ve removed the boat/gameplay element, so it’s just the water painting demo hooked into Flickr.

Lots of pictures come back with “Image not available“, so just search again. If it seems to hang for a while after clicking Search, then just search again! Paint with the left mouse button. Sometimes it works right away, and sometimes only on the third or so attempt.

One of my artist friends commented that this made him look at the use of colour in a whole different light. He said that as you start filling the image in, the colours that come through are often totally different to what you’d expect – and when the colour is presented in low volumes it can often look very wrong. As if your brain has substituted the colours for you, and when they don’t match it gets confused.

I think there’s something quite calming / feng shui about it all personally.

Well this is just too much fun! Grootlicht have just released ActionScript Painter 2.0. I wasted a whole hour this evening creating images in this wonderful package. Remember Painter? This is similar. But automated. And made in AS3. It’s a piece of FP10 wizardary and some of the results are beautiful. Here are a few of my creations:

This is a sweet piece of work indeed! Using the power of the gnuboy Gameboy Emulator combined with Alchemy, fishf has created a fully playable Gameboy Color emulator in Flash.

While my initial tests don’t show it to be as fast as the real thing (or the gnuboy emulator it is derived from) it’s still a mighty fine piece of work indeed!

So here is Contra: Alien Wars (Gameboy classic version) fully playable in your browser:

Download fgnuboy from here.

Edit: Thanks to Kevin Luck for pointing out a flaw with the code in my original post (there was an extra assignment taking place, which caused the byte count to increase). Remove that and ternary will match if/else on a bytes-used basis. I’ll keep this post up here regardless, just ignore everything from this point on
(more…)

Damn I love messing with Flint – it is one seriously cool particle system This is a little test I threw together tonight in about half an hour (includes creating the planet image!). Leave it for a few seconds to see the planet trail burn up, and then just click anywhere you want to re-position the gravity well!

Code wise it’s extremely simple:

(more…)