How The Game Is Played

Walk the Troll

Here is a video I made of the DarkMMO client with a troll under user control.

The jerkiness is an unfortunate side effect of the video capture software I used. Motion is silky-smooth when its not doing capture.

Posted at 03:30PM Apr 30, 2008 by gameguy in General  | 

Troll animation in NB6

Here's the latest from the DarkMMO project.
I've added animation playback in the Netbeans NWN mdl viewer.

I caught a little video. Its a bit jerky due to running the capture software along with NB6, but you can get the general idea.

Play Video

Posted at 04:58PM Apr 28, 2008 by gameguy in General  | 

Beware of the troll...

Here is the next step, a troll placed into the scene by the server.

He's in a neutral position because animation isn't working right yet. Thats the next thing for me to fix...

Posted at 01:17PM Apr 27, 2008 by gameguy in General  | 

Hot troll in the city

This is actually a test of blocking. Right now blocking occurs at the 0.0 point on the model so the gets half-way into walls but then is indeed stopped. Im going to move the test point forward by half his bounding box width to fix that.

This is also a bit more complex scene then the first tests. Its a bit dark because I haven't done anything with lights yet.

Posted at 07:47AM Apr 27, 2008 by gameguy in General  | 

Mission control, we have lift off!

Here is the screen shot of the very first Zone rendered by the DarkMMO client.




It doesn't look like much, I'll have some more interesting maps to show at JavaOne. But it does represent
a very important milestone. I can now build a Zone in the NeverwinterNights toolset, load it up into the server and then connect and have the server send the tile map for the Zone down to the client for display.

The server retains a WalkMesh for the zone so it can do collision checking for cheating clients. My next order
of business is to add in moving characters and do that collision detection. As thats based very heavily on the "BattleTrolls" code base from about 3 years ago, with a bit of luck I should be able to get that much in
before JavaOne!

Posted at 03:00AM Apr 26, 2008 by gameguy in General  | 

My latest Netbeans trick

I now have the netbeans plug-in correctly displaying the walk-mesh for a tile when the tile is displayed.

Walk meshes are a kind of movement blocking map used to make fast calculations as to where a character can or cannot move.

here's the display with the walk mesh shaded green for non-blocking and red for blocking:

Posted at 04:33AM Apr 08, 2008 by gameguy in General  | 

Viewing Neverwinter Nights creatures in Netbeans 6

The past week I've been back to fairly heavy work on the Project Darkstar based MMO engine that I will be talking about at JavaOne and featuring in my upcoming book on writing Massively Mutliplayer games using Project Darkstar.

One of the early decisions I made was to use the NeverwinterNights data set because its is good quality, well thought out ,freely available and has some wonderful tools. However I also need to develop new tools for this projects. A second decision I made was to do all of my new data tools in Netbeans.

There was a not insubstantial learning curve to writing Netbeans plugins, but now that I'm starting to see the other side of that this decision is starting to pay off. I have a plugin now that lets me freely browse through the NWN meta-file structure and view files. The first file viewer/editor I wrote was for 2DA files. These are simple spread-sheet like files that NWN uses for tabular data.



The next one, that I just finished, was harder but is very rewarding. Using JMonkeyEngine (www.jmonkeyengine.com) it displays actual NWN 3D models right inside of Netbeans!

Posted at 04:22PM Apr 04, 2008 by gameguy in Java  |