Sunset of the Pwnage Sauce project

Yes, it’s true, I’ve decided to sunset the Pawnage Sauce Project. (Brief moment of silence)
It seems that I now have to face the ugly truth that my soon to be teenage son has so much going on in his busy life that the thought of spending a few hours a week dedicated to a project is just unfathomable. Besides, what was I thinking? There are friends, girls, Myspace, Facebook, Xbox live & more girls. And I expect this 12 yr old to spend 6+ months with his old man in front of a workstation muddling through source code or 3D artwork? So for now, we will sunset the project and revisit it in the near future. After all I do still have my 8 year old. (Evil laugh)
We will however keep the Pwnage Sauce name and parlay it into a few smaller recreational projects such as our gaming merchandise and web cartoon, coming soon.
http://www.zazzle.com/dmosthated*

I’ll continue to keep this blog and make updates if not weekly at least monthly.

Thank you all for following our progress and I promise to be back with more educational and entertaining entries for your enjoyment.
D.Isaac

Change is good. Isn't it?

I know it’s been a month since our last post and I do apologize for that but we have been steadily moving forward. Aside from a little downtime due to illness each week has been a little more productive then the prior. At a high level, we now have our initial map completed which contains 8 city blocks, roads, 50 interiors/buildings and some miscellaneous items such as trash cans, fire hydrants and street signs complete with textures, everything needed to make a true urban environment. We also have successfully implemented code to produce different types of bullet holes depending on the type of object or material being shot. So yes, we have been busy.


And just when I thought I was ready to upload some new screenshots and update our progress a good friend decided to share the following link with me.
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/udk.html

(Unreal® Development Kit is the free version of the award-winning Unreal® Engine 3)

It seems that the Unreal Development Kit (UDK) is now a free resource. I have made a few Unreal maps in the past and like most I’ve always loved the engines capabilities but to design our game using the Unreal 3 engine at no cost is more then I could hope for. As I read over the list of the tools included within the kit and the initial documentation I am leaning more and more towards restarting our project using the Unreal 3 engine. So we now have a sub-project, to recreate the basic functionality of our existing game using the Unreal Development Kit (UDK) with a hard timeline of 1 week max. If this can be accomplished we will definitely head down the Unreal road.

Screen shots and more detail of the sub- project coming soon.

Art Work

So I’ve decided to take a break from the thousands of lines of code and start working on the games graphics. Over the weekend we purchased the Jason character pack from Eivaa Games for a mere $25.00 to give us a head start with the games main character and NPC’s. I prefer to avoid the painstaking task of modeling and rigging a character from scratch, so if I can purchase one which falls within my so called budget and tweak it to fit my needs, I’m all for that. So I give you, until we change his name,  Jason.


 

Initially I wondered why this character was priced less then most other character resources for the Torque game engine. Well after a few emails with the good folks at Eivaa I found out that they apparently had some issues with the biped rigging of the character so the final version was released rigged with bones instead of a biped. Not a major issue I thought since the standard animations were of course included, run, walk, jump, etc. I soon realized a problem, you cannot use any of the standard or extended animations that are packaged with and produced for the game engine. Those packaged animations are produced for a biped therefore the nodes (bone names) that control what bone to animate and by how much do not exist. Additionally since they are bones and not a biped I can not utilize my motion capture library which I was depending on to make the game play a bit more realistic.

Considering an upgrade ... again

Yes, once again I am considering an upgrade of the game engine. The latest and greatest version is now available. T3D will run us a cool $900.00 bucks! That's $100 less then retail as a current license owner. That upgrade will not happen anytime soon but I am considering the jump from V1.4.2 to the advanced engine V1.7. I had a buddy of mine render my current test model in his 1.7 version and improvement in render quality and lighting alone makes me want to seriously consider the upgrade.

Here is the same exact model rendered in both engine versions.

Version 1.4.2

Version 1.7.0

Guns, Guns and more guns!

We have guns!

After a long and tiresome battle with incomplete code resources and attempts at reinventing the wheel we've added 5 guns and what I think is a pretty nice cycling system, the mouse wheel. Oh yeah, we also have grenades that are currently launched with the ease of a simple right mouse click. And I do mean launched, we're still working out the bugs in the code to force the grenades to look as if they are actually thrown. As it stand they look to be launched with little to no regard for gravity. I have to talk to the defense department about our little rocket launched and self propelled grenades, there may be a market for these.

We continue to work on the HUD as you can see. Now when you switch weapons the HUD displays the current weapon and ammo amount. I've also included a reload function that needs some tweaking. I want the reload to check if the current clip is full before actually reloading the gun. Full clip = no reload. For some reason we can not figure out why the initial weapon image will not display in the HUD. It's as if the function is called after the weapon is changed for the first time which I know is not the case because the correct ammo amount is displayed at start. 1 or 2 days and I'll figure out which section of code I fat fingered and resolve that minor issue.

Our next steps are implementing the bullet hole/decal system, custom crosshairs for each weapon and fine tune the shooting accuracy, which more then likely will involve me remodeling the characters with many more detail and collision points. But for now I'm happy. We're moving forward and learning a lot.

 

 

 

A little closer

Each day we are getting a little closer to what I would consider an acceptable and playable FPS demo. As of this mornings code changes we now have a new HUD and weapon cycling system. A simple roll of the mouse wheel will change between the MP5 and AK47 weapons. More weapons are scheduled to be added this weekend. Next steps are to add the decal system to replicate bullet holes when we actually hit somthing. Once that is completed I'll tie everything into the HUD in order to display current ammo, health levels and the selected weapon. Oh yeah, I'm working on a grenade code resource to plug in hopefully by Sunday night. Big steps this weekend, lets just hope they're not backwards.

Press to Restart

Ok, Lets recap some of the fun we've had so far.


1. We couldn't get a the third person crosshair so we went with a melee system .
2. The melee system was clumsy and NPC's were easy to avoid.
3. Melee attack was just slow and inaccurate.
4. All models required recreation to add detail points for damage detection

So we’ve decided to wipe the board clean and restart. This time we’re taking the simple road. A FPS… period. That’s right a first person, plain as day, easy to code, done a million times, why reinvent the wheel shooter. Now maybe we can get this project finished before my 50th birthday. (I’m no where near 50 by the way.)

 

Notice how I had to model the arm into the gun model in order to have it display in the first person Camera view. A bit hacky bit it works for now.