dave’s blog of art and programming

user generated content

Some work on the roots, smoother extruding animation, variable widths and a new pickup which makes the roots curly.

Linux bin
Win bin

You can now collect pickups by growing roots into them (although it’s a bit tricky) which cause leaves or red swirly things to grow on your branches:

Linux bin
Win bin

As well as incorporating yesterday’s cumberland extrusions, this version has growth in it – currently with each root you grow you get a bit bigger, and your perspective on the world slowly changes. This is a common topic when we’ve been talking about game design for groworld – and it’s a lot easier to implement in a 3D environment. You can use tricks like scaling the world so you can never reach the end of it, although with this demo the fog starts to get too much when you get really big.

Linux version
Windows version

Another one of the useful things to come of the groworld project should be a decent extrusion modeller/animator for fluxus – I spent this morning writing this:

You provide profile shapes and paths as lists of points, and off it goes.

Yet another groworld game prototype, this time trying to imagine how a plant would see itself growing. We are trying to move towards ‘you are the plant’ rather than ‘you are a gardener’. The first person perspective possible with 3D might make this easier to achieve. Everything is very first pass on this, as I threw it together in an evening, but other than the camera wackiness, I quite like the feel – I think it will be easier to achieve more ambiguousness, and feeling of otherness with something like this.

We had another Lirec consortium meeting, this time in Poland at the Wroclaw University of Technology. I took some pictures of their mechanoids, which included COSMOS, a 2 wheel balancing robot, and the best use of xeyes I’ve seen for some time:

Something I wrote on a plane between London and Munich, not sure if it has a use yet:

I’ve been working on the look a lot more, there is now a proper delineation between sky and ground, and the ground consists of stones which the worms crawl around behind.

I’ve also had a play with some more abstract root designs:

There are also some camera controls now: w, a, s & d keys to move around, z and x to zoom in and out. There is a bit of a pause when it’s loading – as it’s doing lots of per-pixel operations on the pluggable plants at startup (which will be cached to disk for a proper release).

Linux bin
Windows bin

I’m going to have to put some care and attention into the overall look soon, but I’ve made a system for describing plant species and storing the textures appropriately so it’s simple to add new ones. Also it supports a kind of two player mode, not that there is much to do yet other than collect nutrients and watch the worms do their thing :)

Windows exe, and linux/win/mac code here.

I’ve slowed the worms down a great deal (although I’m not sure how fast they move from a plant’s perspective, something to mull over) and added the pluggable plants code.

I’ve also been structuring the code a bit to fit in with what I think is a model-view-controller framework, (note: without the business logic!) which seems like a good way to break games into scalable chunks you don’t get as lost trying to figure out, when things start getting more complex.

As usual, the code is here.