Revision…

fun 🙂

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Week of strange calm

I’m glad it’s Friday, Friday quite late but everyone is tucked in bed and warm and fed and reasonably hygaenic which is quite good enough. Odd week. My heating works – yay! My zapped hard drive cannot be fixed – boo! I found a really nice gold colour for the Hobo – yay! The wheels on the Hobo don’t go round and round – boo! Yet – yay! And – now that April’s carefully constructed deathtrap has been fully deployed with all it’s intricate little parts that neatly fit together, we’re into the more straightforward time where the nation has to deal with it as it unfurls, which means I can (gratefully) return to PlanetGardenShed unless required to make soup/provide ear/help out/mop up/  – who knows. At some point this thing will have to be dismantled. The only way is up!

So… Gardenshed! Well, I’d hoped to have something nice to screenshot, and I could put the gold colour on the hobo, but I think I’ll hold back a bit. Mostly I’m happy. I’ve got a working prototype – for PlanetGardenShed, that is, not for any game yet. It’s a basic workspace that will soon look ok (when some easy textures are added) and where I can try things out, build things, mess about generally. Basic as in a basis, a framework, a good starting point for many directions. It works in that pressing keys makes things happen – I can add more as and when I want to try things. Wheels going round for example. I think that’s because I don’t know how to script for grouped objects. The little green shoots of learning C++, HTML5, Python are growing steadily. It’s all interesting and engaging, and thank goodness, a hobby.

A strange thing is happening.

Grey, metallic and bleak as it is, I spend more time now in GardenShed than I do playing games. Still, I did manage to squeeze some in – Fruit Salad as soon as I have time. And yes, I do know that Margaret Thatcher died, but not much to say about it as I didn’t know her personally and wasn’t particularly impressed when she was prime minister. One thing struck me, despite concerted media pumping and hype there is not an upsurge of national mourning. The BBPropaganda is in a pickle since they unbiasedly report and play the nation’s top favourite songs every week. “Ding Dong The Witch is Dead” is number two, and they have had to have a wee agonize about what to do. To unbiasedly report, or not to unbiasedly report – and play it. Apols to Hamlet.

The art of safe protest is not dead, it would seem. The late prime minister’s legacy is the current crop of brats partying on the bones of the weak. Like me, a lot of people don’t like that. A lot of people aren’t going to mourn the passing of it’s most famous advocate. I hate “interesting times”.

Oh alright then – for anyone interested, one Golden Hobo:

Getting posh now

Not been writing much about PlanetGardenShed because relearning languages doesn’t lend itself to storytelling much – ya just do it really, and that’s mainly what I’ve been doing. Python and C++ for now. There will be more because I’m curious and also because though I can’t multitask for peanuts irl, I don’t seem to have a problem keeping several languages/interpreters earthly or computer in my head. Swings and roundabouts. Just don’t ask me to walk and talk at the same time haha – disaster. Walk, talk and eat? Food splatter and probs get run over by bus.

Aside from some heavy but dry learning, though, I’ve been digging into stopping the Hobo dropping through the terrain – boils down to the beginner scripts used in tutorials really which teach you to move things in a very basic way. If you tell a thing to move to x,y,z co-ordinates it’s going to do just that regardless. It will merrily go through unhorizontal things,  into space – so it falls. That kind of basic movement is fine on a flat plane where both y’s (ground and object) are safely = and your Hobo will not therefore be able to break through.

There are more advanced ways of moving things (setlinearvelocity and more) which is what I’ll be looking at next, another whole wee world there. And I’m not sure just where when and how (in the script) an object figures out if it’s going to hit anything and reacts, overriding those x,y,z co-ordinate (increments usually) you fed in – that’s a whole missing piece of information. …I’m gabbling. Anyway, detective work ahoy!

Which I shall duly enjoy. Finding that all that out led me to an interesting blog, and I wanted to put a link. This link is to a better method of making the python scripts, I think (and takes a little more effort to set up). I haven’t tried it – I just found this link, but that’s what I’ll be exploring next when I need a break from the duller stuff.

http://solarlune-gameup.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/using-python-in-blender-game-engine.html

and just because I happen to like the look of my faceted in-development terrain, here’s the stage I use to mess about with scripting, in all it’s sort-of metallic stripped downness. I’m just putting the pics bercos I like ’em – it’s the same old terrain by the way, it is easier to compare results that way. I do many things to it as I go – just imagine what that poor wooze has in store !!

Inadvertant caves and a surprise (Blender, PlanetGardenShed)

Nevermind I’m sure they’ll come in handy.

As it turned out, going through the terrain was irritating me so I’ve been messing about with terrain, physics and scripting again. I won’t really be needing much bumpy terrain for TWoFB (Part I), though it is needed. In the other 2 parts it will be needed more = might as well sort it out. So I was working on that and then….

Erk! OM!G! I’ve inadvertantly done  …… LIFE!!!

And thus (with far too many calculations going on for practical use just now) was born our first Giant Primal Wooze. Oooooh!!!! (Blender Game, physics, soft body – actually Blender did it, it’s a very basic uv sphere/soft body combo, but I’m the one seeing the possibilities). There was dancing around the living room. Children were dragged from serious home decorating in EQ2 to be hugged and kissed and forced to look.

You can’t see in a still but it woozes beautifully down the hillside seeking rest and then meanders around on the plane. The low poly hillside is a shrunkwrapped ANT terrain I’m using to see if I can figure out how to stop my WASD overriding collision detection. Collision detection (convex hull on shrunkwrapped terrain) works fine if you just drop things. They spang about in a very satisfying way. I want that for WASD too. And I’ll definitely be simplifying and using that wooze.

Yes, it’s pink 🙂

(of course I do pink to annoy the boys, you don’t think I’m holy do ya?)

Joy (BGE)

At least this is all going well (pardon lack of textures). I think the scale will do for now. Since 2.6something Blender has an addon that generates terrain called ANT, which I have spent some extremely happy times with. To  my joy the Hobo wasd(zx)es just fine in this environment (and does not fall through the ground). If not flying it flips on bumpy terrain : Edit: oooer wait, it does still go through – something something modified mesh collision … fascinating side road, will have to leave for now because all I’m after is nice scenery to look at while I work, in scale).

Hehehehehe!

Omigosh! Please tell me that is a sea up ahead!

I wonder if I can localise noise… Incidentally pink is a very practical colour! It is easy to spot your tiny spaceship in big untextured terrain primitives with huge mountains when it is pink!

Houston, we have WASD!

Ok so I crashed. A few times. OK, a lot. OK, quite a lot … no… didn’t get the the life detector sorted. Sorry. But some old choklit that was stuck on the repellent disk fell off when it crashed and now it works properly.     …Want some?

(Python isn’t scary, Blender physics are fun! I can’t figure out how to use my screen capture software and that’s all I can report from today. Using keyboard controls the Hobo goes up down, strafes, rotates and does spectacular spins in midair if it collides with anything. Incidentally it’s also quite stable and rights itself if you bounce it a few times on purpose. All movement is lovely and smooth. I’m happy.)

“Yes of course it’s bliddy pink.”

…Now go away and let me fix the life-detector. Wayne says that green stuff snores at night.

Blogmas card for family I don’t live near….

Wheeeeee !!!! Happy Christmas to all, wherever you may be – err I be fine up there I promise 🙂

This is our project I told you about – part of it anyway

PlanetGardenShed 2 – Exploring

“…No…let’s not go down and see what it is.”

No, really, I don’t want to I tell you!

(If you’re wondering I’m figuring out my scale for PlanetGardenShed just now.)

Is Wordpress is handling pictures differently? I liked it when they just appeared large and you could reduce them if you wanted to. Oh well.

Pingggggg!

So for my own reasons which have nothing to do with water I want that pinggggg noise you get in submarines – the sonar I think it is. I spent much enjoyable time already messing about with sfxr – great wee program to play with, and thought it might be a good idea to look at what a pingggg looks like to see/hear how mine compare. Actually I’ve always wanted that noise – now gottagoodexcuse. This is a nice resource and my pingggggs aren’t too far off http://code.google.com/p/sfxr/ and http://www.freesound.org/

enjoy ! (plus now I won’t lose those urls.)