Website Development

Robert an I have looked into the site structure and what the Gaming team require for the site. The site will now include a Mysql -PHP or ASP.net Database which we are currently working on.

Cath Networking

Where the hell are my diploma multimedia students

I spent most of last week trying to figure out a problem with exporting characters to Torque from Max. This week I've spent most of my time trying to create the sun that will float above Ra's head, the actual object for Torque is easy enough: just a sphere with a billboard through the centre.

The thing that has been taking up my time is the creation of animated flame image I want to apply the billboard. At first I thought I could just get some images or movies of the real sun and some how turn them into a sequence of images I could use for the billboard. Unfortunately the created images need to have a transparent background and I couldn't figure out a way to strip out the current background.
I then decided I would get some flame brushes for photoshop and make a halo of flames that I could then animate. The fatal flaw with that scheme is that once the halo was created I had no way of animating the individual flames since I stupidly collapsed the layers, additionally I have absolutely no idea how to create an animation in photoshop.
Fortunately I did save the individual flames I created as seperate images so I am now using flash to build an animation. See below for what I have so far for the image for the billboard and the sphere for the sun:



Obviously I have quite a ways to go but hopefully it will turn out alright. Once I'm done animating in flash I still need to export as a series of images and stich them together so the animation acan be used in Torque.

All of this brings me back to the title of my post; I'm sure if we had any diploma multimedia students they could get better results in a less time.

If anyone would like to try...

If anyone would like to try something new there is a new virtual desktop solution which can run Quake II... I suppose in a Windows VM... it is called MokaFive:

http://www.mokafive.com/

I am not going to download it because I have already download VMWare Server, VirtualBox and I am getting bored... :-)

Cluster built, still problems with 3D to be fixed...

Hi guys... after having built the cluster using basically all possible ways/technology I still have to find a way to make 3D "things" work... It is not going to be easy because the virtual machine 3D support is still experimental... also VMWare Server does not support 3D yet, just Workstation (which is not free) does...
But... my video card is a crappy one and my host system is Ubuntu... I would like to try running 3D on a Windows machine using VirtualBox... I will be doing this very soon...

Website Continued

Hi Guy's


Following on from Robs comments below I have been able to get onto dreamweaver and have had a play around with the site format. See above screen shot!! There is a lot more work for Rob and I to do on this.

Bye for nowxx

Website

Cath and i spend most of the day looking inbto different style of web pages as a front to the UnderGod game.

due to the lack of resourses, we were unable to edit and modify the web pages we found.
we will try use Dreamweaver or Frontpage to do the Site.
then due to our studies off IIS we'll probably use it to intergrate our work to reach our objectives with the requests from the Programmers :)

VirtualBox

We've been searching a way to run 3D games with virtualization software. The easiest way seems to be using VirtualBox.
Testing going on.

23.03.09

looked for games which could be used as example to design our own game

Last week and the rest of this week I'll be working on AI, I've been trying to get bots to have a kind of mob mantality. One of the bots is assigned leadership and the rest of bots in the group follow the leader, this frees up a little bit of processing since they don't have to calculate a path to the player. It was also gives me a base to build of formation from so bots don't run into each other.

23/03/09

Worked on ISA prac for servers
Further study reveals we might not be able to use Virtual PC. We will try to go with Virtual box instead, research reveals it appears to be more effective with games and Efficiency. Installtion was started by Fred, meanwhile Jason and Fred both tried to get test machines.

continued

hii all,
as i said last week ,did research on source codes games though didnt get time to finish up.......today am continuing with the same research and this is some of the source codes links that i have come a cross.

http://www.gamespp.com/sourcecode/aberMUDII.html
http://www.gamespp.com/sourcecode/arena2_1.html
http://www.gamespp.com/sourcecode/asteroidsClone.html

last weeks post

researched on Ventrilo game server(firewall) its all about how you can blog the other web instead of games.and also deed research on source code game server though havent found any types yet.but am hoping to do more research.

16/03/09

Still worked on the webservers and tried to do a bit more rearch into the cluster servers. New source of information reveals we may have some issues using Vmware. Daryl and myself also continued to look at tha blogs.

We might have to redo the servers on VPC

Which game should we try?

Which game should we try first? I would say quake... if Arena works (even slowly) everything should be set properly :-)

Also we could try one of those s***t racing games we can buy in any mall for just 5 dollars... any idea?


Please do not say PacMan!

I realized...

I realized that VMWare and Microsoft Virtual Server are the BEST choice to install and run a virtual cluster... even Xen will work fine but... it is not well-known at the moment like the other ones I mentioned before...
VirtualBox is a good choice for a desktop environment and I think it would work much better than Virtual PC ( are you kind of suprised? :-) ) but both got a really BAD support for SCSI emulation... anyway I really do not like the HD id wich is used by VirtualBox: if you need to back up a drive you can not just copy the file but you need to unregister the disk first or use the command line otherwise two disks will be sharing the same id and nothing will work...

A Vile Pestilence

For weeks now Will has been working hard to build and rig a base male player character model. Last week he finished it. He tried using the DTS exporter but for some reason the models failed to export correctly. Not wanting Will to get bogged down with exporter problems I told him to move onto other tasks and I would sort out the export problems.
Unfortunately my attempts at exporting the model encountered the same problems. Upon hearing of my troubles Alan decided to test the exporter in 2009. He found that the same problem occurred. Since he couldn't remember having such problems when using 3D Studio Max 9 (rather than 3D Studio Max 2009) he reinstalled Max 9 and tried it out. Using the exporter in Max 9 worked so Alan arranged for Max 9 to be reinstalled on another machine in A104 so I could use it.
Unfortunately another problem reared it's head when I found that Max 9 cannot open files made in Max 2009, further complicated by the fact that Max 2009 does not allow a file to be saved in a legacy format. Even worse none of the export formats exported the links between the skin and the bones.
Despairingly I turned to the Internet in hopes of finding a plugin or script that would let me export from Max 2009 and import Max 9. I searched diligently but there were remarkably few import/export plugins/scripts that work with Max 2009 and none worked as wanted.
I have several other ideas to try before I resort to getting Will to re-rig the model in Max 9.

****** UPDATE ******
Thanks to Tim being awesome and putting me in contact with a super cool person from Interzone, I was able to get the mesh and the skin data into Max 9. Best of all in Max 9 I have been able to export the model correctly so that it works in Show Tool Pro, proving that the irrefutably proving that the export problem in Max 2009 was due to a fault in the exporter.

Unfortunately I couldn't find a way to get the biped into Max 9, so I had to create a new biped. This is not an ideal solution as the new biped is not exactly the same as the old one meaning the weightings for vertexes in the skin data is not perfectly accurate. I'm going to have another attempt at making the new biped, this time I intend to try to copy the values for each bone exactly (a time consuming task).

DArrylL

in class on monday i saw researching the available free gaming server so we could install and test with our web server... the search was terrible i was unable to find many freeware server....
TO BE CONTINUED...

Webserver Research

He Guy's

This week I have had a look into IIS and Apache also the difference between Static and Dynamic websites and thier functionality .

Please feel free to add any comments as feedback is very useful

http:///awesomeateam.pbwiki.com/Static--V-Dynamic-Webpages

http:////awesomeateam.pbwiki.com/IIS-v-Apache

Bye For Now x

READ ME

I've added labels to all posts as to whether they are related to programming or networking, and who they were posted by. There is also a label list on the left of the blog so we can filter posts.

Please add these labels to any of your future posts.

Cluster

Have clustering up and running with quorum disks. Testing Stronghold server. Runs locally but not clustered. Been troubleshooting for hours with Jason and Fred.

yeeeeaaaaahhhhhhh

Miroslav

Today i have added the news system into the website

The Devine Spirit Of Language

Since Brett demanded us to post here....(Otherwise he'd send Ninja's after us.....)

Today was a sad day....

*And now for something completely different*

So erm, today i finally finished off that dang Mausoleum...which may actually be "Thumbed Up" by Google himself....(yes you Nick). But probably not..it need serious editting with Lines...cuz like yeh its just being a very unsupportive model atm.

So after that...well about that aye buddeh...

Did some epic research on some random ass things that could potentially get a shining beacon in our game....

Things like Damage/Blood skins on weapons when they collide with certain objectjs.

Mainly looked into a trigger system however, that pretty much runs when Mr Player runs into its box of certain death >_>. These can be added to change when for example 1 or MANY people run into the trigger at once.

This could be a great help to start combat (like them crazy skeletons)

It could also be used to determine when to automatically activate their n"Bored" status.

I don't know why im explaining this.....

I just need to implement something....something...SOMETHING in Torque

why can't there just be "Hey Buddeh, import this SOMETHING here into Torque"?????

That would be very supportive....

*And now for weather with.......*

So yeh...now going to i dunno....perhaps start epic psudo code...

we need some things to base of things and such is the way of the windmill...

Was this sufficient so bloggin Brett?

Sure hope so...i don't really want to deal with Ninja's atm.... >_>

Ninja's stole my cat...

---------------------------

"It's Not The Great Who Are Strong, It's The Strong Who Are Great" - Albel Nox

Julien 16/03/09

I Searched more information about server game on the garage games website.
We tried to run the game on the virtual machine.

Weekly Update (or monthly..)

Working on PC character models recently; Ares (to the left) and Loki will be the models. I'll update once they're both done.

Having to inplement A* pathfinding as C++ coding objective or w.e; and other coding assignments have been taking up my time; will try to keep posts more frequent.

Testing Fail Over Clusters

Frederic - Network Team A

We've been testing "Stronghold" with our F.O.C.

We will try to set this up with 4 machines, using a switch.

administrator reply

the administrator for this game site - http://aatrade.springfield.net/index.php
uses the following specifications

Linux System
Intel 2.4 ghz Processor
CentOS Linux
512mb DDR Ram

i think he has only 60 players for this game though

I just forgot...

Hi all!

just forgot... DO NOT try installing OpenFiler on VirtualPC... I did it and I would not install at all!

I would recommend VMWare or VirtualBox... I tested both!

New ways...

Hi all,

I have been trying building the cluster using iSCSI technology. To do that in a virtual environment we would need a iSCSI file manager so I think I am going to use OpenFiler which has a really user-friendly http manager interface and also... it is for FREE!
Before configuring the cluster we need to configure Windows first... but it is not that hard!
So it looks like I really had fun yesterday... :-)

Matt 12/3/09

Making another post after the threatening email from Brett! jk.

Past couple of weeks I've been working on the AI for Undergod (is it two words or one?), I haven't told Brett yet but I decided to go out on a limb and work in a AI system similar to World of Warcraft where each player has a aggression level. Basically each time you do damage your aggro meter increases and bots are more likely to attack you over other players who have a lower level. I guess you could make it so spells increase the level more than a simple melee attack but I'm not sure whether spells are built into the engine source which would mean I would have to move what I've done to the source instead of the scripting side. We'll see.

Also, no screenshot this time ):

Will 12/3/09

completed Rough Male PC Modeling and Rigging but failed in first attempt to Import properly into TGEA
did some reasearch into Reactor to add realistic looking physics effects to some character animations
completed Basic Scythe Demon Rigging
started work on Textures

Ninjas ate my monkey

Well since my last post I've been working on the user interface(UI), getting animations to orient correctly in TGEA, maintaining the programming wiki, and learning how the Arcane FX system works.
Problems arose whilst working on the UI when I decided I was not happy with simply using an image and decided to add some new fonts to the game. Firstly to install fonts into windows administrator access is required and secondly it is necessary to restart (log off?) the computer after fonts have been installed.
Fixing the problem we had with our .dsq animations also caused issues. We went to the trouble of recording motion capture with four different orientations (i.e. facing different directions), however once imported into torque all the animations had the same problem; that being when played they would reorient the player character to face the left (whilst leaving the camera position alone). Some frustrated experimentation revealed that unlike what every piece of documentation available says the orientation of the character doesn't matter but the orientation of the sequence node does. It turns out that the sequence node must be oriented such that it points forward in the direction that the character model looks at; this is best achieved by drawing the sequence node in from behind the character model.
Arcane FX is a commercial engine mod for Torque Game Engine Advanced that allows advanced special effects to be created through TorqueScript. Effects are created using modular components; at the top of the hierarchy is the choreographer, which sits above phrases, below that are wrappers for each effect and below that are the building-blocks effects themselves.

I have also contributed to the programming teams efforts in planning animations for characters, level design, and character planning.

This week I hope to continue work on the UI, get our test animations working in the game, continue working on the wiki & documentation, import our test character into the game, begin work on Ares special effects, and a bunch of other crap I can't think of at the moment.

Quorum Disk Research

Found information on understanding how Cluster Quorum Disks Work. Introduction to what Clusters are and Network Load Balancing, what are Quorums? Also what type of Quorums there are and what are they used for .

Also look into the documentation structure.

http://awesomeateam.pbwiki.com/Understanding-how-Cluster-Quorums-Work

Update Miroslav

This is the update of my previous post, just adding some screen shots of the stuff i have done

timmeh 9/03/09

Caught up on a late blog, went around and checked to see who had done their blogs, checked out teambee.wiki and battlethegods.blogspot.com to keep my moderating up...that is about it.

Fred 9/03/09

Topology draft added to the Team A Wiki. Waiting for Visio for a neater one.

Kenneth 9/3/2009

Today I continued working on prac webservers through vmware. I also continued on more reasearch for setting the servers up.

Also reasearched info for IIS

First Post.......lol

Recap on the past 4 weeks

week 2 - Help research windows 2008 server requirments for a 4 node cluster server. System requirments, cluster requirements, documenting what i found onto awesomeateam wiki.

week 3 - Researched further on windows 2008 server and started planning topology and documenting how i would go about building a windows 2008 cluster server.

week 4 - Finally got windows 2008 server ISO image from ICT and started installing in Virtual PC 2007

week 5 - Configured a windows 2008 server DC, 2x nodes running 2008 server, webserver and a quorum disk using starwind trial software.

Miroslav

I have continued working on the progile page and close to finishing it

Miroslav (late post)

I have been working on nthe website some more. I have made a login system and half way through the progile page

pravesh - 9/03/09 - contact game admins

i was going through websites to b able to contact some game developpers and i asked questions abt how to run the game server that we wud b creating.

http://www.gdconf.com/contact_us/index.php
http://aatrade.jayslife.com/contact_admin.php

Julien 9/03/09

worked on a topology for the Server.
The topology has been added to the awesomeateam wiki.

timmeh (2/03/09) the monday that there was a holiday

I moderated the blogs and checked who was up to date (yes I'm watching you |<.<| |>.>|) just kidding... I'm only watching on Mondays :)

Jason 23/02/09

Installed server 2008 in 3 different virtual machines: datacenter server core installation (command line only) and datacenter full installation (with GUI). Was decided that we probably wont use the server core installation. Visio not installed did network diagram in word (for now) hope to have visio next week and hope to install virtual server and see if it is of any use to the project.

Jason 16/02/09

Research on server 2008 and ways that clustering can be done in virtual machines. Found out that in the past people have used VM ware instead ov microsoft virtual pc 2007 sp2. Tried to find out if there is a way that we van use VPC. Found that virtual server may be a solution to the problem. will download and hopefully install next week. Viseo and Server 2008 still not provided to us.

Jason 16/02/09

Research on what people had done for this project in the past i.e. clustering firewalls etc. Asked mark to upload server 2008 onto the shared drive for next week and for mike to install visio so that network diagrams can be done

DG

Worked on setting up windows server 2008 on 2 virtual machines. This was done on vmware.

Divine Fonts

Fonts for our four pantheons (Egyptian, Norse, Greek, Hindu).

Importing Motion Capture Data

I've spent the last week trying to import our test motion capture data into TGEA (Torque Game Engine Advanced). This is how the process works:

• Data is captured in Arena and exported as a .bvh file;
  
• the .bvh file is then converted to a .bip file in 3DSMax;
  
• the .bip file is then applied to a biped within Max;
  
• various helper objects are added to biped, to denote important points on the model;
• a bounds box is created surrounding all other objects;
  
• a special helper object is added and keyframed at the start & end of the animation;
  
• if necessary rearrangements are made to ensure the correct object heirarchy;
• the animation is cleaned up by hand, ensuring the biped faces the correct orientation (i.e. towards the back of the scene in Max);
  
• the DTS exporter is setup to export the correct sort of sequence;
  
• a config file is created in the destination directory that determines what will & won't be exported;
  
• the sequence is exported as a .dsq file;
  
• the dump file from the creation of the.dsq is checked;
• using Torque Show Tool Pro and an appropriate character .dts is opened and the .dsq is opened and run;
  
• if the .dsq doesn't work go backwards through the steps until the problem is found, otherwise proceed;
  
• the .dsq is placed in the appropriate folder within Torque;
  
• references are added to the animation in the correct TorqueScript file/s;
  
• changes are made to the TorqueScript files so that the animation may be run when the game is run;
  
• the game is run and the animation is tested;
  
• if things work celebrate! if not go backwards through the steps until the problem is determined.

So after numerous attempts I've managed to get our test data into TGEA, unfortunately it looks like there may be a problem with .dsq exports using the exporter in Max 2009 as I've been unable to get a .dsq to export that doesn't incorrectly orient itself in TGEA, even after having reoriented the biped inside Max. Alan has mentioned that he also has had problems exporting .dsq's in Max '09 (v. 11), he has however had success using Max v. 9 in the past.
So I'll try to get access to Max v. 9 and see what happens. If this doesn't solve the orientation problem we'll just have to ensure that we are correctly oriented when we do the motion capture.

Besides struggling with the animations I've been creating some graphics for use in the User Interface, including finding fonts for the player characters and the enemies. Additionally some of my time has been taken up sorting the videos we took to plan our animations and documenting our animations.

This week I'm hoping to sort out the .dsq issue, continue working on the UI, further document the animations, do some character documentation, explore how AFX works, conquer New Jersey, update the programming Wiki, check in with the rest of the programming team on how they're going with they're tasks, and probably a bunch of other things I've either forgotten or haven't thought of yet.