Long time coming...

Havent posted in a looong time but thats me :) Iv probably had a new job and all sorts since the last post and have had little time for fun. Im quite an expert in wsgi and related things now as well ;) Something in the works in an ajax rpg.

A very simple profiler

I needed a very simple and quick profiler - this is what I came up with. Youll notice its very like a C define, oh well :)

from time import time

PROFILE_STACK = []

def BEGIN_PROFILE(thing):
    ind = "  " * len(PROFILE_STACK)
    PROFILE_STACK.append((thing, time()))
    print "%sBEGIN_PROF %s" % (ind, thing)

def END_PROFILE():
    thing, start = PROFILE_STACK.pop()
    ind = "  " * len(PROFILE_STACK)
    print "%sEND_PROF %s = %.3f" % (ind, thing, time()-start)

You simply wrap blocks of code in BEGIN_PROFILE('some string ident') and END_PROFILE() and it will print the execution time.

Im still fighting with pywracer physics unfortunatly and now Im vaguely tempted to try my hand at a golf game. There arent any free golf games! ( unless we count neverputt )

Not very interesting...

Wow what fun! No - infact. Altho I have swapped in a new config backend for saving data, updated the model exporter and created a nice easy way to insert instances into levels! Here's what the level designer looks like:

Main Window:
Instance Manager:

Dont ask me why those text labels are different colors, seems to be a weird bug in blender ( couldnt possibly be me ;)

Building textures

Ive created some building textures using blender! Its not very difficult you just need to use Ortho setting for the camera. I think its also possible to create normal maps this way ( see this tut ).

Here are the results:

The Power of the High Pass Filter

This is a tutorial I spotted at blendernation and its great! The tutorial is from gamasutra here.

Gimp users fear not - ideasman even posted a gimp script for a high pass filter in the comments of the blendernation post. The script is here and should be placed in ~/.gimp-2.2/scripts on linux.

The results are great, lets see if I can make some nicer looking buildings now :)

Pywracer in Color

Since the last post:

• Color UV textures
• Fading out of detail texture
• Lots more buildings

Pywracer video

Ive never done this before but this should be a YouTube video of pywracer..

Let there be instances

Baked in-place instances - yay! The instances are linked from other .blend files via blenders library stuff. With my export script you can "bake" the instances ( which copies all the linked meshes to real meshes ) and with these you can bake the lighting as they are in the scene. Blimey... That screenshot was also baked with Ambient Occlusion ( which is nice ) - a nice advantage of using blender :)

Screenshots

Some screenshots from the latest pywracer level viewer. There is now a detail tex on the track and some pretty lens flares ;)

Pywracer upate

Pywracer ( http://pywracer.sf.net ) is undergoing a rewrite. This time pywracer will not use soya but custom code written by me. Im specifically targetting OpenGL 2.0 compatible cards so I can use the features of modern cards and save some cpu time. So expect shaders,a much higher vert count and generally a nicer looking game :)

Thanks to improvements in blender since the last pywracer we can now bake lightmaps ( albeit atm without anitaliasing ( and smooth faces?! ) - hopefully these will be fixed). The lightmaps give the pywracer world a much nicer look. Ive also written various city/city building generators in BPy that should help with the war against content. With all this data I've implemented a "data build"; it transforms blender/gimp exported data into game ready data. By doing this is scons I've also saved myself some time because I can reuse the python classes Ive used in writing the exporters and game itself ( specifically one Track Settings class which contains all the info required to build a track, this file is exported from blender and used both in-game and by the build scripts ).

For physics I'm currently looking into Bullet ( http://continuousphysics.com ). It seems great atm - sure I cant do actually do what I need and a lesser prob: there is no c api, but its nicely written and the forums seem good for help. I'd definatly recommend looking at Bullet if you find ODE a bit old/big/scary.

Today I'm going to try and get the ship following a spline around the track and possible create some simple effects like lens flare. I want to start being able to show off the gfx ;)

Hello and welcome

This is probably all going to be about python and gamedev - lets see :)