Zombie Simulator

[neilb]

I'm posting here under a new account name as my previous account is apparently locked (formerly nburlock), presumably due to not logging in for about 12 months.

Over the last couple of weeks, I have had some time on my hands, so I reinstalled Irrlicht for a bit of fun.

The idea I am working on is a "zombie simulator". Think of it as a simulation of the spread of a virus through a population, in this case the zombie virus.

I'm attempting to make the entire city destructible and track every creature individually, ie - damage done to an area remains, every building can be damaged or razed and every person is a separate entity that is followed through life and death.

There's also extra events such as the army invading with heavy weaponry and rival zombie viruses. It will also feature a tweakable range of settings such as how contagious the virus is, how long it takes to "turn", how aggressive the zombies are, how fast they move, special abilities.

I suppose you could call it "The Sims: Zombie", except you're the zombie king and you're invading someone else's Sims experience.

Anyway, I've decided to post now as I've actually got the basics in place and from here on out it's a case of evolving the game towards something worth playing.

For now, it's pretty light on graphics. I've only completed the template human model and the first building model for the purposes of defining the structures I needed to build the engine. The city itself is auto generated from a colour coded bitmap image, rather like the colour coded mini-map used in Sim City. This makes it quite easy to change the city layout in any paint package.



As you can see, I'm rendering from an isometric view that can be zoomed in and out. The main reason for doing it in this style that I don't believe it will be possible to display the amount of detail I'd like in the city if it were done from a first person perspective. As it is now, the buildings and terrain are 3D models while the creatures and all props (fire hydrants, lamp posts, etc) are pre-rendered sprites.

The game is being developed under Linux for a cross platform release. I'm not yet ready to distribute a demo. There's not really a lot you can do with it at this stage anyway, other than scroll around the city and zoom in and out.

If anyone is interested, I've been making regular posts to my blog for the last couple of weeks as development has progressed, which included a screen shot or two every day or so as I've added new features. I've noted down any useful things I've discovered about Irrlicht.

[Virion]

looks nice. looking forward to... maybe a demo video?

[neilb]

maybe a demo video?

I spent all morning trying to create a reasonable demo video. The best I could do was this jittery effort. The problem is that there apparently aren't any screen cast capture programs for Linux that are capable of capturing an entire area of 800x600 pixels once per frame, faster than about 15fps without slowing down or dropping heaps of frames.

In the end I used xvidcap and captured to a ram disk. Although no faster than the others, this one at least seemed to be able to grab between video frames so there's not too much tearing.

As you can see on the titlebar, the frame rate is actually 60fps

[Pazystamo]

For capturing you can try write to texture and save as bmp from irrlicht (like here) and then use virtualdub file->open (image sequence) and save to avi.

Or you can try virtualdub file->capture avi and select device (screen capture).

[neilb]

Thanks for the suggestion. I did try screenshots, but it was producing about 4 shots per second, though I was saving them as PNG and the compression might have been slowing it down. I'll try BMP and see what happens.

In the meantime, I added another building...

[Pazystamo]

For building you can try http://www.tysonibele.com/ buildings generator, but it's only for 3D max...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0LDnz-g ... annel_page

[neilb]

A building generator... interesting idea.

In my situation though, I had to come up with a way of assembling buildings from "blocks" that could be dismantled when the building is damaged or destroyed.



I've created a blender file with all the building pieces arranged one building type per layer. After exporting to b3d format the game engine categorises all the bits then uses the pieces to assemble the different building types depending on the "zone" that the building is supposed to occupy (residential, commercial, industrial, etc). Zones are identified by the coloured pixels in the mini-map in the top left corner of the game screenshots.

Each building is a separate scene node, with each floor in separate mesh buffers so I can reconstruct the floors that get damaged or destroyed individually.

Incidentally, that's why the triangle count is so high in the picture. I'll work on optimising it further later.

[neilb]

Pazystamo, thanks for the suggestion, switching to bitmap files allowed me to record at full speed

I've just uploaded a video that's a lot smoother

[neilb]

I messed around for a couple of days trying to decide how I was going to implement building collapses and destruction before finally going with bullet physics.

It's still early days, the building should actually collapse, but overlapping bounding boxes for each of the parts causes it to explode. Once I've implemented an algorithm to adjust the bounding boxes so there's no overlap, it should collapse like a house of cards.

Exploding buildings

Of course, exploding will still be an option

As usual I've updated my development blog, giving a rough overview of what I did to get this result.

[cobra]

Very cool! this looks great.

[neilb]

Thanks cobra. It's not a bad effect considering it's really a glitch.

I made a couple of changes and created the "broken" model of the second building type so now it's possible to blow up multi-level buildings.

Big bang

It looks like it's running at a decent speed, but it does slow down a bit with that many objects bouncing around.

Next step is to make it actually collapse, instead of flying apart

[neilb]

The buildings shouldn't have been exploding in the previous videos, they should have been collapsing. Part of the problem turned out to be the starting position for the physics objects that made up the building pieces, certain pieces started off overlapping causing them to violently fly apart.

I've fixed that, but I still need to correct the collision bounding boxes for the buildings to fall down properly.

partly collapsing

[neilb]

OK, I've sorted out the problems and got the buildings collapsing a lot more realistically, especially the big ones.

buildings collapsing properly

[neilb]

I've updated the physics class so that when a wall piece hits the ground and stops moving, the forward facing triangles for the part are added to a mesh buffer called "rubble".

I've also added a new building model and I'm just now beginning to create and position props around the city, starting with street lamps.

[Lonesome Ducky]

Sounds pretty cool! I like the constant updates, makes it easy to follow your project