New to Game Programming, Couple Questions

karljs · Post by **karljs** » Sat Jan 02, 2010 2:09 am

Hi,
I'm a reasonably experienced programmer and am familiar with c++ and graphics programming in general. I've been experimenting with Irrlich and Blender during my free time but have some nagging questions:

- I am interested in creating a small world which contains an outdoor area as well as a few very simple buildings. What type of file will I want to generate and is Blender an appropriate tool for this? My only experience is with heightmaps which don't apply to buildings, obviously.

- Can anybody point me to resources about creating skeletal animations? All the Irrlicht tutorials (rightfully) ignore the generation of artwork and all the Blender tutorials on animation seem focused on creating films, not game content.

Thanks in advance

pippy3 · Post by **pippy3** » Sat Jan 02, 2010 4:53 am

irrb plugin is a fantastic tool that exports directly to irrlichts own file format. There's some great tuts on how to use light maps etc there too.

I'd recommend googling to find the best blender tuts on skeletal animation. These tuts I found where good:

http://3dtinkerer.blogspot.com/2008/11/ ... orial.html

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:M ... /Map_Input

http://theprocessdiary.blogspot.com/200 ... -2009.html

Also someone who also went from c++ to game programming: don't follow the waterfall process as closely as you normally do. Play your game constantly and iteratively add features that make the game fun

karljs · Post by **karljs** » Sat Jan 02, 2010 7:10 pm

Thank you.

I think my problem with the skeletal animation tutorials in general is that Blender seems to have several mutually exclusive ways of handling it and I was getting techniques confused.

FuzzYspo0N · Post by **FuzzYspo0N** » Sun Jan 03, 2010 4:31 pm

Animating a skeleton in blender works perfectly fine from the documentation. "animating the gingerbread man" etc.

animating it irrlicht is different, and theres a sample on the wiki im sure

karljs · Post by **karljs** » Mon Jan 04, 2010 1:49 am

The Irrlicht wiki seems to be down and has been since I started researching this.

One of the simple tutorials has some basic animation stuff, but assumes the animations are already defined. I assumed that meant the standard way to define animations was in the modeling software -- is that not true?

FuzzYspo0N · Post by **FuzzYspo0N** » Mon Jan 04, 2010 5:32 am

Well, in skeletal systems, you have control over each bone, which in theory means you can "animate" the skeleton manually, but all animation is normally done in animation programs.. The skeletal control is normally handed to physics, for ragdolls etc. It also means "when i rotate the mouse, his head looks left or right" is a simple setRotation() call, and doesnt need preanimated look left/right animations. Which means more control over how premade animation works together. Such as having the ability to look left and right AND reload AND walk AND crouch, without making animations like :

crouch-walk-reload-lookleft
crouch-walk-reload-lookupanddown
crouch-walk-reload-lookupandleft
crouch-walk-reload-lookupandright
walk-reload-look
etc.

Does that make more sense?

karljs · Post by **karljs** » Thu Jan 07, 2010 6:18 am

That does make more sense. Thanks for helping to clear it up!