10 Worlds of Tux (aka TuxWorld) Alpha Launch!

Well, the time has finally come to reveal a project I've secretly been beavering away on for a while now....

10 Worlds of Tux!

Erm... what exactly is "10 Worlds of Tux"? It's a new 3D side-scrolling platform game inspired by the easy to learn, fun to play game mechanics of the 90's, with a 2000's shot in the arm for graphics (or at least that's what the press release will say! ;-)

From a gamers perspective 10W.o.T will feature 10 worlds (surprise, surprise!), fluid controls, a freedom inspired plot that doesn't take itself seriously at all and stays out of the way of the gameplay :), homages to many icons of the FOSS world, hidden secrets and bonus galore and... an easy level designer to let you customise the game further.

From a development point of view, everything is being designed from the ground up to make it as easy as possible for beginners to contribute and add to the game. It's developed on the rapidly advancing Blender Game Engine, using resolution independent vector image based textures, and will be available on at least Linux and Windows. Mac versions will follow, too if Blender can get it's mac sound issues sorted out... hopefully for v2.5 late this year!

Anyway, enough talk! The pre-pre-pre-pre-alpha (featureing bugs akimbo!) can be downloaded here:

The Download Link!

The .blend file needs Blender installed on your system to play currently (sudo apt-get install blender). Just open the file with Blender and hit P to play (and Esc to quit). Binaries will be made available soonish, hopefully with debs following if I can wrap my head arround the horrors of packaging.

Viva Freedom Gaming!

QBBT: Which Logic Bricks Get Used First?

You'd never expect a programmer to write code without any idea of which line was going to be executed first. Blender's Game Engine Logic blocks are a brilliant way to let visual artists "code" by connecting visual blocks together to create logic and AI in games. The funny thing is that almost no one learning the Blender Game Engine comes across anything that tells you which logic bricks will actually be executed in what order. This can make figuring out complex setups far more difficult than it should be. In a nutshell heres how it seems to work from my tests:

Basically it seems that blender starts with the list of actuators (the ones that make changes on the right) and works it's way down. In this case Blender tests to see whether to play the armature action first... then the message actuator, the state actuator and the end object actuator.

This is especially important to know if you're using the state actuator which switches which controllers (and thus which other actators) will be used from this point on. Obviously if your state controller switches an object to use a different set of actuators, the actuator you had set up just after it isn't going to be run. Also worth remembering is that an actuator hooked up to a delay sensor, while it may be examined first, won't actually be executed until the delay sensor has counted to the end of it's time delay. What happens if a delay sensor is still counting up when a state actuator triggers it? Good question.... to be answered in a future QBBT!

QBBT: Copy logic bricks (and other properties, too!)

I love to block out movement and logic in the game engine before adding complex graphics. It's so quick and gratifying. Once you've got everything working how you want on a cube/dummy though, how do you replace it with your final character / mesh? Easy! Just copy the logic bricks over by:

1. Selecting every object you want to copy the logic **TO**.
2. Select the object you want to copy the logic **FROM**.
3. Ctrl+C brings up the copy menu and just select "Logic Bricks" (you can also copy all kinds of other attributes here).

Why the weird order of selecting the "paste" object before the "copy object"? Because this way you can select a bunch of objects to paste to first and copy logic from one object to a whole bunch of others in one go... Sweet!

Launching "Quick, Basic Blender Tips"

One of the great things about Blender is the wealth of in depth tutorials for it that abound all over the web. Unfortunately being more of the "jump in and learn it by doing, then search/ask when I run into trouble" kind of person, I've found that often when you need a simple answer to a simple problem that you can end up having to read through many 15 page long tutorials before you find your answer. How I wish that I had some source of simple tips that told me all the basic, but not obvious tricks in blender to learn as I went.

Well, in true open source I realised that "if it is to be it's up to me" so now I present a new section "Quick Basic Blender Tips". What are these tips? As I'm new and learning Blender, these are all the basic problems I've run into and then found a solution for, hopefully saving you the pain of making them as well! Feel free to let me know if there are better ways, or if I'm just flat out wrong!

These will be short and to the point (usually less than a paragraph), a great place for googlers to get answers and hopefully a valuable regular education for anyone who cares to subscribe.

All tips will be tagged "Quick Basic Blender Tips".

Let the tips begin!