Indie Developer seeks world domination
| Added Spheres :) |
Urist McDwarf was walking around the island, looking for things to explore.
He stumbled upon what seemed to be a large spherical mound of snow
Urist decided to investigate this large mound of snow. It was huge!
Really Huge!
Epically Huge!
When does the Narwhal Bacon?? This was too much of an amazing discovery ! Urist decided to use his amazing dwarfish ability to build another snow statue.
Alas, it seems, that copy and paste won’t be working tonight 🙁
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| Things are getting interesting … |
Urist McDwarf seems to have landed on a strange island armed with nothing but an axe, a shield and his amazing building device.
This land! it looks flat and boring, but those lakes look nice, maybe I’ll build myself a little house there
A nice little path to the lake to start with, and a nice strong foundation! Time for some walls methinks!
Ahhh, my finished house … and look, I can see also the sea in the distance!
I’ll just stand here and look at the lake mysteriously – actually, I know, I’ll build something else ….
A chair! w00t! Now if only I had a sit animation …
lamentconfig| Unity and MMO experiment – advantages of rapid prototyping |
Many, many years ago I was an avid user of Second Life. The thing I loved most about Second Life was being able to build and create things for other people to enjoy. I spent many an hour on my own Sim, creating fantastic buildings and crazy script inventions.
The Building Grid - and an untexture dwarf or viking midget, can't decide which is cooler.
As phases come and go, I slowly got tired of Second Life. But, I still enjoy the feeling of creating things for other people to explore. I get a giddy thrill every time someone finds the easter egg in SpaceOreMiner, and decodes the cryptic message and sends me a mail about it.
A collection of the default cube with the standard texture
This weekend, I found a box of old designs for various buildings I had planned on building in Second Life, but never got round to creating. So, I thought to myself, why not create some of them for others to look at? Alas, my Blender skills suck, and anything I produce with Google Sketchup tend to look like something a cat may have vomited.
So, I asked myself, why not build my own 3d environment, similar to Second Life, to allow me to create the buildings? I opened up Unity and a text editor, and got coding.
A Cube selected, and the god awful UI, the red colour indicates this is the currently selected object
Five hours, and several beers later, I had the shell of an environment created. Building designs forgotten, now I had my own little world to build and play in.
It is still very, very crude ( think early proof of concept ) but I am pretty happy and very pleasantly surprised that I could create such a ( on paper ) complex application in such a short time. I always seem quite surprised when I produce something quickly in Unity, perhaps I should stop being so surprised by it 🙂
The world consists of three parts – A webplayer, a PHP backbone and a MySQL database. The webplayer allows anyone the ability to add and create objects within a 3d enviroment. The UI ( which is god awful at the moment ) allows full control of the size, texture, position and rotation of all objects spawned within the world.
With the first version, you would hit create, an object would appear which you could type numbers in to alter the object. This felt pretty clunky, so within 20 minutes, I had arrow’s which would let you adjust the object visually, the object reflecting whatever attribute you were manipulating with the arrows. After 10 minutes of playing with construction, I built the Clone button, which when clicks clones the currently selected object – suddenly building got a whole lot faster! ( this again shows the best way to develop anything is to actually use it !) After another 10 minutes, I added some basic textures to the objects, allowing you to change the assigned textures from within the UI. This all fell into place so quickly, it was really a rather pleasant surprise.
A massive collection of six ( 6 ) textures !
The meat of the project is in the Save World and Load World buttons. Every object inside the webplayer is tagged with the tag ‘building’. This allows the Save World button to very quickly located all the objects within the world ( via the GameObject.FindWithTag call ) and record every attribute of each object. This information is then formatted in a certain way, and then it is submitted to the PHP script via a WWW call ( via the amazing WWW class ) . The PHP script records this information, changes it into a database friendly format, and then saves it within the MySQL database. Sweet.
Clicking on Load World calls a different PHP script, which reads this information from the database and returns it to the webplayer. The webplayer takes this information, spawns the correct numbers of objects and then alters the attributes on them to the database returned information.
With these two functions working together, it is possible to create a persistent online world. I’m sure there are some limits somewhere, but the biggest world I have created had just over a 1000 objects in it, with no really delay in loading or saving – anyone who has built in Second Life knows that a 1000 prims is a helluva lot – with that many prims, you could construct an elaborate Gothic castle ( or a single woman’s hair piece, heh). Currently, the only objects that are able to be created are cuboids – but with the code base as is, it is very simple to add anything as an object, and due to the way the world is constructed, anything that can be an object within Unity can be added – so any 3d model basically 🙂
A trilithon with some randomly rotated cubes next to it
I’m not sure what I’m going to do with this, I have a vague idea of a Minecraft type environment – but without cubes 🙂 Allowing anyone to build any thing they can imagine. The project doesn’t actually have a name as it was more an experiment ( well I like to think of it more as a code doodle ) than anything – but I think it could be a very useful addition to my arsenal of solutions.
lamentconfig| Obsessed with green slime |
After seeing five google searches come into my blog yesterday for the phrase ‘obsessed with green slime’ I decided to google it, and shockingly was only on the third page. So in a bid to rectify this shocking situation, I present to you my current favorite pair of socks :
Green Slime Socks
| Introducing : SoulHunter |
I’ve just released live one of my latest experiments – SoulHunter. It is a very simple game created using Drupal and harnessing the power of twitter ( allegedly ). Recently, I’ve started using Drupal a lot within my everyday job and so I thought the best thing to do was to also use it for my personal projects to aide in lowering the learning curve. Drupal is an incredibly robust system, and the beauty of using a pre-existing CMS is that 99% of the work has already been done for you ( I will admit, I’ve always been in favour of rolling your own, but now with Drupal, I think I have seen the light ).
The total development of SoulHunter has been around eight hours spread over the last couple of weeks, most of which was spent tinkering with OAuth and getting Drupal to play nicely with twitter. A lot of the current functionality has simply been implemented by using the vast number of Drupal modules to solve problems that I come across. In addition to those I have around seven custom modules which implement the ‘core’ of the game.
The game itself is simple enough, and is designed with viral growth in mind. You start with an empty screen and go around collecting the souls of twitter users. On successful capture of a soul, you automatically tweet your victory, which is intended to encourage spreading the word of the game. There is actually quite a complex system of spells working in the back end, which I have simplified by employing an automatic system for picking the best spells for capturing a certain soul – I’ve done this to keep the game as simple as possible with the current trend of one click wonders being employed as core game mechanics.
Every user starts with access to two core spells. A direct damage spell and a confusion spell. As a users ‘soul power’ ( the experience points of the game ) increases, so does the complexity of available spells. As different souls have very different attributes ( using a system based upon creating a seed from twitter user name ) different spells will effect users in very different ways. If the game does gain some interest then I will be sure to expand the back bone system with some more verbose information about what is going on – perhaps even making the collect souls page more of a game rather than a one click wonder.
I must admit, most of the spells are quite Lovecraftian in nature. Even when trying not to mention the Elder Ones, C’thulhu etc; I find his ideas and concepts creeping into my work. Ah well, if you have access to that sort of eldritch thinking, why change your thins? 🙂
SoulHunter is one of three personal Drupal projects I’m working on at the moment and the only one which is near a fully finished state. It is great being able to code a module for one project, knowing that it will plug and play with my others – saves quite a bit of time, and re-usable code is always the best path to go down!
So feel free to give SoulHunter a go. If you don’t have a twitter account, then for shame on you! It is much less evil than facebook and I’m guessing most of you have accounts with that evil empire! Once signed into twitter, you can easily log into the game by click on the ‘Sign in with Twitter’ button on the front page – everything is automatically handled, so you don’t need to do anything before you can start collecting souls 🙂
Once again, my regular ending, if you find any bugs, or have feedback or even future suggestions, please either comment, email or tweet me!
The Hunt for Souls has begun …
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