The Blob

Oogst · Post by **Oogst** » Tue Jul 04, 2006 1:11 pm

You actually tried downloading the sources for the decal-system only, not for the entire project. These decal-sources are not online anymore anyway.

scardario · Post by **scardario** » Wed Jul 05, 2006 12:48 am

I just tried the game today

It's really great!!
Congratulations
Once I get used to the controls I really enjoyed to play, it has a lot of very nice effects,
I just had some problems with usability issues like when tried to enter my initials in the highscore screen (The first thing I tried was enter them by the keyboard), but maybe you wanted to make it that way.

walaber · Post by **walaber** » Wed Jul 05, 2006 3:36 am

I also played the game for the first time today.... wow! This game is really great! I love the look of the game, visually it is perfect. The controls are pretty tight, and the city is fun to explore.

great, great job!

Oogst · Post by **Oogst** » Wed Jul 05, 2006 10:41 am

scardario wrote:I just tried the game today

It's really great!!
Congratulations
Once I get used to the controls I really enjoyed to play, it has a lot of very nice effects,
I just had some problems with usability issues like when tried to enter my initials in the highscore screen (The first thing I tried was enter them by the keyboard), but maybe you wanted to make it that way.

Some of the usability-problems come from that the game was initially designed to be played in an information centre. The user has only a trackball and two buttons and no keyboard, so we did not implement typing your name with the keyboard. We might have added it, though, but there were too many small things like this to make all of it before the deadline.

pratty70 · Post by **pratty70** » Wed Jul 05, 2006 12:28 pm

Awesome game, awesome fun. Love it.

I say it every time - more of these excellent projects make us realise the full potential of Ogre!

Many thanks for sharing.

Brun°oO · Post by **Brun°oO** » Wed Jul 05, 2006 2:11 pm

pratty70 wrote:Awesome game, awesome fun. Love it.

I say it every time - more of these excellent projects make us realise the full potential of Ogre!

Many thanks for sharing.

Yep ! I totaly agree.
I need more "Pep Up" contents like this concept

Post by **jacmoe** » Wed Jul 05, 2006 9:26 pm

You should be named Honourable Citizens of Utrecht!

Kezzer · Post by **Kezzer** » Fri Jul 14, 2006 1:05 pm

I had a play on this last night finally and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I thought perhaps in the options you could change the way the input works for the movement so instead of having to keep moving the mouse (trackball in terms of your target input device) you just move the mouse forward and it keeps going forward until you pull the mouse back.

Otherwise it's truly excellent work, I really love the shader work on the Blob itself.

lunarworks · Post by **lunarworks** » Thu Jul 20, 2006 12:55 am

I played the game today, and it is excellent. I love it.

It runs flawlessly on my P4 2.4 GHz, 1 GB RAM, Radeon 9600XT.

Both times I've played, though, I got stuck under ledges and had to quit. Since you're having trouble with this, may I suggest a solution? How about putting in an "unstuck" key that, when pressed, warps you back to the last bullseye you painted?

Oogst · Post by **Oogst** » Thu Jul 20, 2006 6:10 pm

lunarworks wrote:I played the game today, and it is excellent. I love it.

It runs flawlessly on my P4 2.4 GHz, 1 GB RAM, Radeon 9600XT.

Both times I've played, though, I got stuck under ledges and had to quit. Since you're having trouble with this, may I suggest a solution? How about putting in an "unstuck" key that, when pressed, warps you back to the last bullseye you painted?

We thought about that, but the game is made especially for usage in a stand where the player has only a trackball and two buttons, so we do not have a button to spare for this. We should have put one on the keyboard, though, for the players at home. For the information centre we have a different solution, though: if there is no input for a minute or so, the ball resets to some nearby position. Nobody at home waits that long, though.

Funny thing is that some people get stuck all the time, while many others play for a long time and do not get stuck at all. I think different playstyles are the reason for this.

kariem2k · Post by **kariem2k** » Sat Jul 22, 2006 11:03 pm

Cool game congratz

.
I have some questions,because my game's world is much like your's
-What scene manager do you use?
-Do you have any visibility determination And LOD?
-How do you make that big beautiful city and load it in OGRE ?Do you use static geo. or something else.
Thanks for that cool game.
bye

Oogst · Post by **Oogst** » Sat Jul 22, 2006 11:46 pm

"What scene manager do you use?"
Ah, well, I do not know what you are making, but your world is probably fundamentally different from ours. Because almost everything in our world can be painted, which means changing its material, there were only a few objects that could have been static geometry, so we did not use any static geometry and thus just the standard SceneManager. If we were not changing materials during gameplay, I would have used static geometry plus some nice scenemanager, so I expect your case is totally different.

"Do you have any visibility determination And LOD? "
Yes. To make people recognize where they are, some buildings had to be visible all the time. I observed that these buildings are always high buildings (especially the Dom church tower), so I made a custom culling system that simply hides entities according to distance to the camera and height of the object. This results in low objects disappearing quite near and high objects never disappearing at all within the game world. If you get on top of the NH-Hotel (purple flat, west of the railroad) and look to the east, you can see that there are actually a lot of holes in the city because of this. Luckily no one notices this, so it works very well. Along with these we set the clipping distance to very far and did not use any other culling (except for Ogre's automatic view frustrum culling of course).

Ow, this is for the area, of course. Gameplay-objects like coins and cars are simply distance-culled. Finally, for characters I wrote some simple code that replaces distant (quite close, actually) NPC's with a billboard. Again something that can be noticed, but people who do not know it, rarely see that NPC's are actually always billboards until they are close.

"How do you make that big beautiful city and load it in OGRE ?Do you use static geo. or something else. "
It is all just plain old Entities. I wrote my own exporter for this (which will be released along with Cableracer, another project I am working on) plus an importer. The exporter exports positioned and animated objects and automaticcaly calls the Ogre-exporter for every single object. This has the added benefit of allowing me to recognize my own plug-in-objects for 3D Studio MAX that represent gameplay-things like coins and cars. Also, this way 3dsmax is a fully equiped level editor for me that can export the full level and automatically open it in the game (artist work-flow is very important to me, although it still has some large flaws at the moment).

kariem2k · Post by **kariem2k** » Sun Jul 23, 2006 3:43 am

Thanks for your fast detailed reply.
Yes,My game's world objects is not paintable but they are destructable(just showing the damage on the building) ,So by what you said you have reminded me with something was not in my mind,I can't use static geometry

because the materials will change at run-time also,but that would cause a problem when using physics engine like ogreode or OgreNewt because AFAIK there is no entity-vs-entity collision.

But the default scene manager is OctreeSceneManager,you have just used it and loaded every thing as moveable objects,Right?,correct me if i am wrong.
Thanks

Post by **jacmoe** » Sun Jul 23, 2006 3:50 am

Search for uRumble here!

<edit>
Well..
http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2/viewtopic. ... ht=urumble
</edit>

Oogst · Post by **Oogst** » Mon Jul 24, 2006 12:15 pm

kariem2k wrote:Thanks for your fast detailed reply.
...that would cause a problem when using physics engine like ogreode or OgreNewt because AFAIK there is no entity-vs-entity collision.

We used ODE and Ogre, coupling them ourselves, so we did not use OgreODE, and in our implementation we do mesh-mesh collisions as well. We simply copy the geometry from Ogre meshes to ODE trimeshes.

But the default scene manager is OctreeSceneManager,you have just used it and loaded every thing as moveable objects,Right?,correct me if i am wrong.
Thanks

All are simply Entities, yes.

kariem2k · Post by **kariem2k** » Mon Jul 24, 2006 6:58 pm

jacmoe: Thanks your help,I don't want that type of damage i just want the damage of the buidlings interfaces and windows only not full destruction.

Thanks very much for your help Oogst.

Quall · Post by **Quall** » Tue Jul 25, 2006 1:15 am

Amazing. I like how the proportions are set up in the game. I like how you get bigger as you absorb more of the jelly people. You are either a small ball rolling around and painting the city, or a Godzilla sized monster hopping over the buildings.

The gameplay is original, fun. I think your team would make a very nice platform/adventure game.

DarkSun · Post by **DarkSun** » Tue Jul 25, 2006 2:00 am

I like that game.
Somehow I have missed the save/load functionality. I wanted to make a break and to play later again... (I know, the game was designed to be played in an information centre)

syedhs · Post by **syedhs** » Tue Jul 25, 2006 6:55 am

Actually you can finish painting all the bulleyes within 30 minutes if you are fast enough

DarkSun · Post by **DarkSun** » Tue Jul 25, 2006 8:31 am

I have finished painting all bulleyes. Then I wanted to paint all buildings but for that you need a bit more time...

SuprChikn · Post by **SuprChikn** » Tue Jul 25, 2006 9:07 am

Don't forget to collect all the coins too

Although, if you've managed to paint every single building, chances are you've been basically everywhere and have found all the coins. Maybe not though - there's a couple inside of courtyards (where you might have painted the buildings from the outside and never ventured in), and one that's kind of inside a building and kinda tricky to get to

Oogst · Post by **Oogst** » Tue Jul 25, 2006 10:12 am

syedhs wrote:Actually you can finish painting all the bulleyes within 30 minutes if you are fast enough

As a pro I can do that in 10 minutes. Maybe developing the game took too many testing and stuff...

SuprChikn wrote:Don't forget to collect all the coins too

Although, if you've managed to paint every single building, chances are you've been basically everywhere and have found all the coins. Maybe not though - there's a couple inside of courtyards (where you might have painted the buildings from the outside and never ventured in), and one that's kind of inside a building and kinda tricky to get to

W00t! You actually found that coin inside the building, you must have done some really hardcore playing.

raicuandi · Post by **raicuandi** » Tue Jul 25, 2006 4:14 pm

Just tried it!
Awe--some!!!

Except the map view gives me like 0.1FPS on my GeForce2 32mb with 640x480 med quality

In rest, fine! Great game!

Oogst · Post by **Oogst** » Wed Jul 26, 2006 1:34 pm

Is The Blob actually playable on a Geforce 2?!?!?!

W00t! What framerate are you getting in-game?

raicuandi · Post by **raicuandi** » Wed Jul 26, 2006 2:32 pm

I don't know. Does it show it somewhere? I haven't seen it, but its most of the time decently, I think I get 20 FPS or so, so its playable

Well, except the map view ofcourse.

My full specs: Sempron@1.4GHz, 256MB Ram, GeForce2 32MB, Windows XP SP2.

Great game!

Also, I noticed that lots of kids like it (I played it when it was my smaller sister's birthday, which was a bad idea, because now they wanted my pc!!!

). I think a The Blob2 could be a great commercial game! The idea is original. As a matter of fact, I'll send your game to a game magazine here in my country (Level), so they can try it too (that is, if you don't mind that). They'll be happy to see some home-made game like that!