Posted By: Slin
My 1000th post - 04/02/08 21:32
If any mod considers this to fit better to morbius feel free to move it but I think this post is somehow a showcase of me and my work and belongs to "Showcase I" (I just noticed that it doesnīt really fit the new title "Projects" anymore...)
I first wanted to put something into the user contributions as my 1000th post, but somehow I donīt know what to put there... So I will tell you a bit about my experiences with gamestudio and show you some of my work from my beginning to now.
Probably many people will find similarities to their own experiences
When I was 14 a friend of mine and I loved playing computergames and dreamed of creating our own games. In fall 2004 this friend found a comparison of authoring systems in the ct. We tried the free ones but didnīt succeed in doing something with it. He also downloaded the gamestudio demo and was impressed on how easy it was to load a level and run it but did not look at any documentation. But this was enough for him to buy Sybex A5.5 Standart on ebay for about 5. He did not really succeed on doing something with it but still gave it to me to have a look at it. After not beeing able to do more than he, I startet to work through the WED tutorial of A5.5 which made me understand the basics of WED. I told him to do the same and we met each other to show us what we just figured out.
We both started an own project and planed a lot of great features and awsome graphics for those - we had no clue of scripting :P.
I first wanted to create a big city and started to create the first building - a church (I really donīt know why I started with a curch o.O). I called the project "Lahana-City" but soon changed my plans for the project and called it "The Churchhill Mystery".
These are first screenshots of that:
In the bottom right corner of the second image, is a logo I composed at that time...
My friend and I had problems with the template sky (the mountains were to big) and found out that the mountains disappear if we just delete their texture :P
That resulted in an error message on each start but we did not care
It got spring of the next year and we went outsite to do photos for textures. I still had many plans for this game but I got much slower because of playing around a lot with gamestudio and my first tries to include scripts I found on internet without much success.
I wished myself money for my 15th birthday in april to buy gamestudio A6 Comm and did so in may.
On may the 7th (I think the day gamstudio arrived), I created an accound here.
The next half year was mainly reading tutorials, collecting shaders and code snippets on the forum and trying to implement them.
One big success was for example my first implementation of a particle effect created with easy particles and another one was the first working normalmapping and water shader :P
This resulted in for example this "project":
This one has shaders, particles, Newton Physics and some first, selfwritten scripts:
Little Game, Download
I went on learning and then in fall 2005 I got the "breakthrough" from one second to the other I somehow understood C-Script - and wrote a menu^^:
After that I tried to create an own playerscript which resulted in my first post because of a problem with the gravity.
At that time my friend worked less and less with gamestudio-.-
A bit later I entered the first team. I still have a little contact with one of the members, but all the others had no clue about gamestudio and thus we didnīt even start with the project...^^
Later in that year next to a lot of small scriptsnippets I did just for fun, I found out that you can use detailmaps on terrains (just add the detailmap as a second skin to a terrain) which makes them much better looking (I somehow needed very long to accept multitextureshader to be used by myself, I always considered them to be too much work...).
This made me creating a small level and writing a tutorial about the creation progress at the same time.
This project was destroyed through an engine update (the long break between updates ended now :)).
You can find the tutorial here: German RPG Tutorial, Download
Project RPG, Download
In winter, I entered the second team. Other members I remember are Angel (rvL_Exile), Calined, PAS, Sercan S. and Gordon Shumway. It could have got a great team but we did never really get further than planning "Kangus Adventure":
My next own project after these first two teamexperiences was a moorhuhn clon called "Vogelgrippe Game" in spring 2006:
During all this, I gained quite a bit of experience with C-Script and got now more active on the forum which resulted in a first person that asked me to teach him some C-Script. I donīt know what happened with him, but this resulted at least in my first finished project "Pacman Remake":
Pacman Remake, Download
In fall 2006 was a conitec tutorial contest. I wrote a tutorial for it which I never finished...:
Blockbreaker Tutorial, Download
In that year I also created a team with the problem that the other two had nearly no experience and prefered playing WoW-.-
Which means that the results were completely done by me (I think two models where done by one of the other two):
(yeah right, I am a cbabe fan :D)
Between those already mentioned things, I shouldnīt forget my tries with Sylex3.
I think I was somehow one of the first who got for example the Bloom to work:
This resulted in my Sylextemplates: SLX3 Templates, Download
and some more stuff:
In spring 2007 was the conitec causual game contest for which I created in about 4 days of work the project "Jump or Bump" realising an idea of rvL_Exile.
Later that year I offered in the user contributions to create some scripts for free. This and having helped him already before with a water shader, Loopix told me about MystyMood and asked me to help with that. Through the same thread, I also got in touch with Realspawn how asked me to help with Chopper-Zone.
My main work for MystyMood is the watershader which is my first real try to do severe changes to a shader. I did this within Chopper-Zone and later also implemented MystyMoods weathersystem. Chopper-Zone progressed great in the beginning but is now stopped because of the lack of a modeler and some other things:
Chopper-Zone, Download
In summer 2007 HeelX asked me to create a shadercollection and so I created the "Massive Shader Collection".
I also went to the Dusmania 9.0 where I met a cuple of people from here:
I created this small project there over night:
Mini Racer, Download
A bit later I contributed "The Post Processing Collection":
The Postprocessing Collection
When I was in the US for a school exchange I started to do some changes to the gamestudio wikis Shader and Scripts page.
After I helped Tristan3D in a thread, he asked me to work on a small project with him. This is "The Inn", which currently doesnīt really progress because of his much work, but it was a great experience so far to work together with a great artist
:
The Inn: Codes, Download
For the "A7 looks good contest", I recreated my old rpg level and also participated with Chopper-Zone which won the second place.
I am currently developing an other postprocessing collection using Lite-C:
3 days old version, Download
The effects can be combined adjusted and removed at runtime. Yesterday I also succeeded with making the effects fit to a new screenresolution at runtime.
But the HDR is still very WIP and I removed the outlining effects because of a bad performence for a bad look.
So what can I do now:
-I am able to develop scripts im C-Script and Lite-C for nearly everything (I have nearly no experience with pathfinding yet and just a little with multiplayer)
-I am able write, adjust and convert shaders in HLSL for GameStudio
-I have a basic knowledge of creating fixed function effects
-I have a little knowledge of creating plugins for A6/A7 in C++
-I know how to work with WED, SED, MED, Blender and Gimp
How did I learn this:
Mainly through reading tutorials and books (just everything I found) though I got my main HLSL knowledge through trying around and tweaking other shaders.
Other work of mine I to mention are my trying around with shadowmapping:
Thread in Usercontributions
, my work on anaglyph stereo effects:
Thread in Usercontributions
, 3DGS Tree:
Video at YouTube
, my implementations of Newton Gamedynamics:
Video at YouTube
Video at YouTube
and all the other stuff I forgot :P
You can find nearly all my downloads here:
Downloads
This post was a lot of work and I hope that you enjoyed reading it at least a little bit
One very important thing I got out of this time, is that I rally like to do new things and that I like to help others if I can
Slin
PS: just noticed the date...^^
I first wanted to put something into the user contributions as my 1000th post, but somehow I donīt know what to put there... So I will tell you a bit about my experiences with gamestudio and show you some of my work from my beginning to now.
Probably many people will find similarities to their own experiences
When I was 14 a friend of mine and I loved playing computergames and dreamed of creating our own games. In fall 2004 this friend found a comparison of authoring systems in the ct. We tried the free ones but didnīt succeed in doing something with it. He also downloaded the gamestudio demo and was impressed on how easy it was to load a level and run it but did not look at any documentation. But this was enough for him to buy Sybex A5.5 Standart on ebay for about 5. He did not really succeed on doing something with it but still gave it to me to have a look at it. After not beeing able to do more than he, I startet to work through the WED tutorial of A5.5 which made me understand the basics of WED. I told him to do the same and we met each other to show us what we just figured out.
We both started an own project and planed a lot of great features and awsome graphics for those - we had no clue of scripting :P.
I first wanted to create a big city and started to create the first building - a church (I really donīt know why I started with a curch o.O). I called the project "Lahana-City" but soon changed my plans for the project and called it "The Churchhill Mystery".
These are first screenshots of that:
In the bottom right corner of the second image, is a logo I composed at that time...
My friend and I had problems with the template sky (the mountains were to big) and found out that the mountains disappear if we just delete their texture :P
That resulted in an error message on each start but we did not care
It got spring of the next year and we went outsite to do photos for textures. I still had many plans for this game but I got much slower because of playing around a lot with gamestudio and my first tries to include scripts I found on internet without much success.
I wished myself money for my 15th birthday in april to buy gamestudio A6 Comm and did so in may.
On may the 7th (I think the day gamstudio arrived), I created an accound here.
The next half year was mainly reading tutorials, collecting shaders and code snippets on the forum and trying to implement them.
One big success was for example my first implementation of a particle effect created with easy particles and another one was the first working normalmapping and water shader :P
This resulted in for example this "project":
This one has shaders, particles, Newton Physics and some first, selfwritten scripts:
Little Game, Download
I went on learning and then in fall 2005 I got the "breakthrough" from one second to the other I somehow understood C-Script - and wrote a menu^^:
After that I tried to create an own playerscript which resulted in my first post because of a problem with the gravity.
At that time my friend worked less and less with gamestudio-.-
A bit later I entered the first team. I still have a little contact with one of the members, but all the others had no clue about gamestudio and thus we didnīt even start with the project...^^
Later in that year next to a lot of small scriptsnippets I did just for fun, I found out that you can use detailmaps on terrains (just add the detailmap as a second skin to a terrain) which makes them much better looking (I somehow needed very long to accept multitextureshader to be used by myself, I always considered them to be too much work...).
This made me creating a small level and writing a tutorial about the creation progress at the same time.
This project was destroyed through an engine update (the long break between updates ended now :)).
You can find the tutorial here: German RPG Tutorial, Download
Project RPG, Download
In winter, I entered the second team. Other members I remember are Angel (rvL_Exile), Calined, PAS, Sercan S. and Gordon Shumway. It could have got a great team but we did never really get further than planning "Kangus Adventure":
My next own project after these first two teamexperiences was a moorhuhn clon called "Vogelgrippe Game" in spring 2006:
During all this, I gained quite a bit of experience with C-Script and got now more active on the forum which resulted in a first person that asked me to teach him some C-Script. I donīt know what happened with him, but this resulted at least in my first finished project "Pacman Remake":
Pacman Remake, Download
In fall 2006 was a conitec tutorial contest. I wrote a tutorial for it which I never finished...:
Blockbreaker Tutorial, Download
In that year I also created a team with the problem that the other two had nearly no experience and prefered playing WoW-.-
Which means that the results were completely done by me (I think two models where done by one of the other two):
(yeah right, I am a cbabe fan :D)
Between those already mentioned things, I shouldnīt forget my tries with Sylex3.
I think I was somehow one of the first who got for example the Bloom to work:
This resulted in my Sylextemplates: SLX3 Templates, Download
and some more stuff:
In spring 2007 was the conitec causual game contest for which I created in about 4 days of work the project "Jump or Bump" realising an idea of rvL_Exile.
Later that year I offered in the user contributions to create some scripts for free. This and having helped him already before with a water shader, Loopix told me about MystyMood and asked me to help with that. Through the same thread, I also got in touch with Realspawn how asked me to help with Chopper-Zone.
My main work for MystyMood is the watershader which is my first real try to do severe changes to a shader. I did this within Chopper-Zone and later also implemented MystyMoods weathersystem. Chopper-Zone progressed great in the beginning but is now stopped because of the lack of a modeler and some other things:
Chopper-Zone, Download
In summer 2007 HeelX asked me to create a shadercollection and so I created the "Massive Shader Collection".
I also went to the Dusmania 9.0 where I met a cuple of people from here:
I created this small project there over night:
Mini Racer, Download
A bit later I contributed "The Post Processing Collection":
The Postprocessing Collection
When I was in the US for a school exchange I started to do some changes to the gamestudio wikis Shader and Scripts page.
After I helped Tristan3D in a thread, he asked me to work on a small project with him. This is "The Inn", which currently doesnīt really progress because of his much work, but it was a great experience so far to work together with a great artist
:The Inn: Codes, Download
For the "A7 looks good contest", I recreated my old rpg level and also participated with Chopper-Zone which won the second place.
I am currently developing an other postprocessing collection using Lite-C:
3 days old version, Download
The effects can be combined adjusted and removed at runtime. Yesterday I also succeeded with making the effects fit to a new screenresolution at runtime.
But the HDR is still very WIP and I removed the outlining effects because of a bad performence for a bad look.
So what can I do now:
-I am able to develop scripts im C-Script and Lite-C for nearly everything (I have nearly no experience with pathfinding yet and just a little with multiplayer)
-I am able write, adjust and convert shaders in HLSL for GameStudio
-I have a basic knowledge of creating fixed function effects
-I have a little knowledge of creating plugins for A6/A7 in C++
-I know how to work with WED, SED, MED, Blender and Gimp
How did I learn this:
Mainly through reading tutorials and books (just everything I found) though I got my main HLSL knowledge through trying around and tweaking other shaders.
Other work of mine I to mention are my trying around with shadowmapping:
Thread in Usercontributions
, my work on anaglyph stereo effects:
Thread in Usercontributions
, 3DGS Tree:
Video at YouTube
, my implementations of Newton Gamedynamics:
Video at YouTube
Video at YouTube
and all the other stuff I forgot :P
You can find nearly all my downloads here:
Downloads
This post was a lot of work and I hope that you enjoyed reading it at least a little bit
One very important thing I got out of this time, is that I rally like to do new things and that I like to help others if I can
Slin
PS: just noticed the date...^^
