Time for Conitec to implement the possibility of runtime creation of sound fx.
The contest rules clearly show that the engine's capabilities are too limited here

Hmm...And is it okay, to generate all the needed ressources at the first program-start? So the Program generates all the Subdirectories and the needed files at the first start, is this allowed?

I'm sure that it's possible to add something simple like SFXR

Hallo again.
Ähm, another dumb question.
Is it allowed to create models, write down the vertex-positions in an array and link them with draw_line3d?
It is not directliy an embeded model, but it isn't realy procedural.
In fact, I could have imagined the model by myself, without modelling it before.
MfG
Patrick

p.s. I am a big fan of your Aum and JCL contest ideas (to be ontopic?)

The resources have to be created at runtime; in fact, the demos shouldn't use "resources" - they should only consist of a bunch of source code files.
Creating entities at runtime is possible, as long as you don't use any external files and you don't dump the content of the entities to a file and load it from there.

But...so little text files aren't allowed, too? Also, when they've been generated at runtime, at the first game-start?

What's about arrays where I store binary data without dumping directly an entity or the like? Meaning I still need to work with the array data to generate something useful out of it.

If I procedurally generate stuff, am I allowed to store a file format header in my code in order to generate a valid file together with my procedural data?

Awesome contest.. I hope I can find some time to join in, cause I'm swarmed with ideas on what to do..

Btw, jcl is right. Why try to bring in complex model shapes and music in a non-resources contest? I mean, that's why all the other contests before this one were for. Wouldn't it be better to concentrate on the strong points of a non-resources contest, instead of trying to.. buffer everything?

I couldn't help but get in the whole loop on how to cheat with getting models and textures in too, but tbh with the new ent_create instructions we can have our primitive shapes so i think i'm pretty much covered with that.. And as for sound effects and music, maybe try to procedurally create some midi files?


So.. here's my ideas.. Feel free to nick them if you like, since i don't think I'll have the time to do all, if any of them.. But I'll certainly try, once I'm done with Intense X Copper 1.0.


1) Lines 2

Continue on my lines game, but this time add weapons and power ups to make it less boring





2) Inverse Kinematics

Use primitive boxes to assemble a robot arm and make it move using real IK code. Not the most entertaining game, but I figured one could copy paste the small IK function and use it for his game. The function itself is a very optimized real IK code and the algorithm was given to me in my robotics class back in uni. To be honest, I couldn't quite figure out the physics myself, but I could still translate it to code and make a demo out of it. The pic is from my Ogre 3d implementation. If you're in a hurry, I uploaded my assignment report (21mb) which included full source code, screens and explanations for whomever might be interested.




3) procedural creatures

I'll probably won't be doing this one, so feel free to give it a go if that sort of stuff tickles your fancy. It's like a poor man's spore game. You let the user put together a creature using boxes, spheres, and being able to connect them together.. You now apply physics to it (ODE I guess) and use your preferred method (i'd use GAs and NNs) to train your creatures to walk (crawl, hop, or whatever), so they can move to the finish line (so i guess they'd just walk in a straight line from point A to point B) as fast as possible. This project would probably be ridiculously hard and not worth the contest prizes:/ Video is from the game Sumotori, which kinda resembles my idea.. It's 87kb big, so google it and give it a try, the game is hilarious...




4) Speech recognition

Or something like that.. I mean this contest screams for games or applications that don't need any graphics at all. Another idea would be a chat bot, that you can make basic conversations with.. Again, I'm probably just way over my head.. Pic is from the Eliza bot




5) Atoms game

Ever played this atari ST classic? Very cute game, which could easily be done with sphere primitives, and the AI for it would be an interesting challenge. Here's a link to an online version of it.




6) Gamestudio Crayons

I left the best one (and probably the hardest too) for last.. Have you ever played this awesome game? Maybe, if I could find (because I suck at physics to actually create one) an open sourced 2d physics plugin that I could use with A7, I could give this one a go.. If I do find one, the rest will be really easy.





And a question.. If I were to make one of these games, which one would win your vote?


Cheers and good luck to everyone,
Aris

the drunk sumo wrestling looks very funny. but i agree that for a contest like this it would be way too hard to do procedural creatures which learn how to move on their own. i think usually this is stuff very talented computer science students do for their thesis projects.



http://wiki.slembcke.net/main/published/Chipmunk

chipmunk seems to be a 2d-physics engine written in c. so it should be usable with lite-c? there even is a similar crayon game done with it.
EDIT: i took a quick look at the chipmunk source. it uses some non lite-c compatible c features. so either you would have to adapt it a bit for lite-c (the source code only is about 120kb so it should be doable) or you would have to compile and use a chipmunk dll. i am not sure about what would be less effort.

there also is box2d but i am not sure if it is c++ only or if there already is some c-wrapper.

newton can be used for 2d-physics too with a 2d-constraint. but probably it's a bit wasteful performance-wise to use 3d-physics engines for 2d-physics.

That's not what I want to do. Also the primitives are nothing more then built-in models (like ackfont.pcx), and I'm really not sure if those are allowed.

As mentioned before I don't want to buffer lots of graphics or something. I need two very short and simple sounds for my idea, but the capabilites of generating sounds are very limited in A7.

Now I'll probably grab some C++ source for a soft synthie and go with that one... well imho using DLLs defeats the contest idea more than a buffered file of 1k size and doing all the other stuff in Lite-C.

Also the huge question is "what is a buffer"?
Generally any predefined array would be a buffer. Any text string would be a buffer.

For my idea I don't need much. It's not complex and 99% of it can be done perfectly fine without resources, but I need a "real" model (found a nice way for that now, though) in oder to use the mesh functions of A7... and such things are annoying.
So with the current A7 state imho it's not possible to do 3d with engine commands (using D3D and work around this problem defeats the cotnest purpose even more, imho) as a NULL-Entity cannot have a mesh assigned using ent_setmesh.
This restriction is very sad.

Okay, vented enough now

I'll continue to work on my idea now.