Is there any tool for defining roles and relationship of game dynamics - dynamic

We want to develop a game for multi user can play at the same time with together in browser. This game will be text-based. It has a strong scenario. But some roles,skills,experience etc. are not clear.
We are searching a tool to manage and defining roles and dynamics of the game. Do you know any tool like this.

There is no such "tool" to magically manage the balance of different character classes in any game, if that's what you're looking for. You'll have to make your game and test it, a lot.
If you have say, stats such as strength, critical chance, evasion chance, precision, attack speed, etc., then it's relatively simple to make a simulation where you just specify two characters and let them fight against each other.
But this question is overall way too generic for a precise answer and is poorly tagged. And I wouldn't recommend using Game Maker for a text-based game.

Related

Do game developers build custom game engines just for a single game or a game franchise?

I am aware that game engines like Unity, Unreal, Cry Engine provide almost all the tools necessary to build an AAA title game. Its also the best choice if the game has a tight release data or if your new to game development. But since they are generalist game engines (meaning that they are made to fit multiple genre of games. Correct me if in wrong) for some games (next-gen or games which require a lot of performance), they might leave some performance on the table, something which could be accomplished by developing a custom engine.
This brings me to my question,
Do game developers (indie game developers, large teams or even companies) still build game engines from scratch to tailor fit a game or a game franchise?
Thank You!
when we talk about big companies like Ubisoft or rockstar they built their own engines and didn't use Unity or unreal
Rockstar uses "Rockstar Advanced Game Engine"
and Ubisoft uses "AnvilNext"
but why?
there are millions of reasons they do such a thing, I'm gonna say just 2 from #scremyCat
the support
and the license
Support: Highest degree of support and understanding - as they built it all, they understand all of its internals and can offer
complete support. E.g. A game needs X feature, they'll easily know
if they can implement it or not. Another benefit of this is not
having to wait on external entities, if there's a game breaking bug
in the engine they can get right on it, while a third party engine
depending on the licensing agreement this might not be possible
(though they would typically license the source code anyway).
License: Licensing - as an indie developer accepting that you might have to pay a small percentage of your revenue for licensing
the engine might not be as much of an issue seeing as the amount you
need to breakeven is unlikely going to be very high and chances are
you're already making when your revenue is at the levels needed to
pay a %, and your total revenue from a game isn't likely going to be
huge anyway so the amount in licensing fees you need to pay may seem
very reasonable. Meanwhile a AAA game will have a much higher
break-even target and their expected revenue is most definitely in
the tens to hundreds of millions, which now means they're paying a
large amount in licensing fees. Now it should be said they usually
get much better licensing deals to begin with than the indie dev
gets, but still they're paying huge amounts.
As for timeframe, it can take years to fully develop an engine of their scale. Often why you'll see them using the same version of the engine for a good cycle of games whilst working on the next version of the engine. And as for what's involved, a LOT. They need to handle every platform they'll be targeting, the rendering, the physics, the AI, the audio, the input, the file system access, the asset management pipeline, the tools, etc.
How are they better than current popular engines? They aren't necessarily (to other developers), but to them with their own reasoning for doing it they are. The simplest answer for how can they be better is that when you're creating your own engine from scratch you can do whatever you want.
It should also be said that developing your own engine isn't just limited to large game companies, a number of smaller developers also do this. The more popular reasons for this are typically because they enjoy it, and have some functionality they want that isn't available in existing options. E.g. While you can create many games with Unity or Unreal, there's plenty of things which just aren't feasible or might take considerable work to even make possible anyway. This can be a reason for a smaller dev to make their own engine.
Yes, they absolutely do. Nintendo is a good example.

Shape (preferably human) recognition API for use with standard webcam

I am interested in getting into user interaction/shape detection with a simple usb webcam. I can use multiple webcams, but don't want to be restricted to using something like the kinect sensor. My detection cameras need to be set up on either side of a helmet (or if an individual one, on top). I have found some, but they don't really have the functionality I need and most are angled towards facial recognition. I need to be able to detect a basic human skeletal structure and determine if something is obstructing it. I would really rather be able to do it without using any sort of marker system on the target person. I would like for it to be able to target multiple structures. Obviously I am willing to do tweaking if necessary, but want to see how close I can get to what I need before I rebuild the wheel. I am trying to design an ai system that can determine how many people are in an area and where they are.
Doubt there will be anything like this since Microsoft spent a ton of money on the R&D for Kinect and it's probably all locked behind an NDA. I'm also guessing there's a lot of hardware within the Kinect that is not available in a standard webcam.
The closest thing that I could find to what you're looking for is the OpenKinect project, might be a good place to start your research.

Arcade Fighting Game AI

I need to build the AI for an opponent in an arcade style fighting game, very similar to Mortal Kombat.
I don't want to use random moves for the computer, but I would like to have an AI that is harder to beat.
Where can I start looking for resources ? Do you know of any implementation of this sort of project ?
Think about how you play the game.
Ask yourself, under what conditions would I perform certain attacks? When would I block? What do I do when I have low health? When my opponent has low health? Do I become more agressive in one situation over the other? When is it best to use long range versus short range?
Etc.
An AI like this usually only follows a bunch of if/else/then statements, with som randomness added in.
You want it to react quickly so much of anything else (A*, alpha-beta, etc) won't be as useful.
There is an algorithm which depends on statistic and count of shoots in each direction. You can put such logic to calculate how many times enemy kicked you in needed direction and predict future attacks.

How to make a 2D Soft-body physics engine?

The definition of rigid body in Box2d is
A chunk of matter that is so strong
that the distance between any two bits
of matter on the chunk is completely
constant.
And this is exactly what i don't want as i would like to make 2D (maybe 3D eventually), elastic, deformable, breakable, and even sticky bodies.
What I'm hoping to get out of this community are resources that teach me the math behind how objects bend, break and interact. I don't care about the molecular or chemical properties of these objects, and often this is all I find when I try to search for how to calculate what a piece of wood, metal, rubber, goo, liquid, organic material, etc. might look like after a force is applied to it.
Also, I'm a very visual person, so diagrams and such are EXTREMELY HELPFUL for me.
================================================================================
Ignore these questions, they're old, and I'm only keeping them here for contextual purposes
1.Are there any simple 2D soft-body physics engines out there like this?
preferably free or opensource?
2.If not would it be possible to make my own without spending years on it?
3.Could i use existing engines like bullet and box2d as a start and simply transform their code, or would this just lead to more problems later, considering my 1 year of programming experience and bullet being 3D?
4.Finally, if i were to transform another library, would it be the best change box2D's already 2d code, Bullet's already soft code, or mixing both's source code?
Thanks!
(1) Both Bullet and PhysX have support for deformable objects in some capacity. Bullet is open source and PhysX is free to use. They both have ports for windows, mac, linux and all the major consoles.
(2) You could hack something together if you really know what you are doing, and it might even work. However, there will probably be bugs unless you have a damn good understanding of how Box2D's sequential impulse constraint solver works and what types of measures are going to be necessary to keep your system stable. That said, there are many ways to get deformable objects working with minimal fuss within a game-like environment. The first option is to take a second (or higher) order approximation of the deformation. This lets you deal with deformations in much the same way as you deal with rigid motions, only now you have a few extra degrees of freedom. See for example the following paper:
http://www.matthiasmueller.info/publications/MeshlessDeformations_SIG05.pdf
A second method is pressure soft bodies, which basically model the body as a set of particles with some distance constraints and pressure forces. This is what both PhysX and Bullet do, and it is a pretty standard technique by now (for example, Gish used it):
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu%2Fviewdoc%2Fdownload%3Fdoi%3D10.1.1.4.2828%26rep%3Drep1%26type%3Dpdf
If you google around, you can find lots of tutorials on implementing it, but I can't vouch for their quality. Finally, there has been a more recent push to trying to do deformable objects the `right' way using realistic elastic models and finite element type approaches. This is still an area of active research, so it is not for the faint of heart. For example, you could look at any number of the papers in this year's SIGGRAPH proceedings:
http://kesen.realtimerendering.com/sig2011.html
(3) Probably not. Though there are certain 2D style games that can work with a 3D physics engine (for example top down type games) for special effects.
(4) Based on what I just said, you should probably know the answer by now. If you are the adventurous sort and got some time to kill and the will to learn, then I say go for it! Of course it will be hard at first, but like anything it gets easier over time. Plus, learning new stuff is lots of fun!
On the other hand, if you just want results now, then don't do it. It will take a lot of time, and you will probably fail (a lot). If you just want to make games, then stick to the existing libraries and build on whatever abstractions it provides you.
Quick and partial answer:
rigid body are easy to model due to their property (you can use physic tools, like "Torseur+ (link on french on wikipedia, english equivalent points to screw theory) to modelate forces applying at any point in your element.
in comparison, non-solid elements move from almost solid (think very hard rubber : it can move but is almost solid) to almost liquid (think very soft ruber, latex). Meaning that dynamical properties applying to that knd of objects are much complex and depend of the nature of the object
Take the example of a spring : it's easy to model independantly (f=k.x), but creating a generic tool able to model that specific case is a nightmare (especially if you think of corner cases : extension is not infinite, compression reaches a lower point, material is non linear...)
as far as I know, when dealing with "elastic" materials, people do their own modelisation for their own purpose (a generic one does not exist)
now the answers:
Probably not, not that I know at least
not easily, see previously why
Unless you got high level background in elastic materials, I fear it's gonna be painful
Hope this helped
Some specific cases such as deformable balls can be simulated pretty well using spring-joint bodies:
Here is an implementation example with cocos2d: http://2sa-studio.blogspot.com/2014/05/soft-bodies-with-cocos2d-v3.html
Depending on the complexity of the deformable objects that you need, you might be able to emulate them using box2d, constraining rigid bodies with joints or springs. I did it in the past using a box2d clone for xna (farseer) and it worked nicely. Hope this helps.
The physics of your question breaks down into two different topics:
Inelastic Collisions: The math here is easy, and you could write a pretty decent library yourself without too much work for 2D points/balls. (And with more work, you could learn the physics for extended bodies.)
Materials Bending and Breaking: This will be hard. In general, you will have to model many of the topics in Mechanical Engineering:
Continuum Mechanics
Structural Analysis
Failure Analysis
Stress Analysis
Strain Analysis
I am not being glib. Modeling the bending and breaking of materials is, in general, a very detailed and varied topic. It will take a long time. And the only way to succeed will be to understand the science well enough that you can make clever shortcuts in limiting the scope of the science you need to model in your game.
However, the other half of your problem (modeling Inelastic Collisions) is a much more achievable goal.
Good luck!

Models for 3d game programming? [closed]

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I'm a beginner in game development and game programming. I have experience in computer graphics - mainly OpenGL
In those days Finally, I have some spare time to polish my game coding skills.
But when coming to program a simple 3d game, I couldn't find any good resource for free textures and models for 3d graphics (for 2d game for example, I found many resources for sprite sheets and so on).
Is there any good resource you're familiar with for 3d game textures/models?
This is not a programming queston.
As far as I know, good, free and high-quality modeling resources does not exist (from "good", "free" and "high-quality", select two).
There are multiple free model repositories, but quality of content is generally poor, and there are few places where you can buy models.
There are free textures in multiple places (like this one), and they are easier to find than good free models.
Also, most of free content frequently includes some kind of catch - "non-commercial use only", "creative commons share alike"(i.e. if you make derivative, it should use same license), or it is under GPL.
Anyway, if you're okay with "Creative Commons share alike" and GPL, then you can probably use content from some of opensource games (OpenArena ), and get quite a lot of textures from wikipedia or wikimedia commons, flickr, and you can google for "free textures". You should be careful about using content from opensource games - some opensource projects (like war$ow and sauerbraten) use closed-source/restricted licenses for game content (i.e. you're free to reuse modify engine, but you cannot modify game content and you cannot use it with modified engine. Reasons are pretty obvious).
Anyway, it depends on what kind of model you want. It is pretty easy to find "easy" stuff like boxes, barrels, etc, because everyone can do that. When it comes to guns and vehicles, there will be a trouble - quality will drop, and number of good models will decrease. And if you want a fully rigged animated character with multiple animation, normally you can forget about it - such content is almost impossible to find. But you can probably use mods for Q3 and Q2 if you want characters (you can forget about physics in this case, though)
I'd recommend to forget about "free stuff", and try to make content yourself or hire someone to do that.
If you decide to make content yourself, then you'll need digital photo camera and (optionally) graphic tablet. You can make mediocre textures from photos (digital camera is cheap) using gimp, gimp-resynthesizer plugin, gimp-texturisze plugin, high-pass filters, etc. You can also make normal maps using blender or gimp, and there are even tutorials about extracting them from photos (you still will need to process them by hand). Modeling and animation can be done in blender (after 1 or two weeks of training) using reference photos. Low poly modeling is pretty quick (20 minutes to make a low-poly low-quality gun, hour or two to make simple character), but texture and animation will take more (setting up animation for character can take a few hours for amateur, making one animation for character will take at least several hours as well, making texture unwrap - hour, painting texture - up to few days, depending on quality you want, available reference material, availability of graphic tablet, etc). It is possible to cut corners a bit - for example, for making animations, you can film motion using photo camera(or video camera), and then use it for rotoscoping. Also, you'll need to find some kind of model format blender can export to, or you'll have to write an export plugin in python.
The Blender foundation has a large model repository which may be of use.
There are some free models at Turbosquid that I use sometimes for my XNA games.
But of course, the best stuff is not free.
My experience is that there is very little in the way of quality 3d models with animation and full rigging freely available. There a few companies like this who sell suitable models cheaply and I guess most hobbyists could afford one or two models from them fairly easily which would probably be sufficient for learning. (I have no connection to them but I did buy one model pack from them which I quite liked)
It would be nice if there were a few more generally freely available 3d animated models around though. I even think it might be in the interests of some of the companies that make them to give a few away. If I'd been able to get further in my hobby projects I might have spent £100-200 in total on some nice model packs to make my project better, but due to the lack of any real 3d animated models I ended up losing interest in all my 3d projects before I got to the point of thinking maybe I'd spend a little money on this hobby. I wonder if the availability of a few more free quality models would actually significantly increase the size of the market for those companies as more people got their projects to the point where they were willing to spend a little money on it.
Some company should make a nice model pack with a few static models and a couple of fully rigged and animated humans and "monsters" and say that if the community donates £10000 they'll release them for free use. I suspect there are enough people out there who would like a few quality models they might reach this target in the same way that Blender was originally sold to the public.
I know that it's been a long time since this question was asked, but I ran into same problem when programming in XNA and I found a good solution. As long as you don't need rigged / animated models, Google Warehouse is the best place to search. As far as I know, each model submitted to Google Warehouse is available on Creative Commons license. You just need to:
Download and install Google Sketchup (Sketchup download)
Browse to find a model (Google Warehouse) - there's a 3D preview for each one!
Get a plugin to export Sketchup models to .X - I recommend the '3D RAD' plugin (3D RAD download)
If your model does not look good after the export, try to separate it into several less complex ones.
you are looking for open game art ...
http://thefree3dmodels.com/ has a multitude of free 3D models. I've used a few of these for animation purpose, maybe it'll help you too.