Serious Gordon

Life is a roller coaster...

2006-09-13T09:04:00.000+01:00

A few weeks ago the "Serious Gordon" Project (I don't think it ever got a proper replacement name) finished up, now with some time to reflect on the project, I'm ready to share my opinions on it.

11 weeks on, after a slow start and a few changes of direction the final game was compiled (in glorious High Definition) and the source files and a video, showing the game running, was archived and saved.

Looking back on it there are probably things that could have been differently, to yield an even better final product.

Things like having an artist inboard from day one, using a CVS from the beginning, have a better idea of what the project deliverable would be from the beginning and of course having PCs which don't crash every 15 minutes.

However I think that you can only make a decision based on the information you have at the time, and it is pointless looking back on it and thinking "what if". However I do feel that it is vital to note what could have improved the project, and lessons learnt, so it something similar is attempted the lessons don't have to be re-learnt.

I take on board Andrews point regarding people being at the same level when starting a project as it is very hard to learn in a few weeks what someone else has spent 4-5 years learning. However I do think that realistically very few teams contain people of the same level, instead they try to work on the the strengths, different experiences and diversity of the team, which I feel we did well.

I think overall the project was a success, as I said earlier things could have been different, but there is no point in kicking ourselves too much, as the project was among other things, a proof of concept that a project like this can be successful within the DIT enviroment.

Finally I'd like to take this opportunity to thank everyone involved in the project, its been a real experiance, with ups and downs, I'm glad this was one with significantly more ups than downs.

Reflecting

2006-08-23T21:10:00.000+01:00

So here we are, over half way through the last week of the 10 week project. It's changed a lot since we started, in terms of what to focus on, how the game was being designed and the tasks we were faced with. This led me to thinking about what exactly we had accomplished based on the original email that we received with info about the project, which was just looking for programmers.

In this project Paddy has done Sounds and scripting, working in Audacity, Face Poser and Hammer. He did some Java at the beginning but that was scraped after the changes to the game design. He is a programmer by trade and yet for the current encarnation of the game has not touched a line of real code. It's as though he was hired to sell cars but ended up painting ships.

I however have been in the code, but that's not to say all my time was in there, or even most of it. Once the core functionality was done, I was moved into Hammer, while Paddy learned how to script the levels, to create the acctuall levels, some test maps and an good portion of a map that was later junked. With the help of Brian using TortoiseCVS and his machine the CVS was setup. From there it was into Photoshop to attempt to alter skins to fit our needs. That then evolved into Milkshape3d which was used to model new props and then unwrap that and make the new skin in Photoshop again. With there was also the requirements for compiling them and making them usable game assets. All of this happening with MASSIVE computer issues, sometimes going a week at a time with only 1 workable PC between us, and still attempting to get progress made.

For me atleast, it's been quite a trial, being asked to do all these things that I just am no good at, even with a fundamental knowledge, is tough. That's something I would do differently if offered to do similar project, knowing exactly what was going to be required, though I wouldn't go back and change it for this project since there are advantages to better understanding such things. I just think it's very difficult to have 4 or 5 things that need done but each one is such a radically different element to the game that you have to almost learn an entire new tool set to do it properly, without my previous knowledge I doubt I'd have accomplished half of my tasks.

I think I'd also go back and give Paddy 4 weeks or so to learn the tools before starting the project, because I was able to start as soon as we finialised our design when unfortunatly he still had some more to learn and that leaves us in the situation now where we have all the core elements but it all needs to be tied together before the game takes its real form. If we'd been able to distribute the work load more I think we'd have a lot more done by now, but that's no one's fault other than mine I suppose, I got a lot done quickly on the coding and mapping which left paddy with a lot of ground to catch up on in an entirely unfamiliar editor, even now there's a lot of content left for him to tie together before we can get a full release together but with a bit of luck that'll all come together now with his knowledge of the Hammer editor.

Not including the hours of ranting that could be produced on the topic of PCs and their reliabilty, I think those are the only real issues that appeared in the project. Everything else was quite good, there were some aspects that I thought were really great. The storyboarding was brilliant, it gave real direction and a great feel to the game, a linear story rather than a bunch of lessons linked together by nothing more than a short walk from one place to another. The sheer number of people involved at the begininng caused some issues, but as we progressed it was nice to have so much input and such interest in the project.

That's my personal reflection of the previous 9+ weeks, I in no means speak for Paddy, nor would I expect him to have the same opinions, because then only one of us would really needed to have been part of the project, and other could have just read the blog. I have the extended time to work on this so I'm hoping the keep the pace that we have set here at the end of the project, with the aid of hindsight and perhaps a spine I'd probably have asked for some kind of pay rise for the remaining time, but my biggest flaw is that I enjoy games and making them, and just the thought of continuing to make a game being my job was enough to get me to sign any contract handed to me. :D

Working 9 to 5...

2006-08-21T19:31:00.000+01:00

Today was probably the day during which we felt the game programmers arch nemesis, know simply as "crunch time". The final part of the game was to be implemented, the moving boxes into rooms part. As it turned out it was much harder to implement that first envisioned. It seams like an easy problem both on paper and pro grammatically, however when it comes to implementing using the objects provided by the Hammer editor it was a very complicated process.

While Andrew worked on adding some nice touches to the game I spent most of the day working on it, towards the end of the day Andrew got involved and we used out combined brains to work on the problem. At 7:30 a test level of the functionality seams to have worked, the solution was very complicated, a series of what seamed like steam powered (no pun intended) set of levers and pulleys, feeding into each other and triggering different events. Time to go home, sadly I don't think the game will be ready for testing tomorrow.

Start spreading the word...

2006-08-18T17:25:00.000+01:00

Today was another eventful day in the DMC. Andrew and I both did some further work on the game in the morning, after which we made sure that all the recording equipment worked, didn't want to look stupid when everyone arrived if the hardware didn't work.

Just after 11 the actor arrived, we went through the script and recorded all the dialog. We also recorded some additional speech, which may or may not be in the final game.

In the afternoon Andrew and I continued our work on the game, trying to get it top a testable state by next Tuesday.

Bridge over troubled waters

2006-08-17T17:33:00.000+01:00

The last few days have been a test of patients, with both Hardware and Software. Which of course has delayed us further.

On the bright side though the artist which will do the voices for our game is confirmed for tomorrow (Friday) and we were lucky enough to be allowed to borrow software and hardware to allow us to record very high quality sound. The equipment is now setup and ready to go.

Double Posting

2006-08-16T17:30:00.000+01:00

well I've discovered the perils of working from home, and the biggest has to be that you take your work home with you. When the normal break time rolls around you have very little reason to stop what your doing, so here's what's happened to me because of it. I started working on the Chef's clothes and think I've reached a decent enough point that it's no longer unbearably inapporpriate.

This is news enough to get its' own post and if i didn't I'd probably forget about it tomorrow anyway, so here you go in it's horrendous glory, my attempt at reskinning the chef. (my methodology acheiving for this would probably make any Photoshop using professional weap like a baby)

Note: I don't have the mod installed on my PC at home so I'm using the default Half Life 2 character, the visuals will be the same, but our game will have a slightly less agressive chef, ie he'll use forcefull words rather than high calibur munitions to get you to do your tasks.

Telecommuting

2006-08-16T13:45:00.000+01:00

Instead of heading in and siting around waiting for the techs to come and help me setup yet another PC or try and use my laptop without Steam to do anything I stayed home and worked from here.

Most of the morning was spent attempting to create a connection with the CVS server to see if I could gain access, which wasn't expected but would have been nice. Once I'd estabilshed that it was definatly not going to happen I set to work on attempting to help Paddy with the voice syncing issues in face poser, again no joy.

However I did have a reason for making use of my PC, I was able to compile a couple of models that I'd created and skinned, and also to alter the skins for the sink and toilet. They are far from perfect but there's not much that can be done about that, any decent modeller could do better, but then they'd probably have to be hired on aswell. Anyway here's a pic.

No New Work and Lots of Issues

2006-08-15T10:52:00.000+01:00

Well apparently the DIT computers have no reliability what so ever, and that has limited us to one PC between the two of us. I'm using my laptop to do some modeling, but I have been locked out of all the latest Source Code and can not go through and make changes that are needed. So, officially the feature side to, well the entire code section is frozen as is, and there is very little I can do to get access to it. Our repository has an old version, but the PC went down before I was able to upload my changes which included many fixes and overhauls, the PC decided to crash and never start up properly again.

More importantly paddy is unable to get face poser to sync the records to the player mouths, as the program crashes every time the recordings are imported and sync'd with words, which is a massive set back for the game.

But all is not lost... Paddy is single handedly pulling the game through from concept to product, with his mapping, scripting and scene creation, all due credit to him for making this game work so well and to be able to bring atleast something to testing, unlike myself unfortunatly I will have little to nothing to show for these coming tests.

back for good

2006-08-14T17:30:00.000+01:00

Starting of with an apology, due to being very busy over the last two weeks the blog updates have been non-existing.

Since the last update a lot has happened. The development faze has really got into gear, with Andrew finishing the inventory system, and I'm adding the final touches to the scripting.

The plan is to start internal testing of the application on Thursday of this week, and get external testers to test the application next week.

Fix you

2006-07-27T16:56:00.000+01:00

With the computer fixed and ports once again working things seamed to be going well. However the map problem still persisted. I wanted to try to get some scripting done today, but when the map created crashed repeatedly on me it proved to be very hard. So I decided to try to fix the level, as creating it from start again would take too much time.

Easier said than done. I tried removing things I thought caused the hammer editor to stop working, but with no success. I also tried to copy files from Andrews machine I thought I needed. I even tried developing on Andrews PC, however steam is connected with accounts, where you have to log in before you can use it, with my account it still didn't work. Just after 5pm the porter asked me to leave, so much for fixing that map.

Free falling

2006-07-26T16:43:00.000+01:00

When I came in this morning there was an email from Brian, he said he'd look into it, and sure enough a few hours later an email arrived from Brian, with the IP addresses that were set up for us. It was then a matter of changing our IP addresses to the new ones. The first IP address still didn't fix the problem, however the second one did work, all of a sudden steam worked!

I wasted no time in getting the files we had been working on from Andrews PC to mine, to have something to show at the meeting. Brian arrived a bit before the and we both had a look at the level Andrew and I had been working on. There were however some problems. When editing the map the hammer editor froze when editing a certain area of the map, which is of course highly undesirable. When the map was run there were also some problems. These included props such as the truck didn't display (instead there was a big red neon sign saying "ERROR", didn't really blend into the map completely unnoticed)

There were also textures for both the ground and ceiling that didn't display correctly (displayed as red and purple checkered patter) Both these issues were due to files and setup missing from my PC.

We also found a hole in the level, if you walked into it, the result was a Wile E. Coyote moment, where you fell and fell, as the level above you got smaller and smaller, was funny, but not exactly needed for the level.

In the meeting the level was demonstrated, however the limitations were explained. Afterwards we sat down again and discussed the storyboard for the game, outlining a few more scenarios and tasks.

Still haven't found what I'm looking for

2006-07-25T16:42:00.000+01:00

I spent the morning reading up on articles and tutorials, since without steam working there was effectively nothing I could do. However the comforting words from the technicians, that the problem will be solved by lunch time kept me in good spirit.

However lunch came and went, late in the afternoon I got an email from a technician saying that there was no record of them setting up an static IP for us.

I decided to send an email to Brian and Hugh to see if they knew who sorted it out for us last time.

It's a kinda magic...

2006-07-24T04:40:00.000+01:00

Magic is a strange and wonderful thing. From time to time I can't help to think how things will be once scientists have invented magic. PCs that work the way one wants them to, I hope I live to see the day.

Today I started the day with my daily pilgrimage to the all knowing Oracle of Kevin St (the techs) to ask the wise ones to open the ports I needed to run steam. As is stands there are three tasks I can do, Mapping, Scripting and modification of model skins, all three require steam to work. The technician I spoke to assured me there would be no problem getting the issue with the ports fixed.

As I waited all day I got contacted by different teams within D.I.T, and moved between teams. As I was about to send Brian and Hugh and email asking for assistance I got an email saying that it should be fixed by lunch time tomorrow. "Fair enough" I thought to myself, "at least it'll be fixed and work can continue"

Ported

2006-07-21T16:44:00.000+01:00

The frustration of not having a workable PC mounted today. In the morning I once again visited the technicians, when I got there I was told by one of the technicians that it might take "a few days" before the PC was fixed. I went back to the lab, and Andrew and I did some work on his PC, this was however much slower than having two people working on two separate PCs.

In the afternoon I get a call which heralded the good news that my PC was fixed. I lugged it over from Kevin St. to Aungier St. Once everything was plugged in I started the PC. To my surprise and relief the PC didn't crash! The joy was however short lived, since the PC changed the IP address changed, the IP address allowed Steam to connect through normally blocked ports. Which resulted in Steam not being able to run I tried a few things to see if I could get it working, however, with no result. So I went over to Kevin St. again, however the technicians were gone when I got there.

Rage against the Machine

2006-07-20T16:45:00.000+01:00

I started of the morning in summer heat fueled enthusiasm.

I logged onto my computer, started up the Hammer editor, ready to script like a mean green scripting machine. After only a few minutes the computer dies. Mildly frustrating, but due to a good start to the morning not to annoying. So I restart the computer and this time open Photoshop, to do a bit of skin manipulation. It has barely opened before the computer dies, this time I get a bit annoyed. However still not giving into the dark side of the force and embracing anger I restart the machine. "Maybe the software I ran was to processor intensive" I thought to myself, so I open a web-browser window, and start looking for scripting tutorials. Found a really good one, and felt that I was back on track again when suddenly I could have sworn the humming from the computer sounded like a snigger, then it died. I unplug the machine completely and left it of for a few minutes, then plugged everything back and restarted the machine, staring straight at it I explain to it how it wouldn't like me when I'm angry.

By now I really started to suspect that the machine was overheating, so I went onto the internet and downloaded motherboard monitoring software. The first one didn't have the right drivers, and the second one, when started tried to tell me that all sensors picked up 0 degrees Celsius. I found that hard to believe. However the machine was behaving better now, maybe it was because it new I was on to it, or maybe it was because of my threat to turn green and angry. However after 20 minutes or so it decided to test my limits and crash again.

This was the final straw for me so I lugged it over to the Kevin St technicians while thinking of a poster a friend of mine has at work. It says "Dell make baby Jesus Cry", I felt like taking a leaf out of Jesus's book. When I got there I was told to leave the computer there and they would try to fix it. Since they had fixed the problem with Andrews machine I was hoping it would be a nice quick fix and I'd be back up and running again soon. When I arrived after luck as agreed apon, I was told that there was complications and to come back again in the afternoon. I arrived again at 4:30pm but there was no-one there and the door was locked. Through the door I could nearly hear the machine singing the last chorus of the Rage against the Machine song "Killing in the name". Maybe better luck tomorrow.

The STUFF

2006-07-20T14:33:00.000+01:00

Ok, so it's been nearly a week since I last posted, so I'll try and avoid boring you to much with words and get to the pictures as quick as possible to show what we have.

We managed to get most of the coding finished off and polished a bit and returned focus to the map design. We now have a development level of this new map design. Instead of making it too detailed like the last one. We have stuck with keeping it simple and with development placeholders. That way we can flesh out the core, script it, get it playing well, then going back and finishing off the detailing.

SO here are the pics of what we've got so far.

And of course the mandatory Development PRETTY picture. awwww

Buffalo Bill

2006-07-19T17:03:00.000+01:00

In yesterdays meeting it was re-emphasized how important it is to the project to get people in the world, that don't look like zombies or seductive femme fatale. The best way of altering the appearance of a character (by "best way" I mean the only feasible way we can think of in the time frame and resources available to this project) is to create a different "skin" for existing characters. A character in the game is made up of a model, and a skin (among other things) The model specifies the dimensions of the character, and can also contain animations for the character. The skin is then applied on top of the character to make the character actually look like a human. So by modifying the skin the look of the character can be changed, as well as the cloths they are wearing. The problem however is that the images which contain the skin can be hard to modify (picture 1. Glasses were drawn on the skin, picture 2 shows the result in the actually game)

As can be seen from the pictures the skin looks like the skin provided by Buffalo Bill in "The Silence of the Lambs" all laid out flat. This makes it very hard to edit in such a way that it looks even remotely believable. The cloths are done in the same way. As can be seen from the first picture the skin is very detailed, and anything I would be able to produce wouldn't be even close to the quality provided in the already existing skins. If we had thought of it earlier on in the project we could have got professional artists to create the skins we need. I believe that it will be hard to get it done it the time frame left though.

Another VERY annoying thing today was that the computer keeps repeatedly crashing. I can be working away when all of a sudden with no warning the monitor goes black. I choked all connections and they are all plugged in. The only thing you can do is to restart the computer. I don't believe it is a software problem since it crashes very randomly, regardless of what software I am currently using. My theory is that something in the computer overheats, and as a security precaution shuts down. My guess is that the CPU or Graphics card is the culprit. The labs in Kevin St. Were much cooler, and might be the reason they didn't crash during the college term. If this continues tomorrow I will have to go to the technicians in the morning, as it is very frustrating when all of a sudden the computer just dies, and a few hours work with it.

Meeting and Pizza

2006-07-18T16:31:00.000+01:00

Andrew and I started the morning polishing of our demos to show in the meeting (even though we knew it was a long show that steam would actually work in Upper Mount St. where the presentation was due) We did know that there would be other interested parties at the meeting, so we wanted to make sure that it would work, if against all expectation steam decided it would be nice.

After solving a last minute technical problem we wandered over to Upper Mount St. There Pizza and drinks waited, together with Jim our guest. In the meeting we discussed the next part of the storyboard, as well as deciding on the final floor plan of the restaurant.

Leading the way

2006-07-17T16:49:00.000+01:00

At this point most of the scripting elements needed for the game are in place, tested on small purpose built levels, the trick is to integrate them into one level. The problem is that without a map layout to work from the map and subsequently the scripting can't be implemented. The floor plan Greg sent on Friday should be more than enough for our purposes. So Andrew and I will bring up the issue in tomorrows meeting, and propose the floor plan as the one to use for the game.

Today I was looking at getting a non player character (NPC) lead the player to a place, and if the player trails behind the NPC the NPC comes back and "collects" the player. I also looked at scripting a "wake up scene" a scene where the screen fades from black into the room. The player then stands up, after that the user can control the player.

Floor Planning

2006-07-14T16:44:00.000+01:00

Today was spent continuing on our set tasks, encouraged by the good feedback from yesterdays meeting. Andrew worked on polishing up the inventory system, I looked into more advanced topics in scripting. I feel that at this point I know most "building blocks" needed to create most scripting features needed for the game.

As things were going smoothly a bit of bad news arrived. Greg's contact we were going to ask to help us with the planning of the believable restaurant is going on holiday for the next 2 weeks. This was be a stumbling block since we were hoping to get the map planned and developed as soon as possible. However Greg did send two floor plans, one of which looked very suitable. Looks like we will have to base our game on either that floor plan, our find another one on the internet. It will be one of the things to discuss on Tuesdays meeting.

Progressing

2006-07-13T16:08:00.000+01:00

This morning was spent designing a small levels to showcase some of the technologies created, and technologies mastered.

In the afternoon meeting at 2pm. Andrew and I demonstrated the things we had been working on since the last meeting. Andrew showed the inventory system he had developed together with the map he had created. I showed a map which contained some key technologies needed, such as speech (and mouth synchronisation), moving object, causing events to occur when certain things are placed in designated places etc.

Overall I felt that people were very happy with the progress and still very excited about the project.

Stuff Stuff Stuff

2006-07-12T20:36:00.000+01:00

Today I did stuff, i didn't get the stuff to quite the calibre I was hoping... so you won't get to see it today. However I expect to have most of it integrated together by tomorrow lunch time so I will reveal some of this Stuff tomorrow :D

Boys with Toys

2006-07-12T18:03:00.000+01:00

Childlike enthusiasm is probably the most constructive and creative state one can be in. If it could be bottled and sold the computer games industry would never be the same again.

Andrew and I entered this magical state this afternoon. I had spent the morning reading AI tutorials and learning a few new tricks (how to get another person to follow the player and how to get another person to lead the player to a designated spot in the map) and Andrew and done some great work on the inventory system.

In the afternoon, as I was showing Andrew some of the stuff I'd put together when we decided to try to put a chefs hat on one of the characters, and see if we could make the hat move with the character. Enthused by this we continued to add things to the level. Getting more and more excited as we went along. We ended up spending most of the afternoon (and going towards evening) adding things to the level. In the end we had a level where the character gets lead to a room by another character. In that room there is a window, behind the window there was a 3rd character, singing a song. After the song had finished a car fell on the character (I think people become more thrilled by cartoon style scenes when in this state) and a then exploded. To continue the player needed to move a box and put it in an exact place. This triggered the character that leads the play around the place to lead the player up a set of stairs and into another room. When the leading character gets to the computer in the room, the glass ceiling of the room breaks and soldiers come down on ropes and start shooting. At the same time a wall breaks open and soldiers enter the room from the hole in the wall.

Even though as a game it didn't make much sense, as a demonstration of the technology it worked very well. We are hoping to put together a less violent, better structured demonstration of scripting for the meeting tomorrow at 2pm. See you then!

The taming of the beast

2006-07-11T16:39:00.000+01:00

Its funny how programming moments are like buses, they all come at once. Allow me elaborate:

I've been trying to get characters to perform idle behaviour and speech for the last few days, but with little success. However this morning I had a "Eureka!" moment.

Firstly I was able to get the speech synchronisation to work. By following a very specific set of steps I was able to get the crash-prone Faceposer application to do what I asked of it, without crashing (deviation from the "yellow brick road" of the software did however result in a "Would you like to report this error to Microsoft" moment) I now had an actor (called Homer) singing about his Bologna with very good face movement to accompany it. I was also able to to add gestures to Homer, so now he shrugs his shoulders while singing.

The second breakthrough involved getting the idle behaviour to work. By carefully arranging a couple of entities in the Hammer editor, and modifying the way they interact I now had a level where Homer stands in a big room, arms and legs crossed, looking annoyed. When the player interacts with a blue barrel Homer starts singing and his lips move quite convincingly.

It looks like "Programming Eurekas"^TM just like buses are sought after for some time, then they all come at once.

HUD Information

2006-07-11T14:05:00.000+01:00

Now that I have the clothing system up and running it was time to start working on telling the user what exactly they are wearing. Thought it's not the pretties, I beleive we have managed to get that done in the most efficient way we have available to us. Using the players Heads up Display to share this information was the most logical way, and it also turned out to be one of the most intuative ways for users since all the information is right there.

Any way, a couple of pictures showing a couple of different fashion styles.

Artificial Unintelligence

2006-07-10T17:15:00.000+01:00

Today I continued my work on the scripting of the game. I found a few bits of information on the Internet, sadly as with much of the work regarding the scripting it wasn't just a matter of following steps though. First of all there weren't really many steps to follow, more bits of related information which had to be assembled and experimented with, secondly the hammer editor, like a impressionable little brother of a bold sibling, started to act up to, crashing regularly. This made me suspect that faceposers bad influence had caused rebelliousness in the other peaceful Freeman household.

Another problem I ran into, was running into other characters. When the player moves into another character the other character politely says something in the lines of "Sorry Dr. Freeman" and moves out of the way, which must make their digital mummy very proud, but hampers the believability of the game ever so slightly since most people that spent so much time in college getting a doctorate, probably wouldn't be working in the back end of a restaurant. After a lot of fiddling I was able to stop them from saying anything when you bump into them, hopefully it is a workable solution, and I haven't made them permanent mutes.

On the bright side though I did get some small "proof of concept" levels done, containing characters with idle behaviour like leaning against a wall.

Saftey Clothing

2006-07-10T15:32:00.000+01:00

Today I was working on the clothing system.

I managed to get most of the logic coded and the acctual clothing entities. The entities can be set to represent a certain area of clothing with certain values of protection. This clothing can be switched out on the fly by the user.

Tomorrow I'm hoping to get the visual display on the HUD of what types of clothes the player is wearing, then perhaps work with paddy on using the existing code I've made to add some more interactivity between the world and the users current clothing.

Anyway just a little picture of how I was able to test this feature. On the left are items that can be worn on the Torso, the middle are items for the head, and the left are leg coverings. The model used to represent these items may not look correct, but they are simply placeholders since making models is not on our priority list, nor do we have enough modeling abilities to do that.

Everybody's talkin' at me...

2006-07-07T17:35:00.000+01:00

Today was spent investigating and trying to tame faseposer, the application used to create sound etc for the characters in the game. As mentioned in the previous post the application is very volatile, and may crash at any time, and give me a kindof "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.", without even saying anything to me, just glaring at me and not working. I was reading up on the application and reading and watching tutorials. However even though I followed the exact steps it still didn't work!

In the afternoon I was able to get the application to work for long enough to import a sound I downloaded from the Internet and get the voice synchronisation on it to work! I was then able to use the saved faceposer file (.vcd) and use the file in a small map I created. The end result was a map where when you went up to a character he turned around and said "Hello". Afterward I tried something more ambitious, a sentence, however even though I used the exact same steps as previous faceposer felt it had fulfilled its quota of co-operation for the week and didn't want to work for me! Maybe more luck next week.

Friday Features

2006-07-07T15:01:00.000+01:00

Well it's Friday afternoon and I've gotten the mapping of the first section to a point where I can pass it over to Paddy to start scripting it.

It's been a pretty good build, I'm not a mapper by any stretch of the imagination so it's not the prettiest of things. But it will serve its purpose.

Here's a quick progression of the level over the last couple of days.

Wednesday :

Work started and some basic fleshing out was done.

Thursday:

Added a little more depth to the level

Also played around with some other ideas... most of which were absoloutly terrible

Friday :

well I said i wanted to have most of the important stuff done so ofcourse I was going to finish of the interior of the building as far as what we needed, ie. Locker room and Toilets

And finally some more detailing to the existing areas to make them at bit more prettified.

So that brings my trip into the mapping world to a temporary closure, but it opens up next week to programming. I'm not sure which of the 2 tasks is the harder, but i do know for sure which one I preffer and which one I'm better at. That being said I'm not comparing myself to anyone, just to my own productions.

Anyway, until next week, adios

Progression

2006-07-06T19:44:00.000+01:00

The last couple of days have been fairly similar. I've been turning our 2 dimensional vision of the story boards into a 3 dimensional world. Mapping is a slow process especially when you're improvising a lot of the details. But the core essentials are in there or being created, so it's generally going well.

I'm planning on finishing up as much as I can on the mapping tomorrow and perparing myself to get back into the code base. Hopefully I can get the coding aspects done by thursday, which should give us a few more features to present for the meeting, and also allow Patrick some time with the map to get to work on scripting it out.

But beyond that it's all work work work, to try and see if we can match the pace that we've set for ourselves.

let there be sound

2006-07-06T17:36:00.000+01:00

As Andrew was working wonders on the 3D world I spent the day investigating how to put sound into the game.

It turns out that sound is best handled in the game with so called VCD files. VCD files allow audio, FX, Actor Direction (blocking), animation, and scene/map logic to be compiled into one file. The file can then be associated with one or more actors in the game, and set to be triggered by an event in the game.

VCD files are created and edited in the Faceposer application, which comes with the development tools valve provide for half life 2 game creation.

The problem is that the tool is VERY temperamental, and often frustratingly illogical. Something that worked a second ago stops working, or not getting something working, even though exact steps are followed. However when it does work it looks very impressive.

I was able to get the game to trigger and play already existing VCDs. However creating my own became very frustrating, so I decided to leave it to the next day, and let my "pool of patience build" up

Moving Barney

2006-07-05T17:23:00.000+01:00

Today was spent working on the tasks outlined in my previous post. Andrew made some very good progress on designing the map, while I worked on first of all learning how to use the Hammer editor, then how to script events in the editor.

I created my first room, adding textures to the walls, ceilings and floors. Then putting in different objects, some that are affected my physics (in this case a barrel) and some not affected by physics (I used a fence)

I also added an atmospheric blue light in the ceiling. The map was now ready for its first inhabitants.

With help of an online tutorial I added a "barney" character, which when I picked up an shotgun, moved to one point, waved at me, then moved to another point.

What's the Story?

2006-07-04T21:51:00.000+01:00

Well, it's been a couple of days since my last update. That's not to say we weren't busy. Patrick and myself spent the last couple of days comming up with ideas for the story line and inspiration for scenerios.

Today we concluded that the time was well spent. We offered up our intro sequence at the storyboard meeting and it went down quite well. This meeting was what I really enjoy about game design, we know what kind of game we're making, why we're making it and what it's going to be made on. It's now time to acctually work on the environments, interaction and logic of the game. This is something new for myself since I've only really done multiplayer mapping and coding, that doesn't mean the basic principals can't be transfered, it just allows for a whole new focus. Less on making the most of each packet sent between Clients and the server, and more on making things as feature filled as possible.

Before we get to any of that though we've started fleshing out what the world will look like. The drawings on papers and white boards have started, and I emphasize started since that's all it is, a simple start, to take shape in the hammer editor. We plan on getting the intro sequences mapped out without too much detail, then get the scripting and AI inplace. Once that's done we can go back and see what works, what doesnt, add detail where it's needed and be able to move on to the next objective with the knowledge and experience of the previous section. It's a logical progression I know, but when you're sitting behind the monitor it's hard to just focus on getting the overall picture done first and then worrying about the details, especially when that stair railing could be aligned just a hair closer and that wall would look cool with 2 fire escapes, and that rubbish bin could do with some more stuff in it, etc... Anyway hopefully we can make enough progress tomorrow to get a few teaser images up, to show and document the transition and evolution from 2d concept through to interactive and living world.

Story telling

2006-07-04T17:37:00.000+01:00

Today was the day where the storyboard of the game would be drafted up. Up until this point Andrew and I had been working on our own Ideas of how the game might play. Now an official story board was designed. The meeting included the expertise from the eLearning group, the School of Computing and ourselves. Greg our resident Health and Safety guru will be present in the next meeting. The approach we took was to look at the food safety teaching material, and analysing what had to be taught. Then scenarios were built up around the material, and finally a first draft of a map was designed, which could encompass all the scenarios. After the meeting Andrew and I had an informal debriefing meeting, and found to our surprise that the game designed in the meeting was very close to the design we had come up with before the meeting. It was nice to see that the hard work put into preparing for the meeting was well invested.

As a followup to the meeting we received a list of tasks from Bryan Duggan, with tasks 1-3 to be completed by our next meeting (Thursday 13th)

Figure out events and triggers. Lets see some examples where you have made this work. For example, the scene in the alley.
Use MilkShape/Hammer to build a map of the alley, changing room, kitchen etc. Also objects in the map, such as knives, clothes, first aid box etc load the map/items into the mod.
Play audio
Synchronise dialogue audio with facial animation.
Inventory system (for clothes, implements etc) Ability to check inventory, pick things up and drop things
Build the first aid box and the item choosing mechanism. Also need to be able to give something to a NPC and trigger an event (set of an animation/script etc).

This should keep us busy for the next while

Learning to Fly

2006-07-03T17:37:00.000+01:00

This week started as the last week ended, getting to know the Half Life environment, mostly from the scripting side. We had some successes today, getting little City scanners (see picture) to fly along a path, and more appearing as you enter a certain area. We also did some preparation work for our meeting tomorrow, outlining some ideas for story boards, drawing first drafts of maps and examining the Food Safety Authority of Ireland's material to see how best we could create stories, scenarios and tasks, to best teach the material. We are now both looking forward to our meeting tomorrow, which should provide us with a really good foundation to work from.

Seriously Though

2006-06-30T17:36:00.000+01:00

As per our meeting yesterday our main task until our meeting on Tuesday next week, will be to familiarise ourselves with the half life engine and the hammer editor. A task which Andrew and I both delved into.

Since there isn't much more to say regarding the work we have been doing today, I'm going to write a short note on the name "Serious Gordon" the name chosen for our blog.

The first part "Serious" refers to "Serious Games" which are are computer and video games that are intended to not only entertain users, but have additional purposes such as education and training. (wikipedia) The focus of this project is to create a serious game.

The second part "Gordon" can be slightly more cryptic, if of course you don't play computer games. Gordon is a reference to Gordon Freeman the main protagonist in the computer game Half Life. This project uses the recognizable Half Life 3D Engine. The title also makes a reference to the computer game Serious Sam. Which some might say is a bit ironic since Serious Sam is a computer game which prides itself in its frantic arcade action, and is very far removed from what most people might consider a serious game.

Decision Time

2006-06-29T23:50:00.000+01:00

Well, I wasn't too sure on how we got in to the situation where there were multiple design ideas and implementations of the project, but we did, and it's not a bad thing, just how it progressed as we followed the flow of ideas. Anyway this would have been cool to try and get all aspects running as one but that's just impossible in the short time we have and probably even very difficult on a full scale project. So it was decision time, we produced our designs as impartially as possible, looking for both their flaws and strengths so that we could present each design in the fairness we felt they deserved. In the end the decision for focusing on pure game creation got the majority vote and that is what we will be focusing on.

We are now free to move forward with the game play and level design. Though this plan does not call for further development of our simplified development tools, I don't think we'll be dropping them from the project either. The progress we made on them will allow us more flexibility come mapping time.

As for now we'll be getting ready for what will hopefully become weekly Storyboarding/Design/Brainstorming sessions, so we can present what the software can do and a knowledge of atleast how to get started on this. I won't claim to know nearly as much as I expect we'll learn about the acctuall production cycles since I've never done a single player game before. So these sessions will hopefully helps us keep our learning and experimenting in check with the goals and objectives as we move along, aswell as be a source of continuous inovations and ideas.

So, that's all for now... hopefully we'll continue with a good pace on the project since the planning is now pretty much complete, and the Design stage is now in motion.

D Day

2006-06-29T05:35:00.000+01:00

Today the direction of the project is to be decided, as it stands there is two very distinct routes, as follows:

Option A:

Option A is to design at its core level an easy to use tool for educators to produce learning environments that range from 1 off maps to multileveled games. This option requires several development items that would be focused on. The first would be the educators interface to creating their desired product. This is to be an intuitive and simple drag and drop program that allows the educator to open up a 2D representation of their world and then populate it with their desired entities. They would then be able to use the same interface to create simple scripted events that could further enhance this world. The tool would then allow them to export/save this new information to a file that would be readable by the Source Engine. The second item for developing would be altering the Source Engine to handle the input and creation of entities in the information files. After the Educator has created the file, it is distributed by some means to allow the Students/Users to access them via the engine. This is done by the user starting up the game through steam, once in the title screen for the engine the Students/Users will be give a list of local files or the option to import a specific tutorial from another location. The game will then load up the appropriate map and world information and put the user into this scenario.

The Main focus of the development would be on creating the creation program and having the engine accept the output of this file in a manner that requires little to no directory layout, engine handling or engine requirements on the behalf of the user. The final game would be of a minor concern because once this development program is completed it will be a matter of having a knowledgeable person create the map files and then allowing the situation/topic specific educator create the game itself.

Advantages:
It is flexible; change objects locations and such easily.
Various scenarios and uses.
Maps are reusable while still having new content.

Disadvantages:
Game play lacks depth
All levels play exactly the same way
Would still require knowledge of Hammer to create entirely new worlds.

Option B

Option B would deal with a stand alone game developed using the Hammer editor. The Hammer editor is the software supplied by Valve to create levels for the Half Life 2 Source Engine. Since specialised software is being used the scenarios that can be developed can be quite spectacular, and very non linear.

The development would initially require all levels to be designed, in conjunction with someone who knows the subject area which the game is to teach (in this proof of concept application it is health and safety)

After this the actual levels will have to be carefully designed and scripted, using the Hammer editor.

The final stage would be to test the levels, to ensure that they are stable and that the game play is interesting and educational.

Advantages:
More Advanced Game Play
Less linear Game Play
Makes better use of the Half Life Engine
Little or not modification required by developers.

Disadvantages:
The Game would be hard to modify once developed
The Game scenarios would be the same or very similar every time the game runs

Decision:
It was unanimously decide by the all parties to go with option A. To facilitate development of the game storyboards need to be drawn up. It was agreed upon that these should be done on a continuous basis, every Tuesday, with representatives from the eLearning group, Health and Safety, School of computing and us. Until Tuesday Andrew and I will be working on getting to know the Hammer editor, so once the storyboards are in place development will progress faster.

More Pretty Pictures

2006-06-28T18:00:00.000+01:00

We've been working on our proposal most of the day today, and thats come a long way. We also had the techs up and we're setup now, for the most part. Tomorrow will be the big day for our game play proposals so more info tomorrow.

Anyway, just to one up Paddy here's some more eye candy of Half Life 2 : Lost Coast in action. ( i just can't resist the chance to show of the Source Engine and its HDR )

A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.

2006-06-28T17:34:00.000+01:00

We had a day of many pleasant visitors this morning. The first one was one of the technicians from Kevin St. After a bit of "teching" we had Andrew account finally working, and the sound card on my PC working (turns out that the sound card was turned of in the BIOS!, not the most obvious thing to do) We even put in a good set of "puppy eyes" to persuade him what a good idea it would be to put some more RAM in our PCs, hoping we'll get it. Thanks for all the help David.

Soon after that Hugh arrived, with words of encouragement and wisdom.

It turned out that the reason Half Life (the computer game who's 3d Engine we will be using) didn't run due to the sound card didn't work. So it works now. The first thing I did was to start "Lost Coast" an additional level to Half Life, which has significant visual improvements over the original half life.

As can be seen from the screenshot the lighting in particular looks amazing. Notice how the light from the window with the glass broken looks very realistic. I really was very impressed with the game. It is a real pity that the technology used in that level will not be available to us, even though the technology we have is still very impressive.

After Lunch we started discussing the document outlining the options available, and the advantages and disadvantages of each. After a lot of careful consideration and lengthy discussions we agreed upon most of the content of the document, now it is only a matter of writing the document, something we plan to do first thing tomorrow morning, as the meeting looks like it will be scheduled for tomorrow afternoon.

Brainstorming

2006-06-27T18:02:00.000+01:00

Another day, and another success with the white-board. Think we have it all figured out now, massive red text across the board seams to have done the job.

In the morning we prepared for our afternoon meeting, and continued our respective code work. I also made a trek over to the technicians in Kevin St. to ask for some assistance in some of our unresolved technical issues.

After lunch we continued our technical work, until our meeting with Greg, Pauline and Francis. In the meeting the direction of the project was discussed, with the e-learning aspects of the game examined. The conclusion of the meeting was that there are a few different routes that this project could take at this point in time, and the stake holders need to agree on the direction. To that affect Andrew and I will discuss the options available, write a document with the pros and cons of each of the options and publish it. The good news is that the base that Andrew and I have created can relatively easy be built upon in either direction.

More Meetings

2006-06-27T17:47:00.000+01:00

We had another meeting today, this time covering the eLearning branch of this intertwined project. More revisions and design tweaks await us after the meeting, but we did get a lot covered and are confident in our base design. Confident enough to say that we are moving forward into design steps that a normal game might not reach for a good while. The relative plethera of ideas and concepts for the project are still being sifted through, but as each day passes we are solidifying the design and focusing it toward a specific goal.

Thanks to everyone who has anything to say about this design, because I for one, can get caught up quite easily and lose the true sight of this project. Ah well, once we get more of our thoughts on paper we can present it and hopefully get more input to finalize on paper our goals and tasks. Then it'll be time to really sit down and get cracking.

Another Week

2006-06-26T19:46:00.000+01:00

And So Starts another week, out of the stalls it's been a good start. We've been putting some ideas in motion whilst still revising our design.

Not much to add really.

Hello World, and flying pots

2006-06-26T17:29:00.000+01:00

The day got off to a good start, our drawings one the board were still there! In the morning we revised our file system, to make it more intuitive and easy to use. After lunch we brainstormed on the documentation, aligning it more with the revision of the project which occurred as a result of last Thursday's meeting.

After lunch we both attacked the programming. I started work on parsing input files, and Andrew looked at putting entities in the world, based on an input file. At the end of the working day Andrew had worked wonders on the Half Life engine, and been able to add pots and flying cookers to the world, solely based on the input file.

I nearly had the parsing of the input file worked out. The input file looking something like:

"test1.tut"
{
"info"
{
"displayname" "tutorial 1"
"map" "apt.bsp"
"version" "3.2"
}
"world"
{
"pot1"
{
"location" "-4618 -4780 333"
"angles" "0 0 0"
"classname" "prop_physics"
"modelname" "models/props_junk/terracotta01.mdl"
}
}
"scripts"
{
}
}

Sorry about the bad indention, if you have some spare time at any stage and you want something to amuse yourself with, try finding a simple, clean way of indenting things in blogger, I tried everything from letters with same colour as background (which is hard since the background is a picture with a pattern) to indenting using css (which is messy, and puts an extra new line after each line) guaranteed to cause frustration.

As can be seen, the entities are defined in the "world" entity, and scripts are under the "scripts" entity (in this case there are no scripts)

The Half Life engine then uses this information to create entities and events in the world.

Fleshing It Out

2006-06-23T18:01:00.000+01:00

Today we started fleshing out our ideas in the Source Engine. It's nice to be able to sit down and acctually convert the designs that we've been working out with everyone and start seeing how they will look in game. Though we don't have a huge amount done, it was a succesfull day and I got alot more done than I was expecting to.

We are doing something very unique that should aid in making the product more user friendly for both Staff/designers and Students/End users. Paddy had a load of brilliant ideas that he's been putting into motion and I am really looking forward to seeing how they all turn out. My job will be to design the game components to allow for these things that Paddy's producing. From intital testing this should be a great work flow.

I can see this becoming a very unique tool for what we want to do. The design is based on our discussions about other existing tools, but the acctual implementation will be fairly unique as far as the Source Engine and all of it's games and free mods are concerned. If done right this could be much more of a success than either of us originally envisioned.

I'm quite glad that we were able to have the last few days to try and simplify our goals back to what was needed rather than what we thought was cool, because now that we are acctually prototyping things it's a much clearer vision of what needs to be done and how best to do it.

Enthusiasm fueled Progression

2006-06-23T17:25:00.000+01:00

Today was another very productive day. It started off with a shock, the over zealous cleaners had wiped out all our designs and ideas from the white board, even though we put "please do not remove work from board" on the whiteboard, written in red. This time we wrote the same thing, but with even bigger letters and in the middle of the whiteboard, with all out notes around it, hopefully that will work.

After the initial setback we continued discussing aspects of the design of the application. Things like file structures and formats were decided upon.

The proposed architecture based on the feedback from Greg is a User Interface (UI) which allows in a simple flexible way to generate a file which specifies what entities and scripted events to be used in a level.

This file will then be used as input for the Half Life engine, which will generate all the required entities on the fly.

I started research and coding, of the UI today, the initial design will be on of two tabs, one for adding entities to the world, and another tab which allows for scripting of events.

As can be seen from the screenshot, each tab will then be broken into a menu, and a content panel.

Meanwhile Andrew had good success in setting up an initial interface which allows the user to select what tutorial to run, and then loads the map specified by the tutorial.

A new beginning

2006-06-22T17:05:00.000+01:00

We started of today discussing ideas with Brian Mac Namee (BA(Mod) PhD :-) )
and prepared for our meeting at 10 with Greg Bourke. As it happened Greg was unable to make the morning meeting and sent his apologies. Instead we re-scheduled for 12.

The meeting at 12 went very well, it slightly changed the direction more towards the original direction, where visual impact, and ease of updating levels came before the way in which issues were reported, and fancy LUA scripting. The project now seams to be moving towards developing an easy to use editor for use with the half life mod we are creating.

Both Andrew and I got caught up in the excitement of the new spec and missed the scheduled lunch with Kevin (very sorry about that Kevin) however we came up with some really good ideas of how to develop the project, and by the end of the day we have a whiteboard full of ideas and the technical aspects of the project more or less worked out and the distribution of work figured out (more or less) Another good day today, tomorrow we will be documenting out ideas, and starting some small proof of concept applications.

Rethinking the gameplay

2006-06-22T16:44:00.000+01:00

After another lengthy discussion Paddy and I decided to rethink and rework our design a little bit. The core elements we had were what we wanted, but we got a bit carried away with the idea of using external technology rather than trying to perfect the graphical technology that is key to this project. Though the techology would be usefull it is not the real show stopper kind of stuff in comparison to the graphics of the Half Life 2 Engine.

Even while we were trying to stay simple the ideas that were thrown around just grew larger and larger, and todays meeting brought us back down from those wild dreams and put us back in the mindset of creating the proof of concept style game we were brought on board to make. Most of our work has been along the right lines, it was just time to cut the fat off. We believe we have come up with a good design revision from todays meetings.

The rethinking will not put us back at all, it's helped us move forward, so now instead of trying to plan out lots of little things for a lot of features we're focusing on creating large chunks from fewer features. We're more confidant that the task we have given ourselves is more realistic for the 10 weeks than our previous plans and that's definatly a plus.

Designage

2006-06-21T19:01:00.000+01:00

The better part of the day today was spent working on planning out what and how we want to teach in our limited time. We've reading through some documentation on the subject for a few days and today we really sat down and decided what we could teach and discussed how best to implement the topics.

Tomorrow we'll present these ideas, and if they are approved we'll finalize them and get a more detailed game plan put in place.

Meeting the Team

2006-06-21T18:43:00.000+01:00

This morning started of with trying to get one of the PCs to run Half-Life. However its seams that there is problem with trying to run the game. I think this is due to a problem with the soundcard in the PC. However we do have one working PC.

We also did some intensive brain storming regarding the approach to teaching the health and safety material. The ideas we had will now be used in our meeting tomorrow, hopefully Greg will like them and we can formalize them further.

We also got a chance to meet some of the other people working in the Digital Media Center, who all came across as very helpful and friendly people.

We finished the day discussing high level design considerations, and approaches to creating a dynamic and flexible system.

Steaming Along

2006-06-20T16:15:00.000+01:00

We finally got Steam up and running late today, that's a big plus since we can now get a code base running. So now we are waiting on the game to download, my 1 minute 6 seconds remaining and Paddy's 2 hours several minutes and a not insubstantial amount of seconds.

Combined with the project proposal that we are in the process of writing up I believe another succesfull day has come and gone. We have a clearer idea of what we are going to do and now the technology to do so.

Tomorrow will be a continuation of writing our proposal and weeding out what issues we feel might arise from it for our meeting with Greg on Thursday.

Full steam ahead

2006-06-20T16:13:00.000+01:00

We started of this morning trying to get steam working, but failing horribly. The steam software just didn't feel like working. We instead we turned our attention to the documentation side of the project, and gathering of requirements.

After lunch we meet up with Frances Boylan and Kevin O'Rourke from the Learning Technology Team. A meeting to teach us how to teach, was arranged for next Tuesday afternoon. In the afternoon we continued working on the documentation, and towards the end of the day a breakthrough was made in the steam software (thanks D.I.T. tech support team) the software finally started downloading. We're back on track again now!

It begins...

2006-06-19T17:05:00.000+01:00

Project kicked of yesterday, with a very successful meeting/brainstorming session with Greg Burke our resident health and safety guru. Coffee was drank, ideas were voiced, pictures were viewed and decisions were made.

Our attempts at jump starting this project fell short when the network and the Valve distribustion program Steam had their differences of opinion and choice of network ports. Some would say we ran out of Steam at this time (*dun dun tsh*) and called it a day. Perhaps more luck tomorrow.

All in all a good start to the project.