To my knowledge, this has never been done before in a blockland mod, so I'm cross-posting this here from the development topic on the TOB forums:

Quote:
More updates:







ANIMATED BRICKS B--CH. I made the models while Wiggy did most of the coding. I added buttons to the editor general options menu for animating individual ani bricks and all of the player's ani bricks. New animated static shapes can be added as bricks with relative ease thanks to Wiggy's code. The only bug is that sometimes the ghost will animate for no apparent reason, and occasionally ani bricks you place start animating. The buttons allow you to correct this though so it's no big deal.


Thanks to Emperor Wiggy's ingenuity the animations sync to the simtime and can be paused or restarted at the player's leisure. This allows you to place gears, align them, and then watch your machine spring to life. I can't wait to see what people do with this, both with the included bricks and with the system itself, which can except additional animated bricks with relative ease.

EDIT- actually, by "made the models" I mean I ported them from LDraw and spent hours de-holing them.
They can't actually control each other though, right? Back in TBM I recall MCP messing with clocks and other kinds of rotational shenanigans, but the blocks were being rotated by scripts. Is that the case here too?
No it doesn't use scripts, you can override with a rotator switch if you really want to, but the constant client-server connections can be nightmarish for the network. This uses baked animations for rotation(which are much MUCH better for connections), and while it's true they can't actively affect each other, the animations are sync'd with the simtime, so you can align them with the editor before starting and it will look like their moving each other.

BTW, MCP's clock scripts(both analog and digital) are still in the game as far as I know, and are awesome for those who know how to use them. That said, they aren't great for connection quality given how often the server has to update the client so I wouldn't use them on servers with large numbers of players and bricks.

OH, and rotations aren't all you can do with this system. Anything you want to animate can be imported, from complex mechanically realigning satellite dishes, to living, breathing pets.

I can't stress enough how Awesome Wiggy is. He speaks C# better than I speak English. One moment we're discussing avenues for making this work, the next he has working code for me to test.
This is really awesome stuff. Nice work Shiz and Wiggy. I really hope both of you work on FreeBuild with me - especially now that you have a license for T3D.
Well in doing this I've been learning a lot about how SVN works and how to manage different people's different versions of files, which will make things far less bumpy when I start contributing to Freebuild. I still have a basic FPS I want to make in T3D to get a feel for it, but when that's done I should be able to move on to Freebuild. I'm also thinking of deferring admission to college for a few years until I can get my health issues under control, so I should have plenty of free time to pour into projects like this, which will themselves serve as great experience to apply to college later.
DShiznit wrote:
Well in doing this I've been learning a lot about how SVN works and how to manage different people's different versions of files, which will make things far less bumpy when I start contributing to Freebuild. I still have a basic FPS I want to make in T3D to get a feel for it, but when that's done I should be able to move on to Freebuild. I'm also thinking of deferring admission to college for a few years until I can get my health issues under control, so I should have plenty of free time to pour into projects like this, which will themselves serve as great experience to apply to college later.


Until they ask about the legality of it, lol. TOB is like 50 copyright bullet trains colliding together.
Lucas W wrote:
DShiznit wrote:
Well in doing this I've been learning a lot about how SVN works and how to manage different people's different versions of files, which will make things far less bumpy when I start contributing to Freebuild. I still have a basic FPS I want to make in T3D to get a feel for it, but when that's done I should be able to move on to Freebuild. I'm also thinking of deferring admission to college for a few years until I can get my health issues under control, so I should have plenty of free time to pour into projects like this, which will themselves serve as great experience to apply to college later.


Until they ask about the legality of it, 0x5. TOB is like 50 copyright bullet trains colliding together.


I'm not talking about TOB, that's just a mod I've been adding to. I'm talking about other projects I have in mind, like my Osama Shooting Game, and my violent rollercoaster theme park simulator. I also have an idea for a game where you play as a mouse and try to steal food from a house without getting killed by various household pets and traps.
DShiznit wrote:
Well in doing this I've been learning a lot about how SVN works and how to manage different people's different versions of files

Great =D
Have you played around with branch/tag and merge commands yet, or used SourceGear's DiffMerge (a stand-in for the builtin SVN merge utility)?

DShiznit wrote:
I'm also thinking of deferring admission to college for a few years until I can get my health issues under control, so I should have plenty of free time to pour into projects like this, which will themselves serve as great experience to apply to college later.
...I'm not talking about TOB, that's just a mod I've been adding to. I'm talking about other projects I have in mind, like my Osama Shooting Game, and my violent rollercoaster theme park simulator. I also have an idea for a game where you play as a mouse and try to steal food from a house without getting killed by various household pets and traps.

If you want to cooperate on some commercial projects with all that free time (after we make some enormous progress on FB of course), I have some fun ideas too that I've been putting off while I hack away at FB.
elfprince13 wrote:
DShiznit wrote:
Well in doing this I've been learning a lot about how SVN works and how to manage different people's different versions of files

Great =D
Have you played around with branch/tag and merge commands yet, or used SourceGear's DiffMerge (a stand-in for the builtin SVN merge utility)?

Not yet, I've just been coordinating my edits and commits with Emperor Wiggy, and only committing the individual files I've edited(followed by an update to get anything he's been working on). I'm still playing around with Tortoise SVN.

Quote:
DShiznit wrote:
I'm also thinking of deferring admission to college for a few years until I can get my health issues under control, so I should have plenty of free time to pour into projects like this, which will themselves serve as great experience to apply to college later.
...I'm not talking about TOB, that's just a mod I've been adding to. I'm talking about other projects I have in mind, like my Osama Shooting Game, and my violent rollercoaster theme park simulator. I also have an idea for a game where you play as a mouse and try to steal food from a house without getting killed by various household pets and traps.

If you want to cooperate on some commercial projects with all that free time (after we make some enormous progress on FB of course), I have some fun ideas too that I've been putting off while I hack away at FB.
Oh definitely, and since I live close to a rather large game Expo in Oaks, PA, I can offer an additional avenue for distribution. Plus having a couple independent projects listed on my college application couldn't hurt.
That's really cool, and would make an awesome add-on for freebuild with some work. It's also cool that it uses ldraw parts.
Technically they aren't LDraw anymore, I painstakingly converted them to dts using Milkshape. As for making them a freebuild add-on, that much I kinda doubt. Freebuild will have it's own optimized rotation and translation triggers, making this obsolete for gears and rotors. However, other animations, such as natural-looking movements for pets and other animals might still give this kind of system a purpose.
*bump*





This doesn't sync well apparently, but it actually looks cooler that way. Still, if you need to you can synch them with the "animate all bricks" button on your editor options menu.
This does look pretty a cool. Will this be in TOB 2.2?
Yes.
Those switches look awesome =D I've just discovered I'm missing a few of exactly that part from my collection.
  
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