Potential tutorial series (Page 2 of 2)

In unity engine, they have a FPS tutorial for beginners. Which shows everything to make a FPS game with unity. At least provides the starting game framework. Why not make a FPS game like that. Just a hall/godown like room with 2/3 enemy and sentry guns etc. It will cover everything and give Maratis user a framework. And ofcourse it will help me too .

Thanks for the tutorial.

Regards.

I just had a thought, I haven't uploaded the tutorial project anywhere yet, but I have got a private git repository for it and, as of Tutorial 5, I've started branching each tutorial when I've finished it. I've put it up on Github, as I think it's probably the easiest way for people to see it, and maybe even contribute at a later date!
https://github.com/nistur/MaratisTutorial

Last edited by Nistur (2012-02-12 21:25:26)

A simple input manager wrapper is now added to the tutorial series. Will hopefully begin the game soon

Unfortunately, I've been quite busy recently and haven't been able to push forward with this, but I should be able to get back on top of it soon. If anyone wants to donate a gun model for upcoming tutorials, I would be very thankful, otherwise I'll scour for something free and suitable.

Thanks dodosoft. That's great I'm sure I can find something there I can throw in I'll quickly spec out stage 2 and see what people think about that. I think there's also no decision that has to be made about which gun to use.

One quick question, what do people think about the actual movement. We have access to Bullet in Maratis, it's probably the quickest and easiest way to get something reasonable moving around a 3D world, but has the problem that things like going up stairs will cause the player to slow down. I've fiddled with some numbers already and found it awkward to do in a nice and easy way. Another option is to ignore physics and move around the world manually using a 3D mesh, possibly an invisible lower poly one. I believe it will get better results quicker, but also be more prone to miscalculations... gah. Well, if someone has thoughts, please shout. I'll look into it a bit more and see what I can do quickly otherwise.

I had a go with something similar already and couldn't find numbers that would make it feel smooth uphill which didn't cause you to float down too slowly if you ran off the top. I'll have another fiddle and see what I can get working Thanks

I've, unfortunately, been pretty busy recently so I haven't had time to work on the tutorial series so much. I have, however, I think, come up with a full plan of the next stage of the series. Let me know what you think.

Still to do in Stage 1:
- Tutorial 8 - Game framework 4 - Interaction
    Some basic inter-behaviour framework stuff
- Tutorial 9 - Game framework 5 - Tidying up
    Branching the project and setting up for our game
- Tutorial 10 - Overview and planning
    Some scribbles about what we're planning on doing

Up and coming in Stage 2:
- Tutorial 11 - Revisiting our controller
    Making a simple player object which will listen to commands
- Tutorial 12 - Give me a place to stand
    Adding a world for us to explore and some physics-y stuff
- Tutorial 13 - Guns, guns, guns
    How we handle guns and shooting them
- Tutorial 14 - Pew pew. Bullets
    Making things fly around the world, possibly even visibly, depending how enthusiastic we get
- Tutorial 15 - Decals
    Bullet holes in the scenery. Nice.
- Tutorial 16 - Animations
    Setting up for reloading etc
- Tutorial 17 - Enemies are stupid
    A very basic AI. Don't expect much here apart from randomly walking around (maybe do an AI series later?)
- Tutorial 18 - Particles everywhere
    Fire. Smoke. Water. That kind of thing. They look pretty
- Tutorial 19 - Fun in the shade(r)
    I've been playing with post processing, so I may as well put some shader stuff up.
- Tutorial 20 - How gooey is a game?
    some GUI work, maybe a simple HUD, we'll see

There's really not a lot left in Stage 1, Stage 2, however, will get a lot more involved. I'm hoping to go into as much detail as possible when writing them, but at the same time, I don't have several weeks to write a particle system and tutorialise it. I think the plan for this is to use an existing system. With any luck, the plugin system will be up and running and I will write up a bit about integrating a particle system (possibly this one even though it's a bit old now) into a plugin, separate from the tutorial series, then use the tutorial to explain how to set up pretty looking particle systems. The same is true for the GUI stuff as I'm intending to integrate a GUI system into a plugin. Of course, if the plugin system isn't ready to go at this stage, I'll probably do the work in the game project, at the very least as a placeholder.

Anyway, what do people think? I should be able to scrape together some more time this week to hopefully finish off the last 3 tutorials in Stage 1 and start thinking about Stage 2. Are people finding this helpful?

No worries. I'm actually planning on using the majority of the tutorial stuff for my own game project, even though it's not an FPS, so I'm trying to write most of it nice and generally

What I've been trying to do until now is give a solid idea as to the concepts I use when coding. For that I've been going pretty slowly. In order to cover the topics I have planned for the next stage, I'm going to have to change to either writing considerably more per tutorial, or go over the stuff at a greater speed, relying on the reader to understand techniques from earlier on. I'm not sure which I will choose yet, but yes, it should be a bit juicier

I've been playing with the idea of the save system, but I've decided to drop it for now. The reason being that the game we're making will be incredibly minimal from a functionality point of view, there won't be much at all to save. There are arguments for both implementing a save system early and leaving it until later, I think I'd prefer, especially with the tutorial series, to leave it until there's something worthwhile saving.

Pausing can be (hopefully) done pretty quickly and easily. I can try and work it into the existing tutorial layout, maybe enlarge stage 2 to maybe 25 tutorials Replays are another matter however as it requires keeping track of everything which happened  up until the point you want to play to. That means a whole load of extra information to store, the exact animations every entity was playing for a set period of time. It's definitely not something for this tutorial series at this stage.

Thanks for the feedback. I'll try to keep working on them this weekend, I've been trying to get a particle system plugin sorted though to let us all make nice effects Also wondering whether I should invest time in integrating it with bullet, or maybe putting it on GPU. Oh the possibilities. So much to do, so little time

Gah, it's taken me so long to get this one finished, and it was a very simple tutorial actually. Sorry again, it's finally online for people to see. I wouldn't expect anything very impressive or revolutionary, it's still just framework code, but we're getting to the end of that finally. I have 2 more tutorials to tie everything up, then we're onto making a game!

As always, look forward to any feedback. The sourcecode is all on Github as usual.

Last edited by Nistur (2012-04-01 21:05:13)

Can i ask a question i am just starting in c++ and maratis 3d and i started your tutorials
in tutorial #3 Creating the plugin , in  Tutorial plugin.cpp , in the start plugin i saw you adding "-&gt" after the pointers/object of MEngine and MBehaviorManager  can you pls explain  why and what  it is  ?
btw thanks for the tutorials

Last edited by Crucio777 (2012-11-02 18:22:25)