Cool Intro Sequences

simonwittber on 2006/03/24 03:50 of TeamXerian

Hi Chaps,

I've re-created the intro cutscene from Quido in the new SiGL cutscene format. The new format is specifically targeted at non programmer types (designers), so it uses some unusual python tricks to make things easier.

http://www.xerian.net/browser/sandbox/showcase

If anyone is going to use SiGL (probably nobody :) this is a good place to start if you want to build a nice intro sequence.

There are some bugfixes still to go in tonight, so you can work from SVN if you want (http://svn.xerian.net/svn) or use the official build from cheeseshop, which I will make later tonight. During the comp, I will copy SiGL to a new branch which will likely get a lot of modifications, so dont expect the trunk to change too much.

The few tests I have should also help anyone who wants to try out SiGL. http://www.xerian.net/browser/SiGL/trunk/tests

-Sw.

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Comments

richard on 2006/03/24 03:55:

I might be using SiGL :)

richard on 2006/03/24 04:05:

OK, IMO there's still not really enough information for anyone to use SiGL... I figured how to download it (googled "python sigl" to find the download on PyPI). Installed it OK, but when I try to run stuff in "tests" it complains about eventnet.

There's no README so I'll be googling for that again. I found a download for FibraNet, which I guess was the right thing, and it was.

Hrm. Not really accessible for other developers *or* people who have to install this stuff to play a game :(

richard on 2006/03/24 04:07:

Me again. Is there a tarball download for that example cutscene? Bit of a pain downloading all the files individually...

simonwittber on 2006/03/24 04:07:

wow. thats cool. and motivating. ill try and get some more stuff in the showcase to help you out. I've been told there is a steep learning curve.

-Sw.

simonwittber on 2006/03/24 04:08:

doh. ok, ill add some stuff to the wiki.

richard on 2006/03/24 04:18:

Well, really, for a library to be used on PyWeek, I do kinda require that it's accessible to other developers, otherwise you've got a pretty huge advantage :)

simonwittber on 2006/03/24 04:27:

I've added some doco to http://www.xerian.net/wiki/WikiStart to help people get started.

SiGL/LGT has been around for a couple of years now, and has evolved to suit user requirements. I know of two commercial operations using SiGL, so it has been accessible enough, though I will admit, that over the last few months, server and URL changes have lost a few people.

richard on 2006/03/24 04:40:

Cool. I've been working through the examples in the tests dir. Some things kinda make sense, some things don't.

Now, SiGL is a scenegraph doohicky. I'm vaguely aware of what that means :) What that means in practise, for example, in textured_obj.py, is there's a "root" node and other nodes and a lot of appending going on. Like the object's geometry is appended to the texture that's applied to it (and the texture itself is appended to the viewport.) That's kinda strange, and will take a while of poking through the SiGL source to figure out :)

simonwittber on 2006/03/24 05:51:

Yeah. It's strange at first, but it means you can bind multiple geometries or sprites to one texture, which means OpenGL only has to bind to the texture once.

It also means, for example, you can have multiple geometries/sprites under a color node, which means they can all fade away as you adjust the color node alpha component.

One thing to keep in mind is, use SiGL to create a tree of nodes which control rendering, don't use it to build your game model. SiGL is the V in MVC.

pekuja on 2006/03/24 08:58:

Hm... No public release and no documentation? Doesn't sound very accessible to me.

ciw42 on 2006/03/24 13:17:

After the initial post, I ambled on over to take a look at SiGL, and it does seem useful, but it's unlikley I'd be able to spend long enough playing with it that it'll be anything other than a hinderance for this particular competition. If the docs were in place, then it would be fine, but as they're not, it ain't. That said, I don't really feel it should be outlawed. It certainly doesn't directly implement anything to do with games. Essentially, it appears to be just a (rather nice) display list handler. You'd probably find that for specific games, the overhead of the library would actually be a negative thing when it comes to performance.