So "The aftermath" won. That's good, because I always wanted to make a post-apocalyptic grass shearing game.

I will be spending all of today on making assets, and probably tomorrow and the day after.. but well that's what you get if you want to make a 3D game. MakeHuman will help with a character, so all I need to do for that is to merge the meshes into one object, edit the uvs and do some texture painting - I think 2-3 hours should do.

I already have most of the vehicle I want to use done, thanks to someone called "eezerz ..". I took his model:

and made it a bit more post-apocalyptic:

Oh, yeah, and I also set up a GitHub repo, but there's nothing there at the moment:

https://github.com/wezu/pyweek21


EDIT:
So 6 (six!) hours later I got a character textured and rigged, no animations at this point... oh boy, this is gonna take longer then expected...

I've spend about 4 hours today on finding some music (and I found new love for surf rock) and doing sounds. I think I got decent engine and skid sounds. I also checked in some changes to the code, so the my car is actually drivable. Still nowhere near gameplay.

I'm afraid that's it for today.

All is in the repo, if someone feels like driving a buggy over a blue grid - go ahead:
https://github.com/wezu/pyweek21

Now we're cooking with gasoline!

After some problems I had with Bullet Physics and my own stupidity the day before, I'm finally making tangible progress. Here's the proof:

I can drive and walk on my own terrain, I have the terrain rendered, a dynamic sky dome, and... em.. well...the whatsisname? One of those things... well when I stated writing this sentence I felt as if the list of finished features would be longer... Oh my glob! Back to the wezu-cave, I got coding to do! The end is nigh!

Well, there are still an hour or so left, but my eyes hurt too much. I started today around 7:30 and now it's 22:45. The 'game' is as it is, I'd need one more day to get the gameplay existent, but I don't have that day. There's one more commit, that somehow refuses to be pushed to Github but I don't have the strength to fight with it. I'll upload the files tomorrow morning.

Time to sum up. As always some parts went fine and some not so.

The Good

Driving. I'm happy with that. It's fun to drive the car, it's easy to strategy and almost impossible to flip. There are sounds that change in volume and pitch as you change speed, crash, break or just go over bumps. The car also looks ok.

Rocket. You might be wondering what I'm talking about - there are no rockets in the game. The rocket I have in mind is the main character - I named her Rocket, but don't ask me why. She looks cool with a US flag bandana and red boots modeled after the boots Jake the Dog stole... and then there's the 'get out of the car via the window onto the roof's animation. I'm quite proud of that one. Use pview (shipped with panda3d sdk) to view the model and animal.

Grass. If I made the grass from individual objects I'd need 10 of them for every 1x1m square - the map is about 0.5x0.5km so that would be more objects then any modern $500 GPU can render. Without going technical I'll just say instancing, ping-pong texture buffers and dirty tricks are used to render the grass fast, animate it, cut in real-time and show it on the radar. But there's still room for improvement.

The Bad

Gameplay. There's none. The mechanism is there, but there's no goal, no win condition, nothing. As a game it's a epic fail.

Postprocess. I have shaders to make soft shadows, lens flares, heat distortion, bloom/glare and depth of field included but not used.

Character control. It's just bad. I don't wanna talk about it, wasted a whole day on it.

The Ugly

• Wheels spin when exiting the car
• Fixed camera angle
• Almost no decorations on the map
• Basic lighting (1 point light )
• No idle animation
• Configuration via a txt file
• Character control (bad AND ugly)