{"id":839,"date":"2010-12-11T14:51:48","date_gmt":"2010-12-11T18:51:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.braindeadprojects.com\/blog\/?p=839"},"modified":"2010-12-12T15:19:35","modified_gmt":"2010-12-12T19:19:35","slug":"video-game-creation-using-blender-gimp-and-allegro","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.braindeadprojects.com\/blog\/what\/video-game-creation-using-blender-gimp-and-allegro\/","title":{"rendered":"Video Game Creation using Blender, Gimp, and Allegro"},"content":{"rendered":"

I had an enjoyable assignment in a college course on the C language the other day – using the Allegro libraries<\/a>, write a game of your choosing.<\/p>\n

The assignment coincided with my recent discovery of Blender<\/a>, the 3D mesh animation and design tool. Out of boredom on a recent weekend afternoon, I found Blender in a series of random Google searches… and dedicated the better part of 3 weeks teaching myself the ins and outs. (Surprisingly EVERYONE<\/em> I know already knew about it, I’m not sure how Blender eluded my radar).<\/p>\n

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The entire movie Big Buck Bunny was created in Blender<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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So many people are familar with Blender \u00a0in fact, that there are hundreds of\u00a0YouTube videos<\/a> (and even \u00a0DVDs<\/a>) covering practically anything you’re looking to do.<\/p>\n

My first job was to model an alien – one similar to one of the enemies in a great game from my childhood – Commander Keen<\/a>. (Side note: I first got the game\u00a0from one of the many mail-order shareware companies that were\u00a0popular before the Internet was in practically every home.)<\/em><\/p>\n

Simple enough, the Alien is basically 3 spheres and 2 cylinders. After 30 or so iterations, I finally had one I liked.<\/p>\n

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My inspiration (from Commander Keen)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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My Tribute to Commander Keen<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Learning to paint took about 2 days of watching video after video trying to figure things out. Part of that time was devoted to me hunting down the cause of\u00a0 a “bug”, which I later learned was a default setting in vertex paint.<\/p>\n

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This is not a boog.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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With the Painting Mask enabled (the 'F' key)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The freenode #blender channel had plenty of knowledgeable users that convinced me that I wasn’t dealing with a bug in my install<\/p>\n

Probably the best thing about Blender is that even I (having no real graphical talents), was able to create a decent looking object with a small amount of effort. And\u00a0 I could then animate it, using armatures and a tutorial<\/a> by Ira Krakow.<\/p>\n

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Citronella is Evil: The Action Editor and Timeline<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

After creating a few other random objects (some of which looked just plain pathetic), I ended up with a small stable of characters – and thankfully an assignment where they could live.<\/p>\n

The Allegro programming library is a well documented, easy to use programming library that handles the tough parts of graphics programming – getting objects onto the screen. As with everything – where does one start?<\/p>\n

Having two weeks to start and finish a game, I decided another childhood staple would be the perfect game to write – Jetpack<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Just a fun game.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Jetpack had a lot of great things going for it – fun game, re-playable (especially since it had a built in level editor) , and one of my favorite things – a jetpack. Jetpack could easily be thought of as Lode Runner<\/a> with the ability to fly.<\/p>\n

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XScavenger is a fun Linux port of Lode Runner<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

While digging through Allegro’s online manual<\/a> and chatting with other users on freenode (trying to\u00a0 figure out how I could write this thing), my storyline inspiration played on my Last.FM <\/a>stream – “Let’s save Tony Orlando’s House<\/a>“, a great song by Yo La Tengo<\/a> about Frankie Valli<\/a> setting fire to\u00a0 Tony Orlando’s<\/a> house after a dispute over backup singers. The song is so subtle (it could easily be played in an elevator) that I had probably heard it a dozen times before actually realizing this soft song was all about a pretty amusing instance of arson.<\/p>\n

So, I had a storyline, I had a borrowed game idea- and I had little time.\u00a0 My first tasks basically drilled down to these items:<\/p>\n

How do I make the background of a bitmap image transparent?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Set the transparent portion of the bitmap to #FF00FF (pink), and use masked_blit() or draw_sprite()<\/p>\n

Hmm, Allegro didn’t remove all the pink background?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Make sure to disable anti-aliasing, you’re blending #FF00FF with nearby colors<\/p>\n

How do I easily generate animations?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Design the models in Blender, use armatures and timelines to create the motion, save them as individual bitmaps (with OSA disabled and with the camera’s background color set to #FF00FF)<\/p>\n

What’s the shortcut to add bitmaps to a datfile? Grabber would take forever!<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Use the command line interface to datfiles – “dat”. Trust me on this one, I could archive 300 images in a few seconds, doing it by hand would be masochistic, taking hours.<\/p>\n

How do I prevent choppiness in animations and movement?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

There’s system bitmaps, video bitmaps, and memory bitmaps. Look into them, and the example code that comes with Allegro (especially exupdate<\/a>) for ideas and examples.<\/p>\n

How can I fade in\/out?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

One method is to place a semi-transparent black rectangle over the screen. Look at set_trans_blender(), drawing_mode(), and rectfill().<\/p>\n

With the answers to those questions in tow, I had a decent demo ready in under two weeks; one that supported smooth screen scrolling, had some limited game-physics, and an even more limited level editor.<\/p>\n

In the end, I pieced together level backgrounds using GIMP<\/a> and a few photos from IStockPhoto.com<\/a>. The game physics could be better, I’ll attribute their current state to my inexperience and the pending deadline. In the end – I think the project turned out fairly well.<\/p>\n

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GIMP and the first level background<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

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Part of the Title Sequence to the game. Tony Orlando image used without his consent.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I took the following screen capture of the game using Taksi<\/a>, an open-source, and free capture program in the same vein as Fraps<\/a> (although Fraps is limited to 30 seconds of capture in the trial version). The screen-capture doesn’t have sound (the game does) and the actual game runs much smoother than the screen-capture..<\/p>\n

<\/embed><\/object><\/p>\n

So basically, you’re a mosquito with no wings (thank you Mr. Orlando) fighting to survive, collecting blood IV’s and gascans to fuel your jetpack. Now, I’ve got another project to dedicate free time to – all made possible with Blender, Allegro, GIMP,\u00a0 and a little programming.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I had an enjoyable assignment in a college course on the C language the other day – using the Allegro libraries, write a game of your choosing. The assignment coincided with my recent discovery of Blender, the 3D mesh animation and design tool. Out of boredom on a recent weekend afternoon, I found Blender in … Continue reading Video Game Creation using Blender, Gimp, and Allegro<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,23,25,24,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allegro","category-blender","category-c","category-gimp","category-what"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.braindeadprojects.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/839"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.braindeadprojects.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.braindeadprojects.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.braindeadprojects.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.braindeadprojects.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=839"}],"version-history":[{"count":48,"href":"http:\/\/www.braindeadprojects.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/839\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":899,"href":"http:\/\/www.braindeadprojects.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/839\/revisions\/899"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.braindeadprojects.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.braindeadprojects.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.braindeadprojects.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}