Plan for Tom Bampton
by Tom Bampton · 05/12/2005 (12:58 pm) · 9 comments
This is an RTS game where the player plays as an ant colony. Some bastard has augmented the ants with backpacks filled with explosives and genetically engineered the ants as kamikazes. Basically, the ants attack other ants by running up to them then exploding, taking out the surrounding area including other ants and terrain. The ants have a system of tunnels that they can get around by walking into an anthill and selecting a destination.
GID12, Antocalypse Now
The team (in no particular order):
Code: Tom Bampton, Dave Myers
Art: Logan Foster, Nauris Krauze, Craig Fortune, Ben Chavigner, Matt Mitman
Code
Dave did a great job on getting the anthills working, and I did a mediocre job of getting the ants working. In order to save a bunch of work, ant hills just spawn an ant every few seconds.
We used the RTS pack, some code from the Wanking Penguin GID and (see below) the Lighting Pack.
There's not really any more to say on the code.
Art
In true GID spirit, while Ben and Matt were working on the Ant model, we reused Rob Brower's penguin from GID10. You can also see Craig's budweiser bottle here.
The "ants" can now explode. Cool.
Real ants! Ben modeled and skinned it, Matt rigged and animated it. Its pretty damn sweet. See the movies below for more.
About half way through sunday it was kind of decided to merge the lighting pack. Merging the lighting pack 1.3.5 beta with the RTS pack during the harsh time restrictions of a GID seemed like a pretty stupid thing to do, so I did it. I had it done inside of an hour, but in hindsight it was a bit of a mistake. As many will tell you, the past couple of weeks I've had to do a lot of merging of various codebases, the result of which has invariably been me getting really really pissed off. This merge was no exception. As you can see, I slightly screwed it up, but I was so pissed off by the end of the merge that I couldnt be bothered to fix it.
You can also see Logan's kick ass ant hills in this pic.
Movies ... you gotta see the ant moving. It's just f'ing great. The two movies are pretty much the same. You can also see Nauris' awesome menu art in the movies, which strangely I dont have a picture of. The movies were taken before the lighting pack merge and before Logan had the ant hills done, but there were not really any other code changes besides the lighting pack.
.WMV, 576K, Crappy Quality
.AVI (DivX required), 9MB, OK Quality
Matt also did a "flying" animation that was equally great, but unfortunately we didnt have time to use.
Well, thats about it. We didnt get as much done as we'd like. Davis was going to join in with us on code, but his Mac laptop suffered catastrophic hard drive failure so he didnt take part. However, he's going to try and turn it into a "real" game this weekend if he has time, so maybe this isnt the end.
There is no single player game, and the only multiplayer test we did met with problems, so there's no build available of this. Depending on what Davis gets done, there may be a build in the next week or so. Don't hold your breath, though :)
GID12, Antocalypse Now
The team (in no particular order):
Code: Tom Bampton, Dave Myers
Art: Logan Foster, Nauris Krauze, Craig Fortune, Ben Chavigner, Matt Mitman
Code
Dave did a great job on getting the anthills working, and I did a mediocre job of getting the ants working. In order to save a bunch of work, ant hills just spawn an ant every few seconds.
We used the RTS pack, some code from the Wanking Penguin GID and (see below) the Lighting Pack.
There's not really any more to say on the code.
Art
In true GID spirit, while Ben and Matt were working on the Ant model, we reused Rob Brower's penguin from GID10. You can also see Craig's budweiser bottle here.
The "ants" can now explode. Cool.
Real ants! Ben modeled and skinned it, Matt rigged and animated it. Its pretty damn sweet. See the movies below for more.
About half way through sunday it was kind of decided to merge the lighting pack. Merging the lighting pack 1.3.5 beta with the RTS pack during the harsh time restrictions of a GID seemed like a pretty stupid thing to do, so I did it. I had it done inside of an hour, but in hindsight it was a bit of a mistake. As many will tell you, the past couple of weeks I've had to do a lot of merging of various codebases, the result of which has invariably been me getting really really pissed off. This merge was no exception. As you can see, I slightly screwed it up, but I was so pissed off by the end of the merge that I couldnt be bothered to fix it.
You can also see Logan's kick ass ant hills in this pic.
Movies ... you gotta see the ant moving. It's just f'ing great. The two movies are pretty much the same. You can also see Nauris' awesome menu art in the movies, which strangely I dont have a picture of. The movies were taken before the lighting pack merge and before Logan had the ant hills done, but there were not really any other code changes besides the lighting pack.
.WMV, 576K, Crappy Quality
.AVI (DivX required), 9MB, OK Quality
Matt also did a "flying" animation that was equally great, but unfortunately we didnt have time to use.
Well, thats about it. We didnt get as much done as we'd like. Davis was going to join in with us on code, but his Mac laptop suffered catastrophic hard drive failure so he didnt take part. However, he's going to try and turn it into a "real" game this weekend if he has time, so maybe this isnt the end.
There is no single player game, and the only multiplayer test we did met with problems, so there's no build available of this. Depending on what Davis gets done, there may be a build in the next week or so. Don't hold your breath, though :)
About the author
Recent Blogs
• A Game in 2750 Days• GID23 and NPC Editor
• Fun with Lua
• How NOT to make a game
• Thinking Outside the Box
#3
05/12/2005 (2:05 pm)
#4
I dont really know what i did. I was going through merging as usual but at more then one point my eyes glazed over and its entirely possible i screwed up some conflicts. There is definate problems with the merging terrain since there were a lot of things I couldnt be bothered with resolving. It's just one of those things that happen if you merge code whilst in a rush :) I was actually very surprised that it worked at all. Interesting that you mention sceneLighting, though, I dont remember there being much in the way of problems outside of the terrain ... maybe I missed something.
Thanks for the offer of help, but I dont really care if the code works or not ;-) It was only a GID and most of it's script. Actually, the only C++ code came from GID10, the RTS pack and the lighting pack. If I was going to continue the codebase I'd just redo the whole C++ side.
T.
05/12/2005 (2:27 pm)
John,I dont really know what i did. I was going through merging as usual but at more then one point my eyes glazed over and its entirely possible i screwed up some conflicts. There is definate problems with the merging terrain since there were a lot of things I couldnt be bothered with resolving. It's just one of those things that happen if you merge code whilst in a rush :) I was actually very surprised that it worked at all. Interesting that you mention sceneLighting, though, I dont remember there being much in the way of problems outside of the terrain ... maybe I missed something.
Thanks for the offer of help, but I dont really care if the code works or not ;-) It was only a GID and most of it's script. Actually, the only C++ code came from GID10, the RTS pack and the lighting pack. If I was going to continue the codebase I'd just redo the whole C++ side.
T.
#5
"The ants go marching two by two, hurrah.... hurrah."
There's just too much potential in this idea.
05/12/2005 (2:38 pm)
Man, keep working on this! This has potential. Red ants vs. Black Ants!"The ants go marching two by two, hurrah.... hurrah."
There's just too much potential in this idea.
#6
Not sure what's going on since I'm not a code.
05/12/2005 (10:56 pm)
I'm actually running into the square shadow thing too. :-/Not sure what's going on since I'm not a code.
#7
Anyway it's great Tom keep it up! Neat stuff.
05/13/2005 (12:08 am)
Why is someone crying about the Bud wize er? This is (an example of) why I don't post plans anymore.Anyway it's great Tom keep it up! Neat stuff.
#8
Did this happen when integrating into the RTS kit (like Tom)? Can you upload a copy of the code to our shared ftp space? I'd like to take a look at the integration to find out what happened
05/13/2005 (6:03 am)
Hey Tim,Did this happen when integrating into the RTS kit (like Tom)? Can you upload a copy of the code to our shared ftp space? I'd like to take a look at the integration to find out what happened
#9
Hmm. There is a lot more that I wanted to get done with the game, so maybe i'll revisit it. I'm way too busy at the moment to fit it in though so I dont know when that will be :(
Randy,
Adams comment was a continuation of a joke from IRC. I found it funny :)
John,
Drop by #gameinaday and ping me and ill zip up "my" code and send you that to look through. I just woke up so I'll probably forget without being reminded.
T.
05/13/2005 (8:07 am)
Jay,Hmm. There is a lot more that I wanted to get done with the game, so maybe i'll revisit it. I'm way too busy at the moment to fit it in though so I dont know when that will be :(
Randy,
Adams comment was a continuation of a joke from IRC. I found it funny :)
John,
Drop by #gameinaday and ping me and ill zip up "my" code and send you that to look through. I just woke up so I'll probably forget without being reminded.
T.
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