Daily Update 33/Daylight Game Review

Today I worked on getting the videos to play in the game- it was a fairly simple process with a bit of messing with the window to get it to fit the wall, plus getting the screen to fit on level with the window frame, but I sized and rotated till it looked right. Originally I was going to make the window frame myself, but after fiddling round with the frame trying to match everything up, I realised it was going to look very basic unless I spend more time than I had getting it to look good...

To avoid this issue I outsources the window on Blend Swap, a site I have been using for things I won't have time to build (such as beds, wheel chairs, etc). As long as the author is credited there should be no problem.

It is perfectly reasonable for me to use outside objects given my strict time limit and the scale of this project.

Otherwise, in that respect, an object of the bed itself would be good enough for the entire FMP.

There materials were acquired from http://www.blendswap.com and the window used is here;

http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/63021

I think I wrote down the links to the other materials I have downloaded, but if not I'll list them later.

Moving on;

The window was placed on the wall and there was an unattached object inside the frame- this object was given a material and texture to appear before the video is activated. For texture I just chose this crack window image from onsecrethunt.com

Remembering the rule of 3, I opened it in Photoshop and made multiple changes to it.

These changes include- cropping, flipping, adding an extra paint bucket of black, extending one of the glass crack lines and finally adding the Neon Glow effect which changed it slightly but didn't effect it too much.

This may only be a temporary texture for the windows as I am undecided, for now cracked glass seems like a reasonable texture for the environment. With the texture sorted, I input a play_video script- acquired from this tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKozX4rDJEg

I added a NEAR sensor rather than the option selected in that tutorial, so when the player gets within a distance of 10.000 blender units- the video starts to play. 

This was linked to the strip and after some fiddling with the name of the file, it worked!

That window frame was duplicated and moved down the corridor- each file name of the video had to be changed to the file name in the folder my .blender is in.

Problems I've come across are- each window is set to play a different clip (I just shift+d and duplicated), however when you walk to another video, it plays that video in all windows. In the game I want the camera to stick so they can't look away from the screen during play, so that won't be a problem, but it will be using extra memory space that doesn't need to be used, which could potentially cause it to lag or crash.

Also the sound doesn't play, so I'm assuming that's a separate function, meaning the sounds have to be exported to mp3 separately?

That's a job for later tonight or tomorrow. I'll edit if there is any updates today.

As an extra note, I was linked to this game called Daylights;

It's very similar to the game I'm building now only, you know professional.

It's a bit of a bummer as both our games contain similar elements- they even use a teddy bear and ghost theme set in a Hospital! Damn :L

Gary says this happens quite a lot when working in games or animation- I suppose we're all trying to appeal to a basic ideology which only goes as far as or collective understanding and perception, so a lot of themes are bound to be repeated multiple times.. guess we are basically the same creature with similar understanding of our environment- still though, lame D:

Bibliography:
http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/63021
http://www.onsecrethunt.com/wallpaper/3d-broken-glass-wallpaper/46904/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKozX4rDJEg
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/05/09/daylight-review-pc/#more-205985