Dual Wielding Pistols - My Blender Game Engine Project

[MoreDread]

I spent the past couple weeks chatting with PaulTheGreat and creating my own little demo using the Blender Game Engine.
it's been great fun and a good learning experience.
The demo is still in its early stages, but it's coming along much faster than i thought it would.
i have been a hobbyist modeler and animator for quite some time and i actually started learning how to program in Python for this project.

as you can tell by watching the video there are still lots of things to be fixed and/or improved.
it turned out much darker than it actually looks on my monitor, but i think you can see most of whats going on.

the features i managed to implement in the past 3 weeks are:
basic movement + jumping, first person hands controlled by the hydras in 1 to 1 motion,
a dynamic grabbing system that lets me pick up, stack and throw objects,
dual wielding pistols and headtracking using a webcam (no IR leds required)
tho i didn't record any footage of this feature just yet.

currently i'm also using custom shaders for a dynamic depth of field effect and SSAO
written by Martins Upitis

beyond just improving the features i have already put in, i'm working on implementing
a ragdoll system in the near future.

[Leonard Callus]

I spent the past couple weeks chatting with PaulTheGreat and creating my own little demo using the Blender Game Engine.
it's been great fun and a good learning experience.
The demo is still in its early stages, but it's coming along much faster than i thought it would.
i have been a hobbyist modeler and animator for quite some time and i actually started learning how to program in Python for this project.

as you can tell by watching the video there are still lots of things to be fixed and/or improved.
it turned out much darker than it actually looks on my monitor, but i think you can see most of whats going on.

the features i managed to implement in the past 3 weeks are:
basic movement + jumping, first person hands controlled by the hydras in 1 to 1 motion,
a dynamic grabbing system that lets me pick up, stack and throw objects,
dual wielding pistols and headtracking using a webcam (no IR leds required)
tho i didn't record any footage of this feature just yet.

currently i'm also using custom shaders for a dynamic depth of field effect and SSAO
written by Martins Upitis

beyond just improving the features i have already put in, i'm working on implementing
a ragdoll system in the near future.

Wow, great job! If future games had to be released like this, motion controlling in gaming would so much more interesting.
Could you publish this for us to use when you complete the project?

[MoreDread]

Wow, great job! If future games had to be released like this, motion controlling in gaming would so much more interesting.
Could you publish this for us to use when you complete the project?

of course!
the whole point of this project is to figure out ways to make good use of the hydra and hand it out for other people to use in their games.
i'm just one guy, so obviously i cannot develop a whole game that could compete with the amount of content and quality of graphics that
the industry is producing.

most game developers are not at liberty to experiment much... but hobbyists could use what i made for their own little projects, and maybe
it will even inspire some of the professionals if i do a good job at it.

[RealoFoxtrot]

Wow... this does look absolutely great for a project i want to make eventually.. involving physics combat with a Sixense specific controls

[MoreDread]

Wow... this does look absolutely great for a project i want to make eventually.. involving physics combat with a Sixense specific controls

send me a PM with your skype account name, if you have one,
otherwise you can find me on irc://irc.freenode.com #gameblender

[Danny]

Impressive!
Are you guys using PPJoy still or have you tried using the SDK and grab the raw data from the controllers? That would be a very useful project to have and could be added to http://sixense.com/forum/vbulletin/f...133-Developers

An intersting fact is that we had portal firing working like this at one point in Portal 2. You could even roll the controller to change the fired portal orientation. Unfortuneately, it was far too challenging. You couldn't really effectively aim both simultaneously as the cursors got further apart.

[MoreDread]

Impressive!
Are you guys using PPJoy still or have you tried using the SDK and grab the raw data from the controllers? That would be a very useful project to have and could be added to http://sixense.com/forum/vbulletin/f...133-Developers

An intersting fact is that we had portal firing working like this at one point in Portal 2. You could even roll the controller to change the fired portal orientation. Unfortuneately, it was far too challenging. You couldn't really effectively aim both simultaneously as the cursors got further apart.

i'm actually using mrwonkos input wrapper and ppjoy.
http://www.mrwonko.de/downloads/
http://ppjoy.blogspot.de/
which is a little tricky to set up and contains some minor bugs (one axis seems to be slightly messy)
a more direct approach would be desirable, but unfortunately my (little) programming knowledge only applies to Python so i don't think i'm up for the task.

[PaulTheGreat]

This looks pretty cool!

I would love to be able to pull the hydra input right into blender, and I know there are ways to do it, but I'm not much of a programmer either, so if I did it, it would take me a ton of time and would likely be a poor implementation.

If you hooked it up to python, you could probably link it up with 3ds, maya and lightwave without too much trouble. It'd make a nice virtual camera or animation tool.

[cookies4you]

Love it. Might wanna up the FOV, however.

[Marcello Cangialosi]

Great demo MoreDread!

I was actually thinking about something similar myself, but I don't have the means nor the skills to put a demo together. My idea involved holding an hostage much like you do with one cube at some point and using gun orientation to affect enemy AI (point at hostage head to say "stop or I'll kill him!", point at ceiling and fire to get attention etc.). My idea was also based on the Move tech, so I was struggling figuring out how to preserve camera control during the hostage situation, which is not a problem with the Hydra since it comes with a two sticks. I assume you are using the right stick for camera control right?

How much control do you have over the camera FOV? Would it be possible to dynamically increase/decrease its range as the red dots are moved farther apart/closer together? I wonder how that feels (probably not very good because changing the FOV on the fly would require constant target reacquisition).

Since you are doing head position tracking already (as far as I understand), perhaps adding orientation tracking would help in aiming the two guns when they point outside of the FOV, albeit one at the time of course. This would be ideal for recreating Mexican stand off situations

I really like the hand swapping idea (with one gun). I can see something like that being useful when shooting from corners.

Overall, great job!