Endless flying - featuring extra fluffy clouds

Hi,
just wanted to show something I'm working on at the moment for a group of Interaction Design students at my college.

They've designed an interactive installation and I'm now developing the software. This is basically the first time I've attempted to program something in Gamestudio from scratch without just blindly sticking together code snippets from other people. So far it's all working out so I'm pretty happy.

The main idea is to allow endless flying across a static world (meaning it's not randomly generated). Clouds where an important aspect. And eventually music and soundeffects will be faded in and out depending on the height of the player above the world.




Everything you can see in the screenshot and the video is placeholder art. It's a little difficult to see that the world is in fact not just random because I keep using the same tiles.
Just look out for the vertical spiral cloud and the rocks without moss, that;s the center of the map;)

The cloud patterns are very unrealistic at this point in time but I just wanted to test what was possible.

Anyway have a look at it all and let me know what you think.

cartoon_baboon



PS.

A list of things that still need attention:
-getting the clouds to adjust their tilt as well so they can keep facing the camera even when viewed from above.
- further smoothing of controls
- optimise performance, atm there are still a lot of clouds that are out of view but aren't being removed, resulting on somewhat slow performance on my ancient computer
- implement sound and music
- create world models and cloud patterns

nide clouds!
Will you share how you create it?

Thanks!

I'll be releasing the code soon once I've optimised removal and creation of clouds further (see to do list in first post). However I can tell you it's basically just sprites being generated at the vertice positions of a model. At creation they fade in from zero alpha so their popping into view isn't visible.

cartoon_baboon

i really like it CB, what a great demo! i hope you release it an A6 version as well.

use a shader for the rotating of the clouds. I've tried to make them face the camera when seen from above, it's ...well, I won't say impossible... but I never managed to do it... and I used the same code.
If you figure it out anyways, it'd be great to know. (I think gimbal lock is the problem... )

This:

cloudpointer.pan=0;
cloudpointer.roll=0;
cloudpointer.tilt=360;

let the clouds always facing the camera,
if you use simple sprites ( image files instead of .mdl files).
f.e:

void cloud_func()
{
my.pan=0;
my.tilt=0;
my.roll=360;
}

void main()
{
load_level("");

ent_create("cloud.png",nullvector,cloud_func);
}

Yes, but they still turn in a weird way when looking at them from above. they suddenly seem to "roll" around 180 degrees...

Hi everybody,
thanks for the positive feedback and input.

@Blink: I'm using A6 myself, so that won't be a problem

well I've had a busy week working on another prototype for my course.

I've got the clouds facing properly by using the following code:



I don't know how this behaves when the camera is EXACTLY above a cloud but it isn't a problem in this case as you never get to look straight down at a cloud anyway.

The students I am making this for wanted a world that was 50% water 50% land so I've a water shader (yay to Roel Smit for that and ChrisB for the render2texture dll).

Here are some new shots and a new video capture:






I'll be back in a week with more progress. I also hope to clean up the code A LOT as it is now a rather shameful mess

cartoon_baboon

Wow, those are really good looking clouds, I'm really curious to the code that makes it work. Anyway keep up the good work!!!

Nice improvement!
Maybe you should decrease the wave-size a bit, the reflections make the islands look kinda small.