{"id":16,"date":"2011-03-30T08:51:00","date_gmt":"2011-03-30T08:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/grungi.gsmproductions.com\/?p=16"},"modified":"2011-03-30T08:51:00","modified_gmt":"2011-03-30T08:51:00","slug":"lumen-initial-progress-status","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/grungi.gsmproductions.com\/?p=16","title":{"rendered":"[Lumen] Initial progress status."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Hi there ! Welcome to the first status update about Lumen, a project I have with a friend. I figured that a good way to keep the motivation intact would be to periodically report here about our progress with the game.<\/p>\n<p>Oh yeah, Lumen is a game \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;re using <a href=\"http:\/\/www.panda3d.org\/\">Panda3D<\/a>, a free 3D engine, and\u00a0 Python as a programming language. Yesterday, I spent the evening working on some initial tests, and got to the point depicted in the video below.<\/p>\n<div style=\"clear: both; text-align: center;\"><object width=\"320\" height=\"266\" class codebase=\"http:\/\/download.macromedia.com\/pub\/shockwave\/cabs\/flash\/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0\" data-thumbnail-src=\"http:\/\/i.ytimg.com\/vi\/n8g7KXnKtmw\/0.jpg\"><param name=\"movie\" value=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/n8g7KXnKtmw?f=user_uploads&#038;c=google-webdrive-0&#038;app=youtube_gdata\" \/><param name=\"bgcolor\" value=\"#FFFFFF\" \/><\/object><\/div>\n<div style=\"text-align: center;\"><i>It&#8217;s not so impressive, but it was done in a couple of hours&#8230; <\/i><\/div>\n<p>\u00a0So, what do we have right now ?<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A terrain generated from a black and white picture, called a <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Heightmap\">heightmap<\/a>;<\/li>\n<li>Automatic simplification of the terrain based on the distance to the camera (Level of Detail, or LOD for short); <\/li>\n<li>A sphere that you can control with the keyboard;<\/li>\n<li>A mouse-controlled third person camera;<\/li>\n<li>Some simple effects like fog;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>It&#8217;s really not that much from a code standpoint, but it helped me get acquainted with Panda3D.<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;re not quite ready to discuss the concept behind Lumen right now, but as a first step we decided to concentrate on the control of the character first. That and the basic rendering stuff, of course. I&#8217;ve been following the progress made by the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wolfire.com\/overgrowth\">Overgrowth<\/a> team (Just go and watch some of their progress videos. The game is gorgeous, those videos are awesome and really informative.), and they made <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=SAtwQa8t_3g\">a video about character animation<\/a> which serves as a model for how to go from what I have now to something more elaborate.<\/p>\n<p>So next in line : investigating the use of proper physics (and make that ball jump), and probably improve the terrain rendering a bit.<\/p>\n<p>See you next time !<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hi there ! Welcome to the first status update about Lumen, a project I have with a friend. I figured that a good way to keep the motivation intact would be to periodically report here about our progress with the game. Oh yeah, Lumen is a game \ud83d\ude42 We&#8217;re using Panda3D, a free 3D engine, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[11,4,3],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/grungi.gsmproductions.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/grungi.gsmproductions.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/grungi.gsmproductions.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/grungi.gsmproductions.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/grungi.gsmproductions.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/grungi.gsmproductions.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/grungi.gsmproductions.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/grungi.gsmproductions.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/grungi.gsmproductions.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}