Today marks the anniversary of America going independent, and to celebrate, I thought I would show you a bunch of new stuff we have been working on lately. This morning I woke up and realized we had no 4th of July themed hat, so I took care of that
Also, I have been working on a cool pirate ship kart as well:
Finally, a very enthusiastic Zero Gear fan (ok, my wonderful girlfriend) decided to make an entirely physical version of our sock monkey character, complete with a Zero Gear butt-label! Awesome!!!
Beyond all our expectations, the artists on the glorious game-art forum Polycount have started making custom content for Zero Gear before they have even been able to play the game themselves. Here is a little collage showcasing some of the work they have already started on:
The people are hungry for Zero Gear!!! I had better get back to work. Here is the Zero Gear thread on polycount if you want to see what people are making, or are interested in making something yourself!
We have small mention in this month’s computer graphics magazine 3DWorld! The issue focuses on open source technology, a lot of which we use in Zero Gear. If you see it on news stands, check it out!
Pior Oberson is the first person to make some custom content for Zero Gear! He has modeled a new character and hat for the game which I got into the engine today, check it out!
Woohoo! This is our 50th post since we started the Zero Gear development blog! I am just taking a quick moment to post a revised GUI mockup of how we want the garage to function. This will hopefully be another GUI programmed in flash, and will feature floating elements that can be positioned by the user. Hopefully you will be tooling around in this garage soon!
After getting Hikari working, we wanted to test it.
We wanted to create something we could use in game. Something that would be difficult or time consuming to create manually. We also wanted to see how well it held up. What better test than a Mini Map?
First, here is the Mini Map in action:
It was created by Dave’s brother Ian and supports rotating, zooming, and any number of icons on the map. It was written in ActionScript 3 and is a Flash element that is being rendering in our game using Hikari.
It performs quite well. There is barely a FPS drop and it is pretty smooth.
You can see the full source here and the data file here.
Here is a quick summery of what I needed to do to get it working in game.
I call the ActionScript loadMap(imageUrl:String, mapWidth:Number, mapHeight:Number):void function from Lua, passing in the name of the mini map image, the width of the map in game units (1 unit is a meter), and the height (or depth in 3D).
I can then call the ActionScript setPlayerPosition(x:Number, y:Number, rot:Number, zoom:Number):void function, passing in the x position, y position (or z in 3D), the degrees rotated around the y axis, and a zoom amount (based on speed of the player).
There is a similar function for setting data related to other players called setObjectPosition().
From there Ian takes care of the rest and that means I have time to watch an episode of Dexter instead of writing a Mini Map in C++. Yay!
As we are starting to build pieces of the GUI for the much anticipated race mode for our game, I spent some time mocking up a general outline of what it might look like. What do you think? We will use this as a guide to build the real pieces. Click to see the bigger picture.
