Working on the level. Early screens

Note: Note naija themed yet. We need to discuss that. We will need 3D modelers to achieve that. Well sha,

Here is a sketched map of the level.

@ worldbest: Great job. I'll be done with my registration soon,  just some minor things to complete and I'll start doing some work.

                      The map is large though. We should concentrate on one residential area, preferably one close to the soccer field so we have a mixture of closed spaces and wide ones.

                       The rest of the map should be restricted from the player for now. I don't think we are ready to work on a large map yet because due to the nature of the game, the setting being a mixture of urban and rural environment, we will be forced to fall into the feature trap.

                        We're going to be thinking of filling the void created by such a large expanse of virtual land and implementing things like bicycles, skateboards and cars may seem cool but they are largely secondary to the game. Lets work on a small area first and see how we can improve.

                        Regarding the building in the pix and 3d in general; It looks nice. Are you using 3ds max? I noticed the interior was displaying without any errors. You can duplicate it and modify it to look different then duplicate both again, modify and make several small layout configurations. Saves modeling time.

                        I had a hard time getting my blender models to display well in unity till I discovered it was caused by normals facing the wrong direction. It seems 3ds max doesn't have that problem. Just giving a heads up to anyone who is also using blender. It's better to turn off double sided before you start modeling so you don't make mistakes. 

                        It's also better to model several buildings together and share textures. My problem now is texturing as well as getting the object scale in blender right because it doesn't have a unit of measurement like 3ds max. The 2.5 version might have but I don't think it's supported by many apps yet.

@GraphMoney: Thanks. Welcome to the team.

@GA: Yes its a really large map.

I agree with starting from the residential area near the soccer field but i think it is too small for the first level though. We can just make that area and test other functionalities there before expanding the level. I made the house in blender, exported it in .fbx format for Unity.

At the moment i am still figuring out how i can make gutters/drainages(normal naija stuff) and how to make roads.


We need to have an idea of how the scene will look like, what kind of houses(face-me-i-face you, 1-2 storey build,church,school). Remember we talked about creating a naija kind of scene.

We need to know how and where we will be placing them assuming we are focusing on just the Residential area near the soccer field.

I will come up with a sketched arrangement plan for the Residential area tomorrow.


Cheers

What of real football 2011 wit multi player and master league and enter the legend.

@DKaz

Listen, go advertise you mobile site somewhere else. We don hear you.

@worldbest: Unity can import blender 2.49 files directly. I don't know about the new version of blender and unity 3 though.Try extruding the edge of a plane downwards, sideways and upwards again to get a gutter.

Using a small residential area first might work. We place puzzles, enemies and other things along the way.  The player races against time to get to his objective. If the area is small, the player can study the environment better and learn things quickly. Following your level one mission you suggested earlier, we can split it into three levels.

1: Find a job- The player has to look for 5 people who will send him on an errand, if he delivers his message late, he loses etc.

2: Sales/search mission: The player may be asked to look for buyers of a good before time runs out etc

3: Tuition: A man loses something and will reward anyone who finds it. Can you find it before others do or before the time runs out. It is the only available opportunity to pay your fees.

All this missions can involve tricky puzzles. The player encounters the gangs along the way etc. We also have to think of things to reward the player with.

@GA:
Great i love it. I have further refined it this way.

In the begining,player has to live his apartment and head for the newspaper stand or a job agency to find a job.

He finds a job and has to go to the address to meet with is future employer.

He is offered the job.The employer gives him products(legal or contraband) to sell to specific people over a period of time. if he fails he doesnt get paid or he is fired.

As he engages in his missions,he encounters gangs,police,robbers,money making ventures(gambling or crime).

Proceeding with the mission, he meets new characters interested in offering him jobs(GTA Style). He also obtains/picks things(weapons,money etc) during missions.

He is awarded money,clothings,gadgets(Iphone,ipad,car etc) on completion of tasks.

He may decide to later sell his rewards for money, remember his main objective for the first level is to come up with his First year college tuition.

He can also participate in search competitions with AI characters for rewards.

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so now we need a to model his house,newspaper stand,etc

@ worldbest: I don't know about those rewards yet. Why give the player such things? you have to pay apple to show the ipad in your game, what music will he play on it? Will you pay for the song licenses?

Secondly : Trying to do things similar things implemented in games like GTA require time and knowledge. GTA is a very sophisticated game with high end AI, animation and effects. Lets keep things really simple and only do what is really needed.

I suggest we implement just money and points as rewards. We limit the interaction to just enemies who will be encountered in groups and those who offer him missions for now.

Modeling is house is not so complicated as it should be small and rough. A small problem might be arise from getting the scale right in blender for objects modeled in different scenes. The other for me personally is texturing.

The camera might also prove tricky as we'll have to ensure it doesn't stick into walls as the player moves about. We can use the smooth follow camera for now though. We'll concentrate on better implementations of things after we're done with most of the work.

@GA: Will the need for a licence arise when we do not plan to sell the game? And i dont think having a player meet people like GTA will be too hard to implement programmatically. We dont have to use apples ipad,iphone it was just an example though. Having sure rewards can only make the game experience better. By aquiring such rewards, he's 'Rep Rank' gets higher or we can make him need d rewards in other missions. I believe this first leve isl where we should test stuffs.

, And I dont like the way your response sounds, dnt give d idea that i dnt know what im talking about, we just contributing ok.

For the camera, we can attach the camera to a cylinder and apply collision detectors to the cylinder and let the cylinder follow the player. I think that will solve d camera problem.

@ worldbest: chill bro, I'm sorry, my reply wasn't meant to imply anything. I didn't mean to offend you.

I was just trying to say that giving the player certain things have consequences and some of them are external to the game. Giving him money means we have to give him something to do with it and since we already have things like him paying for tuition, it's can go easily with the game. Other things like ipods require certain things. We can design different gadgets but we have to consider If we can do without it, what it means for the player and what he can or should do with it.

While we can easily program the interaction, we have to consider it's realism, how it impacts the player, how the interaction can be dynamic, how to control the NPCs when not interacting with the player etc. All these things may push us to unnecessary planning and programming at this time. That is why I suggested a small area with mainly enemies who are fought off and characters who give the player missions. All the other things can be added when we are through with most of the game. I just wanted us to do the necessary things first.

Again, I'm sorry,

@GA: No problems, i agree with the simple idea. We need to have a plan on how the level will look like,for instance, where will the player's employers stay, the arrangements of building etc. I suggest we draw a plan for the level,it will show where house A or B should be place, the routes/roads needs to be planed well too. I will post a small demo map later today.

We need an efficient way to share our files. We can do that on sourceforge but the game will be public since its SF is an open source platform.

Meanwhile, i am modelling a 6 room 'face me i face you' building then i will go find a tutorial on texturing.

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Or are we just creating just anyhow environment?

@worldbest: We'll do mixed buildings for now. We can work well on some and just make the others to populate the scene. At least, one the houses on the main streets may allow the player to go indoors. We can arrange 10 houses on a street since most of them will be low poly and not have inner spaces.


We can put the characters on separate streets and but I'm not yet sure how to make something like a radar to show important locations on the map. Maybe we can use small sign boards or 3d arrows to show directions for now.


I think most of the free repositories are for public projects. We can still put the needed things there since this is mostly a learning project, we'll just manage it but if we feel like we don't want to share something particular with others that are not part the project, we can secure the file with a password and share it through 4shared or something else.

@GA: Well said. Lets begin work on the level. For now our objective should be to:

1. Create a level
2. Create simple camera
3. Allow movement around level

Lets try to achieve this in 1 week.

I will create a SourceForge account when i am on my pc,if you can you can set it up.
,
Are we using Unity's terrains or we are just building d world from blender, cus i see in your attached image u may have done that from blender. I will suggest we only use blender to model and import into unity, that way we can scale acurately.
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Still figuring out texturing,

@ worldbest: Yes I did it in blender. Like you said, it'll help prevent too much scaling etc.

Please post anything you find on texturing. I haven't seen good tutorials yet.

I'll try registering on sourceforge now.

EDIT::

I've registered and started a project.

Its at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/naijadev/

Well done so far GA & WB!!

You guys are doing a great job. Thogh am late but i still like to join. I know i would have some inputs.

Name: Ojukwu Ogbonnaya
E-mail: ojukwuogbonnaya@gmail.com
Skills:
Vb.net, asp.net, vwd (very good)
C#,Blender (Learning and fast too)
Maya(good)

Please where can i get the free version of unity?

@GraphMoney

Thanks alot.

@Ojukwu
You are welcome to the team. We are currently creating the first level, since you have skills with 3D modelling tools, we will need low poly models  of buildings(Naija sytles) this buildings dont have to have openings/Spaces inside. We want to complete this level really quick. Your help here will make things easier. Welcome to the team again.

@ Ojukwu24: http://www.unity3d.com welcome to the team.

@ GraphMoney: Thanks.

Are you the one modding games pls mode correct real football 2011 beta version

working, I'll replace the ground plane with several better defined meshes later

Ok, This is really great. I still cant find good tutorials on texturing. You did this in blender right, cool man. Can you upload the project file so i can begin work on the camera?

@ worldbest: Yes I did it in blender. I'm in school now trying to finalize my registration. I'll upload it as soon as I get home tomorrow.

Pls guys,am sorry i've nt been able to do anything. My pc crashed d day i joined. I pray they fix it and on time. It has to do with the nvidia chip on the boart.

@ ojukwu24: It's cool, hoping you'll fix it soon.

@world best: I'm uploading the unity package now. It's large because I included the default unity package(standard asset) with it, about 67mb. I'll only add upload additional models and packages next time so as to reduce size of needed downloads.

A few things you'll notice in the level model is that some random tall blocks are present. I used them to represent a human for scale/proportion sake, especially so I can limit the height of objects on the floor so that the player can easily step over them.

In unity, I decided to use the default firstpersoncontroller prefab as the default human size an changed the level import scale to five which makes the blocks i mentioned earlier just a little taller.

My speed is messing up and I couldn't upload the whole project file so I just uploaded the blend file. Just change the scale in the import setting to 5, add a firstpersoncontoller, lights and walk around.

@GA: Alright, i have downloaded it. At the moment i am not with my laptop, i will get home by tomorrow. I will add a camera and use a cylinder prefab as actor and allow the camera follow the actor while adding collision detection to both actor and camera.

Nice.

Cheers

Hello,house is bin long, i had some challenges,am with u guys.U guys av rily done a great job!

@ skoten: nice, welcome back.

@skoten: Welcome back bro.

Name: William Odiomonafe
email: catchwillonline@yahoo.com
phone: 07068535208, 08074586601
Skills: HTML Website Coding,
BASIC P.L
JAVA (Beginner)
V. Basic (Some knowledge)

@willo. Welcome to the team.

I am currently working on the camera.