The conference was a big success. I will report a bit more about it later. In this mail I want to concentrate a bit on Apricot. Ton Roosendaal (project manager of Blender) visited the conference. His main goal was to get an idea on what Crystal Space can already do and also to get a feeling on the Crystal Space community. When Ton left the conference on sunday he told me that he has gained a lot of confidence in us and that his impression was very good. We also talked a lot about how to actually organize Apricot. You'll get to see a lot more about this project in the near future. The Apricot project will most likely start around the first of january. But before that there is already a lot that we can do (and must do) so that at the time the project starts the people involved can concentrate on making the game and we don't have to extend CS and CEL too much then. Note that we will really aim very high with this project. The goal is to make a game that can compete with commercial quality games.
Here is a initial list of things we will have to work on for Apricot (and CS + CEL in general): 1. A very important thing will be the new render manager. This is absolutely necessary to do modern effects like HDR, Bloom, post processing effects, better dynamic hardware shadows, water reflection effects, ... These really are essential for games like Apricot. Marten will do the initial work on this and after a few weeks or a month at most other people should be capable of joining the work in this area. 2. Equally important will be a much improved character animation system. Since the game setting will be cartoon based character animation is absolutely essential. When people will look at Apricot later the character animation will have to be something that is flawless and people will think it compares to bigger commercial games. We still need a developer to work on this area with us. Initially I will contact a few people (mostly among the Blender devs) to get a feeling about what exactly we need. Also in Blender they will work on an improved character animation system. With Elephants Dream the character animation was often criticized as not being absolutely perfect. They want to improve that in their next Open Movie project. 3. This is not certain yet (depends on how the game will be made) but most likely we will need some kind of imposters and/or LOD. It is possible we'll have to render forest as well so LOD or imposters will be important. We have to see exactly how and what has to be done here but trying to integrate OpenTree better (Fossi has already done some effort on this in his imposters branch last year). 4. We don't know yet if we will need things like lipsync and facial animation. This is a complicated area and maybe the game will not require it. Just adding this to the list so that we keep this in mind in case it really is needed. 5. We are considering improving bullet plugin. The Bullet physics library is a big thing in the blender world and many people consider it to be better then the ODE physics library. We already have a Bullet plugin in CS but it is probably not completely full-featured yet. 6. In CEL we'll have to do more work on game logic stuff. Things like support for the new character animation system and support for whatever game logic we will need in Apricot. 7. Probably I forgot a few things but the list above can already keep us occupied for a while :-) Greetings, -- Project Manager of Crystal Space (http://www.crystalspace3d.org) and CEL (http://cel.crystalspace3d.org) Support Crystal Space. Donate at https://sourceforge.net/donate/index.php?group_id=649 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by DB2 Express Download DB2 Express C - the FREE version of DB2 express and take control of your XML. No limits. Just data. Click to get it now. http://sourceforge.net/powerbar/db2/ _______________________________________________ Crystal-main mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/crystal-main Unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
