The amazing hackers at ONI Central did it again, and recently added a Lara Croft model to Oni. So I ran OniSplit on their patch, which created a dat/raw Oni-level file, on which I ran my old Oni-Breaker, and tadaaaa! Presto, here’s Lara Croft in Konoko Payne. Yay.
If you want to try it out in the last KP release, here’s a small patch. I imagine anybody interested will figure out what to do with it (and if not, you don’t deserve it :))
www.codercorner.com/KonokoPayne_WIP_April_2010.rar
Fullofbugsnotimeforanythingthosedayssorry.
Here’s a quick test for adding a gravity gun to KP.
- run the exe
- select “Developer => Load test level => GravityGunTest” (the only level included in this release anyway)
- pick up the gravity gun in front of you when the game starts. The console in your back gives some additional instructions.
Very quick test put together in one week-end, there are some bugs, etc. Just to have something to post… not much time for anything those days.
Here is another Konoko Payne release. The last one before moving back to Switzerland! The main change is that pathfinding is now performed via the Recast & Detour library. It’s just the initial implementation, so you may expect some troubles.
Changelist:
Played a bit more with Recast. It rocks so far.
I wonder if I could use the Recast nav-mesh with PathEngine?? Sounds like best of both worlds if Detour has some limitations. For example I don’t know yet if it handles dynamic obstacles very well.
The world is cut into several regions connected by portals. I think I will end up generating one nav-mesh per region. Then if a pathfinding query goes from point Pa in region Ra to point Pb in region Pb, I can always split the query into several sub-queries: first from Pa to the portal connecting Ra and Rb, then from the portal to Pb. Or maybe Recast’s “tiled” mode can do the trick directly.
Not sure how to handle moving platforms yet.
I tried Recast on ONI’s level 10. Seems to Just Work! This was all generated by clicking a button.
I guess it’s time to try “Detour” to actually do some pathfinding queries on those meshes.
EDIT: first successful pathfinding queries done with “Detour”. Just Worked. Yay!
Some more Recast notes:
My characters use capsules with radius = 4.0 and total height = 15.0. After some tweakings I got the best results with those build parameters.
The cable holes on the ground are gone. But they did not disappear when changing the “walkable climb” value. They disappeared when changing the “cell height” from 0.2 to 0.7.
EDIT: the next paragraph is BS, see the comments.
On the other hand I still have troubles with cable holes in the small “command center”, somewhere else in that level. The nav mesh here would look very reasonable without that big hole in the middle. I didn’t manage to get rid of it. Admittedly the UI does not expose all parameters yet (like “max edge length”) and maybe playing with that one will do the trick.
I see troubles with the “walkable radius” otherwise. Even though I use the actual radius from my character’s capsule, the nav mesh misses some connections, areas that can definitely be crossed by the player. Reducing the “walkable radius” helps a bit but not much, since it’s quantized to an integer value internally. So I decrease the value a bit in the UI, nothing changes, repeat that a few times, until suddenly a big change happens because the internal code clamped the float to the next integer. Would be cool to be able to fine-tune this better.
Admittedly that mesh is not very friendly with all those narrow passages. But hey, real-world meshes tend to be painful to library developers - tell me about it!
To be continued, I will post more results after exposing the last build params to the UI.
EDIT: done! Tweaking the remaining params did not significantly change the results.
John Ratcliff told me about a new pathfinding library named “Recast“. It’s open source and it looks pretty good. I am currently using PathEngine in Konoko Payne. That’s a powerful library but it has one big problem for me: navigation meshes have to be created by artists. Since I am the only “artist” in this project, it has always been a huge pain in the butt to open MAX and manually, painfully, create the nav meshes. I more or less did it in KP’s prototype, but never even started for the “real” level (especially since the level is “under construction”. No way I’ll spend time creating a nav mesh for a level which might change the next day).
So the biggest appeal for “Recast”, to me, is that it automatically builds nav meshes. I have no idea about the runtime performance or memory requirements yet, but for me this single feature makes it worth checking.
So, I did.
Pretty simple API, seems to work as advertised. Didn’t test it much yet but seems to work, and it’s fast.
(to be continued)
I’ve been working a little bit on my Konoko Payne level. I’m usually on the software engineering side of things, so progress is slow and results certainly do not look next-gen or anything. But I’m quite happy with how it turned out. With some more years of practice I might be able to create decent-looking levels 
Anyway I was thinking about sharing a few pictures:
Now, as I was saying, there’s a very strong GITS influence here. So much that you could call it a complete rip-off. But hey, I’m not selling this thing, I’m only practicing my MAX skills. So no harm done. I created some cool comparison pics to show the scene in KP and the original scene in GITS. The GITS pics have been taken with a crappy digital camera so they’re kind of bad. On the other hand using a digital camera blurs everything out and curiously makes it look better than the real thing.
Konoko Payne on the left, Ghost In The Shell on the right:
Here are bigger, individual versions:
In any case this project is a lot of fun!
A while ago I started a small shaft model in MAX. I stopped this for months but now I have some time to continue. I worked a bit on it today, and made some progress. It will be included in the next KP release.
