3D Gamestudio Gamedevelopment 3DGS A6 A7 - free engine tutorials models shaders textures codes

As HeelX announced yesterday, a freeware xmas game with opensource litec code and a great tutorial will be released on christmas eve this year! He said:

“RUDI” is an open source Christmas game. Experience fun and action in a living & graphically stunning world packed with passion and wonder, elves, sweet penguins, eskimo villages and lots of gifts to collect. Travel around the world with Rudi - the presents got lost everywhere. Each gift you collect adds a sleigh to your chain.. don’t cross them! Santa will give you some delicious gingerbread cookies for every sleigh at the end of each level, so make sure to collect as many as possible!

Rudi is a game for everyone. Beginners can start promptly, without reading a manual. You will control Rudi with the cursor keys only. If you are a hardcore gamer, you will love it too, as some packets are really well-hidden and require a lot of skill to capture them.

As if that were not enough, we added a complete do-it-yourself game development workshop! Create your own games with the A7 game engine with ease and the help of this well-structured e-book. Learn about the development process, the game mechanics and its tricks. Code examples and pictures will guide you through it and make game development a pleasure.

One level demo featuring the Northpole will be released on Christmas Eve 2007.

You can also watch a gameplay movie here at YouTube. Or have a look at more screenshots here. I’m really excited about this project and the whole tutorial! Because i think they are a great gift for the 3dgs gamestudio community, especially because this is about A7 and litec.

Yeah it’s true, finally i was able to finish the game! The neverending game Marble Sheep, formerly known as Utz Wollewutz the marble madness clone is now available and ready for download on the Marble Sheep Website. Well it’s still starring Utz Wollewutz for those of you, who miss the cute name. I was so busy the last months finishing it up and struggling with university, that i had almost no time to update the blog. Big sorry for that, i hope to return to the high update frequency i had when starting the blog soon again. Uhhh… i can tell you i’m very exhausted but happy right now, that the whole thing is finished and i’m pretty satisfied with the results also.

You can buy the game for only 9,95 $ and support me, so i can continue to develop more casual games.
If you are broke like me, you can of cause just download and try the demo for free ~23MB.

If you have any questions regarding the game, feel free to drop me a line at the comments. I’m happy about any comments regarding the game. Oh i almost forgot to thank everyone involved in making the game, motivating me to finish it and so on… by the way here is a little YouTube video i made to show you the action, in case you don’t know if you should try the demo yet.

Hey there, i just decided to compile a linklist for gamedev that helps the beginner, intermediate or even pro users to find helpful ressources for independent game development. I will always try to keep this list up to date and eliminate old/outdated links. Please dont worry, that i can not include all links, i want to keep it as clean and helpful as possible without too much confusing content.
It is not meant for the 3DGS A6/A7 user exclusively, but for everyone who wants to dive into game development and gather knowledge/tools. I also list freeware/cheap tools first, because those are meant for the indies. Note that all tools, links are tested and recommended by me and not just copied from somewhere. They are meant as a basic toolset or starting point, so you cant go wrong if you learn to use and master the things listed here!

You can find this link always under the “Freebies” Section and the sidebar, be shure to bookmark it and let me know if i missed/missspelled something, as this list will constantly grow. Thanks!

Remember: Not the tools make a great game, but the one(s) behind them!

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Heelx wrote a nice free wrapper DLL for the FMOD audio engine. You can get it here! You may ask yourself, “Why do i need this plugin?”. The answer is quite simple. It does enhance sound playback, not only is it faster than standard hardware sound acceleration but also it has great features such as internet streaming, audio cd playback, spectral analysis and so on.

The only thing you need to know is that this wrapper allows you to use FMOD wich is free for freeware products, costs 100$ for shareware authors and 6000$ if you plan on using it in a commercial project. Word of Warcraft for example uses it. So grab this for your next freeware project or big commercial MMORPG!
Here is a quote from Heelx about his plugin:

FMOD is a cross-platform audio engine, which makes it easy for you to use current audio technologies in your software. No other audio engine offers such a rich and up-to-date platform support. FMOD isn’t only available for the Windows 32 bit system, but also for 11 other systems, among them e.g. Windows 64bit (AMD64), Linux, Macintosh and all game consoles available on the market. FMOD is being and was used by over one hundred commercial games, for example in “World of Warcraft” or “Flat Out”. With the Lite-C FMOD wrapper plugin DLL for A7 / Lite-C, all of those features will be enabled for you – no matter which edition of the A7 engine you own or if you „just“ use the free Lite-C distribution.

Damocles wrote a fast treescript for A6. Its using bones animation, therefore it can be used from the com version above.

It generates a variation of a tree and then places some leave sprites wich always face the camera.

The effect is a nice alternative to static trees only consisting of models, it also runs very fast.

If you know speedtree already, you can guess how the whole thing looks in action or you take a quick look at this screenshot.

You can download the free script with a compiled example here.

http://www.wasteland.at/tree_generator.zip

Damocles said its not complete yet but he does not want to put more work into this. So if you need some C-Script practice go ahead! Things like LOD, different sprites or wind effects would make the script even better - have fun with it!

Wicht has released a free DLL for file handling functions wich are not available in wdl script. It is available both as lite-c and c-script plugin.

gs_GetCurrentFolder();
gs_SearchFilesInDir();
gs_GetSearchFile();
gs_DeleteFile();
gs_CreateFolder();
gs_FolderExists();
gs_DeleteFolder();
gs_SearchFolders();
gs_GetSearchFolder();
gs_FileExists();
gs_GetSpecialFolder();
gs_GetWindowsVersion();
gs_GetTime();
gs_GetDate();
gs_GetUserName();
Links and more information are available in this Thread.