OGRE, OGRE, Ogitor
In support of IndieZen’s graphic plugin for OGRE, I have been busy testing a few things this week.

First: I downloaded OGRE SVN trunk, built it and installed it. All was great, after I finally got my environment configured properly, by the end of the 12th attempt I have a working OGRE install.

Second: I installed Qt Creator, an IDE for C++, and the primary environment for compiling Ogitor. It is also used to configure and build Ogitor. Ubuntu has an install for this one so it was a no brainer.

Finally: I Grabbed Ogitor, a Qt based wysiwyg scene developer, configured my environment after only 5 tries, and installed it. It runs, as far as I can tell, but as of this writing I have not been able to load any models or textures into it as the sample files are all out of date and need to be updated with OGRE’s built-in converter. This app is still deep in beta, version 0.3.2, this is my only warning… I will say you need the OGRE trunk anything older than OGRE 1.7 is not sufficient to compile Ogitor.

Overall, If I had more time to work with it I am sure that I would have created a great world scape for all to see. Unfortunately Ubuntu released version 9.10 and the upgrade, although very smooth, did not maintain any of my alternate libraries and I had to reconfigure a few things. Nothing difficult or challenging, but time consuming all the same. Other IndieZen members have had some success with this tool so I thought it good for me to get up to speed with it too. By this time next week I should have a couple of screen shots to share with everyone. Until then, keep a weather eye on the horizon and keen ear out for OGREs.

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Happy Halloween!
Grab your ghoulies and get a little downtime. That’s my plan…

For more news please visit the IndieZen Wiki

Where Are We Today?
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Zen Engine Tutorials Base Starter Kit 101

This tutorial shows you how to create a game client using the Base Starter Kit. This game client does little more than initialize a few game engine components and display a blank screen.

The only additional thing this game client does is to bind the “Q” key to the “Quit” action, which allows you to quit the game by pressing the “Q” key.

The Base starter kit is a game engine starter kit that is used to simplify the use of Zen Engine. It contains code in support of behaviors, game objects, game groups and scriptable actions. It also contains the primary “game loop”. — read more –

Graphically speaking the game is sub-par for a playstaion 2 game of the time, and even less so for the compter. It feels very much like a dumbed down final fantisy game style wise.

Where Shadow of Destiny really stands out is its story. You start out as Eike kusch, a 22-year old man who is fated to die. In fact you dont start controling Eike untill after he is stabbed coming out of a small coffee shop.  It is in death that Eike is given a small divice and a second chance. The divice alows Eike to move though key spots in time, in hopes to change his fate.

The over all game play is very simple. Most of the time is spent on changing small things in the past thorough actions and dialog with prominent people from the city’s past and present, so the game is more like a interactive story trying to find out ways to stop Eike from dieing and of course finding out who’s trying to kill him in the first place.

If you like time travel stories or adventure type games I would highly recommend  getting a hold of a copy if you come across it.

Current Events
Welcome to SIEGE!
SIEGE OCTOBER 2-4, 2009
THIS WEEK!

Much of the development team is off to the SIEGE Conference this weekend so things feel a little empty at the moment. We are holding down the fort in the IRC and maintaining business as usual in any case. We look forward to hearing about all the great things that SIEGE has brought to the table this year, and we anticipate the renewed energy that these things should inspire.

So until next week we wish you all the happiness you can tolerate and all the gaming you can get.

For more news please visit the IndieZen Wiki
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Current Events
Clips from the Indie Zen forum

• More progress on World Builder
• Handling of Memotica stimuli
• Cross Platform Build system
• Zen Engine + Zen Studio feature list

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Casting Call is scheduled for:
Saturday October 17th 2009 at 12:00 noon
Tacoma Community College Auditorium
building 3 on North end of campus.

This film takes place in, and will be shot throughout the greater Tacoma and Seattle area. This web site is designed so that actors and actresses that are interested in participating in the making of this film can print off the lines of the part(s) they wish to audition for. This film has a low budget and all acting will be done on a volunteer bases. Yet, I will be entering it in the 2010 Seattle International Film Festival from May 20 – June 13, 2010. Credit will be given to all participants. This is a great publicity opportunity for aspiring actors and actress.

If you have any concerns or questions feel free to contact me through the title link above
Thank You!!!

In the beginning
An introspection of the computer game and its importance to the human race.

Episode 4 – Entertainment
The most significant item of importance to humanity is play time. As videogames have evolved over many years, access to them has become commonplace. Videogames can be found almost everywhere today. My Cell phone came equipped with two games from the factory, and has the ability to download and run many more titles. At the movie rental store you can also rent games for all the major consoles. And in most homes there is an Internet connected PC that can access more games than one could shake a proverbial stick at. Now I would like to share some facts with you that you may enjoy as much as I did. — read more –

I guess the question that’s been nagging me the past week or so is, how real are dreams? I think there is a habit of defining ‘real’ as being what we can see, touch, taste, and hear. An apple is easily defined to be real. The shape and color are seen right away, the firmness of the skin felt, the juice tasted when bitten, and the sound of crunch quite audible. All these sensations are broken down into impulses that are then sent to the brain, these impulses tell us that the apple is real. When I mentioned an apple, what color did you picture in you mind? Red maybe? when I mentioned juice, could you for a moment almost taste it? and did you hear the crunch of the bite? Yet the apple presented just now wasn’t real.

I’ve had dreams so real that I honestly couldn’t tell if they had actually happened or not. It wasn’t until I talked to the person in question that I knew for sure. There have been times where I knew what happened was a dream, yet when talking to the person that had been in the dream, they had, had a similar dream the same night. If what we kn0w as real, are simply impulses that the brain is picking up. Is it possible for dreams to be more real than normally thought?

I don’t have an answer. I do know that through my dreams I have had a chance to fly many times, been the only person in a city of monsters and survived.  I have been killed in countless ways, felt all ranges of emotions. I have been in many families, I have been married and had kids of my own. I have lived and ran with wolves, raised by dragons, and hunted with lions. I had the chance to be a the creation of everything, and I have seen it all end.

I have memories of these dream life’s. Even if they can’t be defined as real they still share a place in my mind.

In the beginning
An introspection of the computer game and its importance to the human race.

Episode 3 – Visual Effects

When computer systems first came into use in the business and science industries they were tailored to the needs of those customers. In business and science data is king, numbers have value, and information is power. Therefore, the way things looked was not as important as the way they worked, and visual output was generally printed on a teletype or some other ink and paper printing device. Then, in the late 1960s, along came the video game, Pong, and the beginning of a revolution. — read more –

In the beginning
An introspection of the computer game and its importance to the human race.

Episode 2 – Sound Check:

In contrast to the relationship between computer hardware and computer games, it appears that it is music and musicians that are inspiring the advancement of computer audio hardware and software. Game developers are reaping the benefits of the advancements inspired by the needs and desires of musicians. — read more –

In the beginning
An introspection of the computer game and its importance to the human race.

Episode 1 – Space Travel:
The year is 1969. The united States is enthralled with NASA and the Apollo Missions. The ARPANET is born. Ken Thompson has just lost his shiny new toy, a GE 645 Mainframe Computer that he and his team at Bell Labs were using, in concert with other programming teams, to develop Multics, the first multiuser operating system. The project was not meeting design goals and Bell Labs decided to pull out so the GE 645 was packed up and carted off. This left Ken with a tremendous dilemma, how to play Space Travel.
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Dr. Horrible’s sing-along blog. An amusing story of Dr. Horrible and his struggles to go from a nobody to super-villain in the Evil league of Evil.  Of course his rise to power isn’t easy, not only does he have to make himself noticed by the Evil League of Evil, but he also must contend with his heroic enemy Captain Hammer. As if all that wasn’t complication enough for the Dr. There’s a pretty redhead down at the laundromat that’s grabbed the Dr.’s eye.

Filled with laughs and songs Dr. Horrible’s sing-along blog is definitely worth the watch.   Watch me!

We have pushed through another milestone. Version 0.6.0 is in beta and the team is pushing out a technology preview for Zen Studio World Builder. An amazing concept that seems like it should be in every major game engine since it works more akin to the way we think, than to a cold logical calculation engine. In the end World builder will provide a flexible robust and user friendly interface to game developmentand virtual worlds. On that note check out this bit from wikipedia on game engines. It makes me think that the great people here at IndieZen are ahead of the curve in implementation and design. — read more –