Power Station Industrializer: Metal Hit Sound Procedural Generator

PSI is totally my favorite sfx-gen toy right now! It took a bit to compile it and a little bit to compile its dependency gtkglarea but it was worth it! copyc4t of freesound.org shared this “little old gem” with me.

Height (-h), color (-c), foliage (-f) and coordinates

The Linux racing game Trigger Rally uses a height map to create level geometry, a color map in combination with the /data/textures/detail.jpg image to paint the geometry, a foliage map to place plants on the map and checkpoint coordinates to define the race path.

My tools are Geomorph (optional), Gimp and Inkscape.

0. Preparation

Copy a map directory to work with, for example

cd data/maps/

cp roundhouse/ mytrack/

cd mytrack/

mv roundhouse.level mytrack.level

and edit mytrack.level’s name, comment and author.

In the following steps, overwrite the existing image files and edit values to match your map’s needs.

Hint: insert “a” at the beginning of the name, so that the level appears first in the track list, for quicker testing.

1. Height map

Geomorph Interface

All you need to know about height maps: white is high, black is low.

I like to use Geomorph to create height maps, but the “render/clouds” filters in Gimp can be used just as well. I can only say “play around” to create a 512×512 environment.

Making a track in Inkscape

To create a complete off-road experience, stop here. To create a more interesting track however, start Inkscape and:

1. draw a path using the Curve/Line tool (Shift+6) with no fill and a #000000ff, 12px-width stroke and round cap,
2. select all nodes (F2, Ctrl+a) and make all nodes symmetric or ‘auto-smooth’ using the buttons in the tool controls bar,
3. set the stroke fill to linear or radial gradient and… play around some more!
4. (Optional) duplicate the curve, convert it via “path/stroke to path” and move some nodes around, so that the race track varies in width.

Make sure to export “page area” of the 512×512 image. This way, the coordinates will be a 1:1 match (more on that later, just make sure to save the .svg files).

The last step is to combine environment and track into one height map. Layer blend mode and opacity are values to play around with. The “colors/levels” tool will allow you to make quick black/white (height) changes. Or you can change the verticalscale value (I don’t recommend it).

A possible terrain/track mix for the heightmap

2. Color map

My setup is simple and not so pretty: two layers in Gimp (terrain and track) and both of them are differently colored via “colors/colorize”. Maybe with a “filter/blur/gaussian blur” of 2px applied to the track layer.

A possible color map mix

3. Foliage map

Thanks to this image’s white surface, the level will have foliage distributed in respective areas. The distribution of plants is rather organic, so you can just paint with a brush.

What I like to do is taking a white-filled track layer on black background, gaussian-blurring it and overlaying another black-filled track layer, so the track’s borders have even vegetation on them.

One foliage map example

4. Coordinates

For this, you will need the path svg opened in Inkscape. Select single nodes to see their position and copy that to the mytrack.level file. Here are the coordinates for above map:

<startposition pos=”66, 43, 2.0″ oridegrees=”250″ />

<checkpoint coords=”197, 36″ />
<checkpoint coords=”193, 160″ />
<checkpoint coords=”100, 234″ />
<checkpoint coords=”101, 307″ />
<checkpoint coords=”150, 324″ />
<checkpoint coords=”136, 257″ />
<checkpoint coords=”229, 174″ />
<checkpoint coords=”244, 94″ />
<checkpoint coords=”314, 60″ />
<checkpoint coords=”419, 173″ />
<checkpoint coords=”383, 259″ />
<checkpoint coords=”261, 289″ />
<checkpoint coords=”326, 381″ />
<checkpoint coords=”397, 313″ />
<checkpoint coords=”356, 194″ />
<checkpoint coords=”301, 123″ />

These values work well when the following is set:

<race coordscale=”4.0, 4.0″

Here’s a gameplay video of the result:

Video: Trigger Rally Eversnake Track

In a later version, I ended up making the track part much smoother, which might or might not have helped making it easier to drive on the track, rather than on the terrain. You can download the level (GPL2+/CC-BY-SA 3+) and the source files (PD/CC0).

I posted the first track, that made this way, as a patch.

1984

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

BMJ: It was fun! And a board game was made!

I was at the Berlin Mini Game Jam January 2012 yesterday. It was great fun! Come join us next time!

The themes turned out to be “The end is the beginning” and/or “Future” (you could use either or both) and at some point I started thinking of a game about dairy cows’ life cycles.

Letting the player prepare a cow for getting slaughtered

I created weirdly-stylized assets and wrote a game design doc (previews & links to art inside). The ‘game’ is an illustration of a cow in the industry, how it grows, reproduces and dies. Then it starts with it’s calf again.

There’s hardly any interaction planned, just touching/clicking and dragging some sprites around the screen.

During the process of writing this, I learned about artificial insemination and that the civilized way to kill a cow is to shoot to the head it before letting it bleed out.

This is not supposed to be/turn into a work of education or propaganda. I’m not into annoying people. There’s no plan to continue working on this yet.

“Abstract Meta-Game”: I made the first three scenes back then. Now I finished it and instead of making a game, a .gif animation should do.

You can download the GIMP .xcfbz2 under cc-by3+ and/or lgpl.

“Luxury / She Doesn’t Love Me”: I wanted to make a ‘throw things’ with a cynic romantic scenario. I now uploaded the sprites, in case anybody would like some horrible sprites.

Into game dev and in Berlin this weekend? Goto this mini jam plz.

Cute Robot: from concept art to rigged model

2011-12-03: OGA-user “Buch” submits cute robot concept art (CC-BY/GPL)

2011-12-24: OGA-user “Quandtum” creates a rigged 3D model based on that concept art (CC-BY-SA)

Hopefully I did modeled the concept well enough to not disappoint Buch.  I unfortunately had little time to do this project, but I really like the concept art at opengameart.org and the work being done there and I was hoping to promote more contributions.  This one seemed easy enough to create while blowing the dust off my rigging knowledge (about a year rusty).

All we need now is an animator. :)

There are already a few robot sounds available on OGA (see video below) and I recently made the amazing discovery of the robot sound libraries (made for real robots!) while looking for sounds to add to Nikki.

Robot sounds from OGA (find download links in description)

Got questions? Ask below.

I hope there’s no trademark on these colors, which I used for the JSettlers2 tileset you see above.

Download from OpenGameArt.