The crystal space engine

[tcd12642]

I see that the crystal space engine...has very few tutorials out there, and documentation. I have searched for a couple hours, because I was hoping to try to use the engine to just create one room. I have found a simply complicated dll, which had a bunch of documentation in it after I viewed it in notepad,  ?(  but I was wondering if maybe the administrator of the forum, (or a moderator) could lead me to some decent documentation on crystal space.

Also you can import only 3ds files to change to \".lev\" (level) files, so now I understand why you could be expirienced in any of the major 3-d graphics programs...  )

I was also wondering, like I have said in many posts, if anyone could help me in a 3d game, probably with the crystal space engine...if not, another 3d engine. And if we can\'t find a basic one, we might just have to go with advanced 2d... (baulders gate type graphix...)    Hopefuly not.  

Thanks, please reply.

--tcd12642--

[Mephisto]

The thing about the crystal space engine (and most other engines) is that they arent as popular as the half life engine and all those famous multiplayer games out there, there is a million half life mods which results in a million tutorials, all though I don\'t think there are many games developed using crystal space and therefore there is most likely not many tutorials either.

To program for the crystal space engine you need to be a very experienced coder and the best way to learn using the crystal space engine is to get training in it through a project (like planeshift)

[tcd12642]

Yes, but do you know any other game engines? I don\'t have half life, and those engines aren\'t exactly for making games--they are for making mods to the games, which I do not want to do. Besides they are usually first person shooters and I\'m doing an rpg.

[Vengeance]

The CS website is here: http://crystal.sourceforge.net

Good luck.

[tcd12642]

I know that, but they do not have many good tutorials there...

[Mephisto]

You can make rpg\'s for half life

[tcd12642]

Yah...rriiighhhtt
I DONT HAVE IT!
  X( and besides you would have to re-script the arm motions so he would swing weapons like sword/mace/etc

[Mephisto]

Well thats a modelling issue, when making a player-     view weapon, you have to create the arms, the bones and the animations

[Bigfoot]

Hmm I think some of you have a mild misconseption of what a game engine is.

Halflife quake3 and such are not open ended game engines you cant take them and make a new game with them, what you can do is make a half-life or quake3 based game, ie a Modification or MOD for short (TC\'s or total conversions are possable but the basic gameplay and layout remain essential the same as the original product, TC\'s are more like removing all the visable content and redoing it and adding a few features (Sleep Walkers TC for UT and TeamFortress TC for Halflife)).

The only way you can use those engines to make a brandnew game is to get your hands on teh source code and alter that, useing there exsisting network and graphical engine code as a basic framework, although the programming level  and amount of re-programming required for such a feat is far in excess to what most normal programmers have (Im meaning the beginner and intermediate programmers).

Engines like the Crystal space engine, Nel, Nebula, WorldForge and such are  the class(?) librarys and basic framework open source engines designed with the scafholding of a engine in place such as the graphics engine, sound engine and such and you have to code the rest of the content and/or tweak them to your liking. Kinda like buying a half a car engine and a few parts of the chassey then making all the rest your self, gearbox, seats doors, fuel tank (The Half-Life and Quake3 engines are more like a car just missing the outside metal shell).

Im not saying the half-life engine cant be used to make a game like a MMORPG you\'d just need to buy the licience to the source code and that would cost you 3000$+ , youd then have to drasticly alter the networking code to make it run like an MMORPG. Redo all the game content and such. in many situations the engine are programmed to much into there base game type, so it would be just as fast and much less work to get a free all incompassing  basic engine like CS, Nel, nebula or programme one from the ground up your self.

Basicly you cant make an RPG from half-life, you could how ever make a medieval FPS RPG-like Half-Life MOD or TC.
 
Heres some links to game engine resources.

List of some engines, not many usefull ones in there...
http://www.ambrosine.com/resource.html

Worldforge..
http://www.worldforge.org/

Nel... (i particulary like the look of this one)
http://www.nevrax.org/

Some more game engine lists
http://www.gdse.com/servlet/gdse.links?s=1

Nebula Engines homepage..
http://www.radonlabs.de/

[Vengeance]

I would say starting to build an MMORPG by getting familiar with Crystal Space is like starting to build a Formula 1 car by getting some nuts and bolts and springs.

Better than nothing, but you might as well try to build the Taj Mahal.

[Cyonamie]

i have a lil question for mods, can u take current models(in command and conquerer renegade for example), take um into lightwave or maya or 3dsmax or gmax or watever, edit them, and itll still load in(with the programming it alrdy has), i dunno to much about it yet, im learning still

[Bigfoot]

im not sure what you mean there.. but you would need an importer for teh file types and an exporter to export the altered mesh from the 3d programme you used. And dependant on the game you where modding you would have to do oter things (like in unreal you would have to alter some of teh .ini files to load the new mesh in and like in quake3 where if you altered the animation frames you wold have to readjust the number of frames for the variouse animation cycles in its animation file)

[Cyonamie]

im not sure wat i mean either, but to make it blunt, can i just make my own lil models of a person or arena and load it into a game as a mod without programing, or do u need to program?

[Bigfoot]

you could do a model ok, but thered be a little file editing and such and making a map is easy in games like Quake3 and Unreal. So yeah you could do that ^^...

[Cyonamie]

i decided to start with Quake 3 unpacked the .pak files using Wally, dug out hte models and am going to use worldcraft on the level, hopefully itll work!