how they do 3d adventures games?

[galraoooo]

  They uses a engine like the one from half-life, using a background static and transparent boxes to limit the stage? I really wanna knows show they do games like "Syberia" "Aghata Cristie ATTWN" etc... games that the personage move through the stage in 3d...


Thanks,
Hugs from Brazil
Fausto Rodrigo Toloi
Nice engine! congratulations.

[galraoooo]

sorry about my worst english  

[Gilbert]

My attempt in translating this into English:

Did they use a engine like the one from half-life, which took a static pre-rendered background static and putting transparent boxes to block the characters from moving off screen? I really want to know how they made games like "Syberia" "Agatha Christie: And Then There Were None", etc... That is, games that the characters move through the screen in 3D...

Hope I got most of it correct.

[Andail]

I still don't really get it, but he sure is polite

[DoorKnobHandle]

They use similar systems to those that are used in firstperson-shooters. The rooms and characters are three-dimensional models and the collision detection works like in any fps games. You just can't move the camera and you don't use W, A, S and D to move the player around but you click your mouse on the screen to move there.

[Helm]

I suspect most pre-rendered adventure games have walkable areas like AGS and stuff, and rely on 3d resizing just for characters and objects. Nothing's changed since Alone in the Dark for this type of gameplay. No need for a full fledged 3d engine that handles complex collision etc

[Snarky]

I think it varies slightly from game to game, but this would be my best guess:

The background is essentially just a painting, though it has usually been rendered in a 3D app. It does not exist as a 3D model in the game. The walkable area is probably an invisible plane (or planes) in 3D, projected on top of the background (similar to this engine). Sometimes, the walkable areas may have been extracted from the 3D model of the background.

In some games, for instance The Longest Journey, walkbehinds appear to be handled just like in AGS: an area of the background that will hide your character if it is further away than some given distance (probably a z-dist in these 2.5 D engines). Other games may use a crude 3D model to represent walkbehinds. In Still Life you cast dynamic shadows on the walls. This probably involves a precomputed map of vectors for every point on the screen (essentially: which direction of rays from the lightsource you'd have to block to cast a shadow on that point), and knowledge of the 3D position of the lightsource.

[fred]

I think you're right about The Longest Journey, on the other hand IÃ,  think most games of this type will be developed in a full 3d environment with fixed-angel camera in the future, because it really isn't that hard to do the almost static real-time 3d rendering. With a fixed camera, the light-sources can be fixed and the textures baked beforehand. Look at what can be done with the editor for Neverwinter Nights for instance. http://aurora-toolset.iqnaut.net/

If you're interested in this, perhaps also check out Virtools, a 3d game engine that I know supports this type of games (as well as other 3d games). http://www.virtools.com/

[shbaz]

I have screenshots for you.

This is a Curse of Monkey Island spin-off that never made it to completion.  It was made using the Blender game engine in the Resident Evil style 3d/2d mixed views.

Here's what the player sees:


Here's what it looks like from a designer's point of view:


He simply pasted a 2d image in and matched the corners to the camera's view.  After that he could look through the camera and see where to set the player boundaries, 3d objects, etc.

Does that answer your question?

[Kweepa]

shbaz, that is unlikely to be how most of these games are developed as it's a painstaking trial and error process, despite the 3d background data being readily available to the artists.

I suspect that the detailed scene and the simplified collision geometry are both modelled together. Then the following is written out:
- background image (which can be touched up in Photoshop or whatever)
- z buffer (for walkbehinds and shadows)
- camera parameters
- simplified 3d collision geometry
- hotspots and triggers (points and volumes)

[ildu]

This is basically how 2.5D games (such as Syperia, EMI, Still Life) are done:

1. Create the 3d scene.
2. Determine the camera position.
3. Render the scene in different layers, depending on the movements of the players.
4. Create the scene again in a 3d program, but only using planes - the layers.
5. Position the layers accordingly and use an orthogonal camera view.
6. Lay in a simplified version of the environment 3d model and hide it.
7. Add lights.
8. The game engine is supposed to use the new 3d scene accordingly.

This naturally doesn't work for full 3D. A Vampyre Story is going to use a similar method although it's a 2D game. They're drawing the backgrounds by hand, so basically they draw each layer of the background, color them, export them as TGA textures, use them as planes in Maya, create a simple 3d environment to correspond to the image and use the 3d scene in their engine. They're using real-time 3D characters too, so it's imperative that they use this method.

[The Book]

Hmmm... I can tell you what the process looks like in WME.

First of all, you need a 3d animated model in Milkshape3d format (I'm currently using the one they supplied with their 3d demo). The model is referred to in actor definition file, which in turn is parsed by the engine to create and animate the 3d actor.

Then, the background. I model it with Blender, render (usually )with Yafray, then create the geometry file, again with Blender, and export it to format recognised by WME using a decent script which can be found on WME forums. The geometry file contains:

- walkable planes - areas where actors are permitted to move
- blocked areas -  areas blocked from movement
- camera position - from where do we look at the actor
- lights - self explanatory

  Blender-created geometry files have to be scaled in order to match the actual space generated by the engine (otherwise 3d models grow to enormous proportions when rendered).

   Only THEN I proceed to create the actual scene in WME Scene Edit. I load the background and geometry file,  then create the walk-behinds by extracting some of the elements of the background picture with GIMP to set them as sprites, and setting the node hierarchy in Scene Edit in a way that makes WME render them before other elements of the scene.

    This is the garage way of 2.5 D adventure game creation. I hope that my post is comprehensible enough - and that Mnemonic's assasins won't get me killed for revealing the arcane secrets of creating adventure games in WME.  8)