Clothing video

GTA progress

Over the last week i have continued my research and work with the GTA San Andreas engine. There were a few bugs with my character model, mainly with skinning and problems when combining my models with clothing from the game, where they didn't fit together properly. Originally i replaced the Valet outfit with my suit model and this worked fine because it changes all the characters clothing that roughly matched it. However when you died you wound up back at the hospital with no clothes on which is a bit silly. So I replaced the suit1 model and texture with mine and created a range of textures to go with it. Now I have a range of coloured suits available to wear in game, later I will work on the textures to make a more realistic set of suits(Pin-stripe, Double and single breasted, gangster and other variations). There are other slots available for clothing that could also be modded like the Tuxedo, Tweed jacket and pants(suit2). All of the cloathes can be modified but for the moment i'm replacing like for like so items will appear in the appropriate way and I don't have to change the names in the main.scm(script), this is possible but is a bit tricky. It isn't somthing i will worry about now but when I set my TC mod it would be nice to name the cloathes properly, that way I can have many more. I can replace the hoody model for example with an overcoat model and then rename it appropriately. So the player would buy an Overcoat that looks like an overcoat instead of buying a hoody that looks like an overcoat.

Hi i've done more research into procedural animation/programming and realtime worlds. playing some well known games Spore, GTA, Crackdown, mafia provided me with some interesting ideas and inspriration.

http://uk.gamespot.com/pc/action/mafia/review.html

There are many game engines available to me to use for this project. I have experience working with many game engines (CryEngine2, SourceHL2, Unreal) these are very powerful engines to work in and fantasic mods have been made. Even so these games are complex and geared to making fps worlds which is great if thats what you want to make however the storyline is usually linear and restrictive. Also because they are so complex, making large environments is difficult except for crysis and that is designed for making praridise islands, thats not to say that you couldn't make any other kind of world in it tho. The main reason I don't want to use Crysis for this project is simply it's complexity, at a guess the uni computers won't be able to run it. I will still experiment and create other works with it but not for this project.

I need an engine that handles animations, vehiecles, guns and fighting and a large open and dynamic environment. I love the GTA series and would like to work for Rockstar games in the future, so I investigated the GTA series and assessed their practicallity. I used my modding experience to unlock the GTA game and now have an empty world ready to fill with my own content. This is exactly the kind of tool i'm looking for, it provides all the tools I need. I can now create content and 3d objects and see it work in the game engine, so my character will run round and be animated accordingly and interact with other characters and objects within the 3d world. It also has a fairly simple scripting system for coding missions which is perfect for creating loose open ended sandbox style gameplay.


I'm now researcing gameplay and storytelling techniques, and genre conventions. I'm looking at traditional film plot devices, cinematography and iconography and how they are used create a rich and believable worlds. I think that games atm have got a lot to learn from the movies to help develope narrative and use genre conventions to help the audience relate to the
experience.

Games are an amazing form of media they allow us to experience alternate realities share experiences and do things that we never could in the real world. Here lies an interesting idea, communication has been a powerful force in human scociological developement. We developed language to communicate with others then writing so we could develope and document our ideas, these are technologies that were developed to aid in communication. I suggest that video games and virtual reality is almost the ultimate extension of this same drive to communicate and share experiences with other individuals. I think this fundamental concept or understanding is missing in many games and a game that does this and contains an interesting perspective that questions our modern world view will break the mould and realise gamings full potential.