Hi everyone - Quikly Game Studio Pro is still in development and coming along quite well
For those of you who don't remember / haven't heard of it its a drag & drop style game making suite, a bit like FPSC except it can do different styles of games and output to dbpro code
I'm planning on releasing a new demo, (along with an option to register a full version and get free updates as they come) on the 15th of December - this will be a lot more advanced than the last demo, with many new features, bug fixes and a whole loada models and pre-fabs
Up until then (just over 2 weeks) I'll post details of my progress here.
One thing I really wanted to get done in time for the new demo was a model creator so that people without modelling software could make objects and scenery for their games. This is one of many tools that will be eventually added to the package, I have things planned such as texture editors, effects editiors, wizards etc.
The model creator is relatively far along in development. The basic idea for this was that I personally find modelling, and especially texturing in milkshape/3dsmax etc quite difficult and I know from reading these forums over the years that many others do also. This modelling software is as far as I am aware, totally unique in the way that it works. Its based on "box modelling" (making things out of cubes which you then re-shape) you can have as many boxes as you like, and each one can be resized, rotated, moved etc.
They can also be re-shaped via editting their vertices, but this is made very easy by the interface, which automatically moves them dependant on your camera angle, you just choose which corner you want to move and then use up, down left or right to move them. Its very simple, everything snaps to grid, and UV points of textures are automatically moved to fit.
Texturing models is REALLY easy - you simply move the view to the area you want to texture (front, left, etc) and choose a texture from your hard drive. That texture is then added to the side, and scaled appropriately, and when you output the model, all the textures are put together into a big texture and uv points set automatically
Essentially this is the easiest and most intuitive way to make models I could think of, and now I've finally got the code to work how it should, its really very fun and rewarding to use
(Its kinda like lego, but you can squish the bricks
)
Heres a screenshot of the interface:
Ok so this is a VERY simple model and obviously the textures are not relevant to it, this was just me fiddling around quickly to make a house shape and sticking a different texture on each side (the poster for "Confessions...") was ideal for testing as it had many different square photos with different colour backgrounds all in one image).
All I need to add now is an automatic texture scaling and stretching part, a hide/show box function and make sure the models are outputting in the right scale & rotation to work in Quikly Game Pro and then I'll start making proper models with it and show you guys what it can REALLY do
Have plenty of plans for some nice mid-poly guns, buildings, vehicles and prefeb walls etc ready to be imported into the game
Other than the model maker and onto the actual gameplay, I'm still planning on the december release being mainly first person unless I can make a decent animated 3rd person model in that time (unlikely as I'd rather finialise the skeleton system first) and thus also no proper enemies yet. However power ups and objectives (start and finish points, object collection, puzzle solving etc) will be fully available, and the enemies and player models shall follow very soon
Thanks to anyone who's still interested in the progress of this project
Cheers, Sam
