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Project Link: [Updated: 12 August 2007] http://www.enigmatekuk.com/forumposts/FPS.zip

Ok, so I bought Dark Physics and Dark AI...fantastic I thought, I'll just rip out all that Newton stuff and bang in Dark Physics in its place and off we go.....how wrong I was.

If you look at the demo...and I apologise for the sloppy code/bad modelling skills etc...But I'm really not that impressed. As you can see, I have things like stairs, ladders, gravity, physics crates, etc. I've got a lot of this from looking at the demo's etc but I can’t manage a few simple (but important things):

1. How do I make the player be able to 'push' the crates around if their mass allows it. Newton had all this built in. Now it’s probably because I’m using the character controller thing, and not a rigid body but I'd like to know if its not possible either way.

2. How do I implement crouching? With Newton I could change the height of the players collision object and all is well, will this work for DP? My attempts with destroying / recreating the character controller while the crouch key is held are messy at best

3. Jumping...you'd think it'd be easy, smash the player under his feet and watch him go up into the air a little bit and fall back to earth due to gravity...if someone can share that little gem of code with me I'd be overjoyed .

I realise I’ve only had the products a couple of days and I'm probably gonna get shot for one reason or another, but I'm no newbie, I've done a lot with DB Pro, for a long time, and worked a lot with physics (Newton), I'm just so frustrated with the whole thing, not least with the lack of decent demos and documentation.

I'd love people to take a look at the demo and have a go at adding/editing/improving features, it'd be great if we had a fully working First person shooter shell that people could take and play with. I'm sure it would benefit all users of Dark Physics.

For those who want to see before they download…here’s a couple of screenies:

anyone who tried to download last night might have got a corrupt file, seems it didnt upload properly...give it another go

I'll download now and try to implement crouching for you.

It was corrupt, and I have not tried the new one.
One thing you can do for crouching is to lower the camera on the y axis.
It's a fake, but can save some time.

Yea you could lower the camera, but you wouldnt be able to do any of the collision stuff -> fit through small holes, hide under low objects etc.

I've tested the download and it seems fine. Let me know if you have any problems.

Right, well I’ve managed to get DarkAI up, running and integrated.

I’ve added a warehouse like room with three waypoint based patrolling enemies. Upon seeing you they close to attack with physics based bullets, which make a mess of the littered obstacles round the room.

That’s something I should be happy with, except I’m not, I’m getting frustrated again. DarkAI seems unable to work on the y# axis. I’m experimenting with ray casting down from the DarkAI entity to the floor to position it correctly on the y axis so that the enemies can go up stairs / ramps etc, but I’m getting no where fast. From what I can tell, each different area height-wise is supposed to be a different `zone` and AI entities cant change `zone`, but maybe I just need to read some more.

So there we go - another brick wall. I think once I’ve worked out how to get the player swimming/jumping/crouching and get the AI entities going up stairs, down ramps etc then I’ll be fairly happy…might just have time to sling in some weapons, explosions, switches and doors and call it an engine. I don’t think the Nemesis/Goldeneye Engine is scared just yet though


The screenshot is debug 3rd person showing three enemies attacking and some dislodged crates as a result of their `gunfire`

Using the character controller is a bit odd but it can give you great results... trust me I have a smooth FPS engine going with it...( look for the nexus engine in the WIPs if you want to see ) to overcome a few issues I had to come up with a few things:

-crouching = when your character crouches you have to delete the character controller and re-make one to a smaller size. and vice versa when he stands again

-jumping = you have to point your character controller in the direction you want and move him, for up and down simply modify the X angle and use the "move character controller" command. obviously the gravity comes from some vector or something.

- moving objects with the character = use a "for i=1 to blah" command and run through the objects you have that have physical properties and add velocity to them based on their distance from the character controller when they get close.

If you really cant figure it out I can upload a working system but its better to make your own system, it will enhance your coding skills.

lol yea I agree, I'd rather work it out on my own, sounds like you actually managed what I couldnt get to work. I left the crouching / jumping thing for now, but I'll have another crack tomorrow see if I can do it. Seems a bit messy adding force to all physical objects though, surely they should have added something to the DP commands for character interaction? Ah well, watch this spacem I'll see if I can nail that tomorrow too.

I decided to work on a few other things in the meantime-

characters - getting the enemies in, loaded and animated, which isnt easy - getting them to walk/strafe etc but its done now

Effects - I played around with particles, but the whole thing seems reall buggy. I might leave that until the next update of DP.

I'm gonna add a weapon subsystem and some pickups, maybe add the XML level loading scripts from the Goldeneye nemesis engine for enemy / object loading, that'll be cool.

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Don't destroy an re-create a character controller. There is a command to set it's size, look in the doc with the first update (1.1) for it. It is fairly self explanitory, just fill in the values as you would as you are creating it.