Tutorial 1 – What is FPS Creator?
This is not much of a Tutorial but more of what the heck is FPS Creator and how it works.
I may make this sound simple, and in most cases it is, but to understand the whole picture just read through it and it will start to make sense later.
It is my opinion that the wonderful people at “The Game Creators” were sitting around eating pizza and talking about how they love to play FPS games and how as a company who specializes in making program that make games, how could they do this?
3 Years later FPS Creator is out as an Early Adaptor.
The premise of FPS Creator seems to be building a “matrix” or “grid” of square cells that will form the basis of your 3D world in which you can run around, shoot things, grab keys etc.
The main program application is called the “Game Level Editor” and it is how you build your levels. I say levels because as the time of this writing, you are limited to 20 cells high by a grid of 40 cells by 40 cells. This is not a bad thing, just don’t go expecting to make Everquest (besides, there is no multiplayer…..yet!) which I would more call a world instead of a level.
Each cell that you create is built out of multiple “segments” Try and think of Segments as a sheetrock wall panel in your house. Sheetrock is hung in panels of usually 4 feet by 8 feet (yes, I know they are hung sideways, but we don’t want to confuse everyone). Each piece is given a texture (texture is another name for an image or a picture), just like if you applied paint onto the Sheetrock wall.
If you stand up in the middle of your room, and you put your arm out in front of you, you would have one panel there (4 feet wide and 8 feet tall), now turn yourself right 90 degrees and still having your arm out, you put a panel there, repeat 2 more times and now you are in a box, with 4 walls. You have used 4 Segments. As noted, you have created 4 walls but you do not have a ceiling or floor, so you need to make panels there (else you fall into the Abyss which is usually a bad thing). Total panels used are 6 (1 for the ceiling, 1 for the floor and 4 for the walls)
Segments are DirectX model/mesh files that you can create yourself. They don’t “have to” be flat as the sheetrock examples I have explained. Some of your houses may have molding in the middle of the panel about waste high or crown molding around your ceiling. We are just going to currently talk about flat panels.
DirectX model/mesh files are created using a modeler program. The market is full of them, some such as GameSpace, 3D Max, MilkShape. What these programs allow you to do is create the “panels” (which are model/meshes) that are the Segments used in the FPS Creator.
The modeler program also allows you to build the “Entities” that you can place for visual appearances in your game. Think of Entities such as the chair you are sitting in, and the desk you are leaning on, and the computer you are using to read this. Those are 3 entities. You yourself are an entity. Entities are also created using your modeler program.
Following so far?
Segments are used for building your “structure” of your level.
Entities are the “objects” that you can interact with.
Ok, so now you can see everything you “see” in the game world is either a Segment OR an Entity. Let’s take this a step further.
Scripts.
Scripts are what bring life into your game. Scripts control just about everything in the game. You do not “need” to know how to create your own scripts since there are many pre-existing scripts that come with FPS Creator to suit the novice user BUT if you want to make a really compelling game, you are going to have to learn the scripting language.
I cannot stress the important of scripts. If you really want to bare bone down the FPS Creator program, all it really is, is an single executable program (around 10 megs) that loads scripts, which in turn loads other scripts, which load the segments and entities as well as the position which you are told them to be located using the “Game Level Editor”.
Got that? So if you want a custom entity that you created in your modeler or found a model on the internet, your going to have to have a script that loads the model, otherwise the game will have no clue that you want it in your game.
The manual that comes with the FPS Creator is wonderful. I can say without hesitation that 90% of the questions people ask on the forums can be found in the manual, but just as this Tutorial I am writing, if you don’t understand what you’re looking for, you’re going to be clueless.
What I “highly” recommend is for you to close your eyes and think of one thing you want to do, like have an Enemy when they die to drop a key. Start on page 72 and think through what needs to happen.
1st, you need an Enemy. Let’s name this Enemy “KeyMaster”. Add him/her to the level. Now, add a “Key” entity and place it somewhere in the level that the Player cannot get to. We will call this “GateKeeper”.
With Enemies, you have defaulted 4 types of AI actions. They are “Init”, “Main”, “Destroy” and “Shoot”.
We are concerned when they Enemy “Dies” so the most logical one would be “Destroy” When the”KeyMaster” is “Destroyed” we need to then execute the “GateKeeper” script which will position our “Key” that is dropped by the “KeyMaster” slightly above the corpse and maybe have an little effect such as spinning orbs around the key to highlight or attract the attention of the player that they should pick it up. Quickly skimming the commands on page 72, you will come to one that states “DROPMARKER” followed by “NEXTMARKER”. You can see that once the Enemy dies, you should call a “DROPMARKER” and then have the “GameKeeper” Entity execute the “NEXTMARKER” which is the location of our Destroyed “KeyMaster”
Does this work? Not a clue. But you will not know unless you try. That’s for another Tutorial on scripting which I will write a little later after someone orders me pizza.
The point was to show you how you can look through the manual and start to use the commands available to you to accomplish what you want.
I hope this has helped someone understand how simple this FPS Creator is, and what an incredible job the people at “The Game Creators” have spent their last 3 years creating for us so we can make FPS games in such a short about of time.
Cellbloc Studios
-This...is my boomstick!
