Yes, it is true. I really neglected the blog for a while. So what am I doing at the moment?

First of all, I working on gamekit to have it in shape for creating the kind of games I want to create.  For that I’m doing lots of bugfixes and working mainly on the runtime and it’s lua-layer. Actually I love this project. Finally I’m home in case of game-engine. Now it has to be stable enough for all platforms, which will still be a tough way,…

For people that don’t know gamekit (and I think that are 99,99%). It is a blender-based game-engine. This means you use blender as scene-graph, use (if you want) its bge-bricks for visual logic (most of them are implemented in gamekit) or use lua-scripting inside blender or use c++. Of course you can use all 3 methods altogether. The game can produce code for Linux(my main platform), win and osx plus android and iOS (but the mobile versions still need lots of optimizations).

Caution: Since this is a 100% community driven engine, there isn’t that much documentation People who are not willing to make their hands dirty and need everything on a silver plate to produce something should switch to the big good documented and more stable engines like unity3d or udk (btw: I like unity but I do like more to play in the dirt :p)

So let’s have a look at http://code.google.com/p/gamekit/

…and if I’m not working on gamekit I’m working on a game-project with a bunch of people that are located somewhere in Germany. So it is some kind of distributed working. At the moment we see if we can get a publisher of that master-piece of game software

…and if I’m not working on this one, I’m involved in a game-project at the University of Applied Sciences Trier…

…and if I’m not doing this I’m working on a super ambitious Software-Project that should/would/could change software-development, but actually that might only work in my head *lol*

…and if I’m not doing this I’m running or biking so that my head and soul get at least a bit to see from the world. Sports is one of the most important things of the day.

Biggest problem is the 24h-day constraint…there is just too less time for too much things to do

Ok…actually this is not such a mystery, Nevertheless it had to be tested and here it is. A model that is covered by 3 different textures that uses stencilmaps in order to show the regions to be shown:

Ok..finally after some after work evenings I got the right workflow how to export stencilmaped textures from blender to jME! Actually that was one of the last main-features I wanted to learn until I can start building my first small level…. Here a picture of a wall:

EDIT:PLZ ignore all my complaining! everything should be fine now in wiki and the upcoming releases (>1.3.2) Thx for the fast reaction of the ODE-Developers!

To say it from the beginning. This ODE is a BPEL-Engine for orchestration of Buisiness-Processes and has nothing to do with Physics-Engine ODE. Nevertheless I spent much time switching from the filebased buildin database to MySQL. There wasn’t much to find about that in the WWW. There is a nice point in the userguide that drove me crazy:
...

3. Make sure that MySQL is started and the ODE schema has been loaded in a ode database.

...

Well,…but how!? First of all there is no schema provided and the integrated openJPA seems not to be willing to create the schema for you….

Here a tutorial how to install Apache ODE 1.3.2 on Apache Tomcat 6.0

1. download mysql-connector if you haven’t yet
2. unzip/untar the archive and move the driver-jar (mysql-connector-java-xxxx.jar) to your tomcat’s lib-directory (TOMCAT/lib)
3. download ode-war.zip
   
4. unzip the archive and copy the file ode.war to your webapp-directory (TOMCAT/webapps)
5. Follow the instructions as described in the user-guide(following steps 6 + 7):
6. Add the following stanza to TOMCAT/conf/server.xml inside the <Host> element:
   

   <Context path=“/ode” docBase=“ode” debug=“5″ reloadable=“true” crossContext=“true”>

   <Resource name=“jdbc/ODEDB” auth=“Container” type=“javax.sql.DataSource”

   maxActive=“100″ maxIdle=“30″ maxWait=“10000″

   username=“root” password=“” driverClassName=“com.mysql.jdbc.Driver”

   url=“jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/ode?autoReconnect=true”/>

   </Context>

7. Add a file named ode-axis2.properties under Tomcat/webapps/ode/WEB-INF/conf with the following content:
   

   ode-axis2.db.mode=EXTERNAL

   ode-axis2.db.ext.dataSource=java:comp/env/jdbc/ODEDB

8. create a database with the name ‘ode’
9. create the ode-job table (somewhere in the sourcecode I found that):
   CREATE TABLE ODE_JOB (
jobid CHAR(64)  NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
ts BIGINT  NOT NULL DEFAULT 0,
nodeid char(64)  NULL,
scheduled int  NOT NULL DEFAULT 0,
transacted int  NOT NULL DEFAULT 0,
details blob(4096)  NULL,
PRIMARY KEY(jobid),
INDEX IDX_ODE_JOB_TS(ts),
INDEX IDX_ODE_JOB_NODEID(nodeid)
)
TYPE=InnoDB;COMMIT;
10. In order to let openjpa create the schema go to the command-box (START->run…->CMD) and set following java_options(this is one line):
    set JAVA_OPTS="-Dopenjpa.jdbc.SynchronizeMappings=buildSchema(ForeignKeys=true)"
11. navigate to you tomcat’s bin-directory and start the tomcat by using the startup.bat (or startup.sh)
12. With a bit luck, that’s it….hope that helped.

Additionally here is a schema for Apache Ode 1.3.2.

I really ask myself why there is such a huge lack of information about that topic. Maybe I had something on my eyes and all of this is obvious. But for me it was not. And I really can’t get why to use a build-tool “buildr” that is ruby-based!???? And using all “how to build the source-code” instructions ended up in a buildr-error!?! Well,…maybe again my fault!? Actually I now can start to work with ODE and maybe someday I will love it, but not yet! That is for sure!

EDIT:

Just got comments from the Apache ODE developers that they fixed the wiki and will ship the schema with next releases! Wow,…actually I didn’t expect such a reaction! All I can say is:”Thank you”. Sry about being mad about the wiki I know it is no fun to keep that up to date… ;-D

At the moment I’m not so really sure how to go on. I really like jME and java and find it so cool that there is such a great Engine and want to participate in developing the engine. But at the moment my problem is to get my objects loaded into jME properly. As soon as it getting a bit more complex there are problems. Using MD5Importer or OgreMeshImporter. I’m quite sure that all could be more or less achieved the right way nowadays but I need something like a guideline how to treat your object that it is fully exported by the exporters and also being loaded by the importers.

Yesterday I just tried to use PANDA3D to load a model that was not possible to load with Ogre (MD5 does) and it worked from the beginning using the egg-exporter. With panda I have had some texture problems but that may be an experience problem. As it is a new programming language (python) and a new system.

Panda3d is so overwhelming in the point of documentation! It’s unbelivable. I think this should be an example how jMonkeyEngine should look like in a couple of years. I even found some sample blender-files that are able to export with their blender-exporter. So you could have a look how that models are build up… I’m really curious about testing them….

Well,…at the moment I think about starting a nice little minimalistic game-project and I am still not sure what technology to use. jME or Panda3d. At the moment I think I will give PANDA3D the chance to show was it is made of. jME I will try to find out the best way how to model a character and animate it so it can be imported everytime…. So I will go on fighting with jME,PANDA3D and BLENDER……

Today I looked a bit deeper into blender. My main task for today was playing around with hairs which are quite cool implemented to blender but the big problem is to get it out to use it with jME. Ok,..to make a long story short I skipped that part and tried other hairs first with planes and alphamaps which seems was quite simple but had some problems exporting it. Then I tried just texture hair which I decided should be my approach for the beginning. Maybe I can add bumpmapping to that. I can go deeper into that later. So I skipped that also. By the way I’m quite good in skipping! Nevertheless I didn’t give up and played around with blender’s sculpture-mode. And here is a very very very new guy in the minimal-family…..looks a bit like a real character. I’m impressed :D. Actually that one has quite lots of lost vertices but nevertheless it was possible to export him…. I will start tomorrow a new one….

–>How to overwrite .bvh-animations in blender hack

Well, it wouldn’t be me if I would have been satisfied after being able to model and animate my model in blender and load it in jme2. (actually that isn’t working 100% every time) Well,…accidently I found the possibilty to import .bvh-motioncaputure-files to blender. There are huge resources (see links) for that and so it would be nice if I could let the animation-work be done with “just” importing the .bvh-files. Well,…too bad! I didn’t find a step-by-step tutorial how to make this done.

That two were the only more or less useful resources: youtube-tut resource2. The vid is quite useful and show how to work with empties. The second resource I wasn’t able to connect my model to the animation. The script wasn’t able to find the .bvh-file so I couldn’t go on right after step1. Nevertheless I think with this might be together with the youtube-vid a good start to achieve the big goal! Somehow, someday…. For the moment I am still too inexperienced with blender to achieve that in an exceptable amount of time. So back to hand-made motions!

Here some additional links that might help people that are interested in that topic as well:

• http://www.gravity-music.net/skinny/index.htm
• http://blenderartists.org/forum/archive/index.php/t-112707.html
• http://accad.osu.edu/research/mocap/mocap_data.htm

[EDIT] newly added:

• http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=39635

Truespace(free). Seems to have some possibilties as well, but I really didn’t want to look deeper into a second 3d-tool:

• http://www.caligari.com/
• http://forums1.caligari.com/truespace/showthread.php?t=5540
  
• http://forums1.caligari.com/truespace/showthread.php?t=5987

Sad but true, I have to postpone the .bvh-project.

[Edit]:

Finally I succeeded in adding the animation to the armature with tracking the bones to the empties. In some resources it was written that applying a new animation to the aramture would be possible with just deleteing the existing ones and import the new animation. THAT didn’t work for me because the links pointed to nothing after the deletion. For that I modified the python-script (my first python experiences ;-D ) and now if you once connected your armature with the empties you just have to import the new animation as empty and the new animation-file overwrites the old animation-data. I will look over it and will write a tutorial this evening.

BTW: For sure there is a better other way but I didn’t find any sollution. So if there is another good way, plz tell me.

PS: Now I found that links. Looks very promising.

http://blenderunderground.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1664

http://pagesperso-orange.fr/jb.perin/Mocap/MocapAnimation.html

Here the armature bvh-import is used. It should be possible to modify the script for that option as well.

I wrote a tutorial on my own. If you want to load different bvh-files to the same file then that is your tutorial.

Well, for some strange reason I had the feeling to switch to blender in order to create 3d-Models. Well, ok! Blender is for sure very very good but maybe even too powerful what makes the inital steps quite hard. Nevertheless I started (again) with going deeper into blender although I was ill (what makes the project even harder).

As I am still working on my RPG-Engine and a first techdemo I just wanted to build a 3D-Model, put a texture on it, give it an amature and animate it. And the most important step export it in a way JMonkeyEngine is able to read it. That seems to be the hardest part of all. Currently there a two formats that seems to be best for importing animated textured models into jme2. MD5 (Quake3-Models) or OgreMeshes (Ogre3D-Engine).

For me it seems that the ogre-importer of the radakan-project seems a good way to export for jme.

Here you can find the exporter-script for blender.

For the importer there is a ogreloader-project inside the radakans svn:

https://radakan.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/radakan

or you can download an archive. (don’t know if it is the current version)

There you can find jme2-typical  tests how to integrate an orge.mesh to jme2.

Well that’s it for the moment. Once I am really sure what to do in blender in order to do everything the right way with texturing, rigging and skinning I will try to write down something like a basic tutorial cause since I started with jme it was always a big issue how to import models that fulfill all my needs.

Keep on rocking….