Some summary.

It was some time since my last post. Well a lot of things was moved forward, and at current moment I've done following parts of game engine:

• Implemented a* for unity to find way in rooms. It works fully automatic, you just need to put colliders around walls. Actually I found few implementations on unity asset store but all of them was crapy. Maybe I'll publish my solution?
• Implemented a dialogue engine, so you can talk with all NPC. It works with Astah plugin which I mentioned few post ago.
• Implemented rooms & passage manager, it also works with Astah plugin which allows me to edit any passages opening through associated graph. 
• Implemented logic & trigger engine so I can build scripting conditions for my game.
• Fully implemented Main & in game Menus. GUI in unity is nightmare for me, totally alien logic. I don't like it at all. Maybe it's a valid place to build my own solution here? Who knows...
• Implemented Load & Save game, and game stare/end routines. I don't like this part of system, but it's needed so I done it.

So what left? Well... actually just content & graphics :) Now I can sit and write dialogues, and more dialogues, and more dialogues. And when I finish... I can throw project to my projects graveyard :) But until this moment we still have some time to play ;)

Unity, here I come!

Well, after few months of learning UDK I got finally piss off. Unfortunately UDK + VS is total pain on my computer. So I moved to Unity... Well, I can tell one thing. It's much, much, much easier to master than UDK. It's hard to say what exactly is easier, but it is for sure. And personally for me switch to c# from Java is extremely easy, comparing c++. At this moment I finished whole GUI for dialogues, and most of logic engine. In tomorrow I'll do some tunings and hopefully add few screenshots. And then we move to rendering of rooms and movement of player and NPC. Stay tuned for next episode :)

Spin of direction.

Ok, I got really pissed of by Unreal. It took me literally 6 minutes to compile a single class written in c++. Ok, first compilation you said. Well ok, then I wanted to debug... So I needed to choose different target in MS Visual Studio... And it took another 6 minutes to recompile + next 2 minutes to run editor in debug mode. But guess what, breakpoints doesn't work. So I spent 15 minutes just waiting to see that it doesn't work. Well another problem is, when in editor you press Ctl+Space to see completions... I waited 30s to get this... Fucking 30s for autocompletion? Ok, my computer isn't monster but it works much, much faster in InteliJ into which I put a bunch of heavy libraries. So I downloaded Unity, and started to learn new tool. Let's try to give a chance for different game engine. At first look it works like a blizzard, comparing to Unreal. We will see...

Hard testing.

Ok, I resurrected my PC! Then I improved my Astah plugin to export even more data from diagrams. Now I can control dialogues, passages (doors closed/open) and initial location of NPC. I also finished corrections of chapter one dialogues. After exporting it to JSON it takes me 143kB of definitions. A little to much to handle it manually. So I decided to write Java application which can load all this and work as a NPC speak engine. So now you can check how it will behave in this same way as it would in game. This step allowed me to verify exported data structures. And as usual I discovered several bugs. Sometimes I was exporting nulls, other times conditions wasn't good. I also discovered few things which need to be covered in Unreal. Now it's time to send this to my beloved testers, and start to convert it into unreal. 

When I polish my tools a little more I'll upload sources to it. Maybe someone finds it useful.

Visit of a death god.

Well, I wanted to write some more things which I was doing lately. But... I got very sad situation, my win7 just died. Lovely "Side by side" configuration problem. It looks like I had no luck in resurrecting my machine and time comes to reinstall system from scratch. I just spent last 2 days to try not do this... Well, I'll back with new post after I solve this...

Dialogues Astah Plugin

As I promised here comes plugin to astah, which allows you to convert state machine diagrams into nice JSON which later can be imported into Unreal. To compile it you have to download AstahSDK and execute in console 'astah-build' and next 'astah-launch'. If this doesn't work you can follow tutorial for plugins or write comment here. Ok so how this work. You should do as follow:

1. Open astah and create nice diagram of dialogues (must be state diagram). It should start with initialState and finish with finalState. Actually you can have several final states, it depends how you build your tree of dialogues.
2. Save diagram (or diagrams). And then select from tool menu plugin.
3. In directory where you saved astah project you will find 2 new files. One is JSON other one is TXT. Plugin also do basic checks of your diagram:
1. If all paths of dialogue have final state
2. If all dialogues starts with NPC speech.
3. It builds you list of all variables used in conditions and exec sequences.

At this moment tool is very useful, I already found few things which I didn't finish, and few about which I forgot. When you doing one dialog a day, after week it's easy to forget that you had some great idea and you already putted some variables to achieve this. 

Another thing is, that internal structure of data for dialogues evolved, I found some problems with previous one... So I need to rewrite some parts of my blueprints, which probably will be pain in the ass. Thug life...

Here is ZIP with plugin. 

RPG? It's easy we will do something like Baldur Gates! (but better)

Well, I heard a lot of sentences like title of this post. Probably in every game forum, some young programmers are searching for team members to finish some epic RPG project. Well before you start this, maybe you will be interested in scale of dialogues with NPC. Below one picture which is tree of dialogue with one NPC in firstof episode... About 3.5 hour of continuous work. So only 14 other NPC left to finish first chapter...

BTW.
If you are interested in polish history, and some materials which help me while creating my game here is link and another one.