The Game Learner

Sketchup is an easy to use 3D modelling tool now owned by Google. I first tried it out a couple of years back and then, not having any reason to use it, put it away in a dark virtual cupboard.

I needed to create a model today though so I reached deep into the back of the cupboard and was able to whip this up in a couple of hours (in between meetings and reacquainting myself with elements of how it works).

There is also a nifty third party plugin with the imaginative name of Sketchup Web Exporter that enables you to display your models in a web browser – you can actually click and drag on this object to rotate it.

Go on – guess

I’ve spent a good part of the day battling with the FPS Creator segment editor, a tool that allows you to create your own walls/rooms/floors and so on in FPS Creator. This largely came about because I liked the wall of one pre-made segment and the floor of another and (not properly reading the manual) I floundered about for a few days before discovering that you can’t actually do this.

Fortunately now I can take the mesh (the physical framework of the 3D object, generally a .x file in this instance) from one section (wall, floor, ceiling etc), stick it next to the mesh from another to choose my own textures (the flat part that sits on the outside of the mesh and makes it look like whatever it is that you want it to look like – generally a .tga or .dds file).

Of course,  the provided instructions neglected to mention that for the FPSC Segment Editor to recognise your specially created textures (whipped up in Photoshop and converted using the beautiful DDS2 converter), you need to label your textures blahblah_D2.tga or blahblah_D2.dds – fortunately the FPSC forum came to my aid.

All in all, this was a great practical example of discovery learning – just knowing enough to get started and identifying the new pieces of knowledge that were required in the process of doing it.

I also had another design idea the other day – by placing each separate mission on its own individual level and having the player progress to the next level (which is just a cut/paste of the initial level but with different audio files and resources), it’s possible to make the experience a much deeper one. (The initial problem was having the player going up to an NPC – non-player character – for information and having a limited range of responses, which would have been tied only to a single mission).

Nice to feel like this is getting somewhere.