Engine revealed - AVS Startling Discoveries

[r0ckarong]

Hey people, I just wanted to use the opportunity to join this new forum with a bang.

 

I just poked around again in the source files for AVS (readers of the Pumpkin Post might know my post there under my name Markus) with the devolpment image files for the game etc.

 

I tried getting AVS to work on my Linux machine and while I was looking through some debug shells I found something quite interesting. Remnant lines from the Windows compilation code that hadn't been cleaned up. The lines reference to something called "orenpanda" which I translated to "Original English Panda" ... a quick Google search revealed that Panda 3D is in fact a free 3D engine.

 

But that couldn't be could it? A new game like that based on something so simple? Well, lo and behold fellow Vampyre fans.

 

AVS is in fact constructed around the Panda3D engine. Don't believe me?

 

Check this out:

 

Froderick

 

Mona de la Fitte

 

What this means (and all that this means). Is that this game is based on a multi-platform engine and could easily be done as a Linux or Mac Version. I guess they chose Windows only for a start because that was the only platform with SecuRom protection available.

 

What do you think? Want to see it too? Download Panda3D yourself.

 

Then navigate to:

"<Drive>\A Vampyre Story\game\assets\actors\" and there choose whatever character you like. There is a folder each for the characters with subfolders containing as labeled the model, the animation, textures etc.

 

Textures are usually mapped png files (last time I've seen that style of texture was Quake 1 skinning -but it's awesome) and can be edited. I don't know yet if that does have any effect on running the game.

 

You can open the .bam files with the program "pview" (Panda Viewer) included in the Download. If you want to see the animations for the characters you need to use more parameters in pview.

 

(I'm a Linux user so beware of the command line!)

 

For example. To see Froderick flying you need to tell pview to combine the model with the animation file:

 

pview FRO_bind.bam ../animations/FRO_DUN_flyOnScreen.bam

 

 

Please Autumn Moon don't hurt/sue me. I don't even understand most of what I saw and I have no means of reproducing your game.

 

This just goes to show how awesome these guys are. The game is even an adventure AFTER you've finished playing it

 

Edit: Whoops, seems like this is terribly old news. Someone at the Adventure-Treff.de forums mentioned that two weeks ago. Still good news to me

[Gabez]

This is news to me, too, and definitely interesting. Well done for making this discovery!

 

Also, welcome to the forums! Hope you stick around, and come over to the other Mojo forums as well!

[neon_git]

Heh, I actually did pretty much the same thing trying to get the demo to run on 'nix. I didn't bother getting as far as you though, good effort It's always cool and a little surprising to see FOSS out in the real world.

 

Good to have another computer geek on the forums, hope you stick around