What exactly can the SDK/GDK allow us to do?

[PiousAugustus99]

I don't know too much about these two things so I was wondering about what kinds of things we could pull off with it...

 

Would it be possible to make a single player Duel of the Fates level? Where Darth Maul would be very hard and only he would have a double saber...And then to add an A.I. allied Jedi (Qui Gonn) as you both fight him? Would it also be possible to have Darth Maul's A.I. to keep heading slowly into the room where Quigonn and him die?

 

If we were able to pull stuff like this off, this game will last forever...Just think about some of the possibilites...

 

Luke vs Vader - ESB

Luke vs Vader - ROTJ

Obi Wan vs Vader - ANH

[EKM]

and then of course there are all the great fights in the novels... I wanna see some in-game Vong.

[Joruus]

Actually Pious what your proposing falls more in the line of Machinima than game development.

 

With the right tools, and skills, you can develop scripting sequences for Q3A engine games, which can be "filmed" within the engine and then edited to remove HUD elements, add music, transition effects.

 

For a good example of Q3A based machinima, you can check out Tritin Films, as they've done some of the best stuff with the engine. But most of it with live actors.

 

The actual bot scripting and programming to simulate the speed and skill of a duel between Qui-Gon and Darth Maul is a whole nother barrel of monkies though. The engine is capable of some pretty incredible saber combat, but the bot code as it is right now is not that good, its good bot code, but its not Qui-Gon/Maul good on its own.

 

Generally in machinima, its best to work with live actors that have enough skill to translate your vision into action.

 

I haven't done any machinima since Quake 2, back when we had a 3rd party editor that could edit camera viewpoints within a demo. Q3A engine machinima is much harder, since something about the EULA for Q3A forbids that kind of software manipulation. So to actually make movie sequences in Q3A, from a hobbiests means, you would need these tools.

 

3D Video Card with a video out/in port.

A VCR Recorder to capture the "camera" players viewpoint

JORadiant or other complaint JO Map editor to build the scene enviroment in.

Some form of digital video editing software. (After recording the intial scenes in to VCR, you would then loop the VCR recording back to the editing computer, and compress it into an AVI or MPEG format for editing.

 

Oh and most importantly....lots of extra time on your hands.

 

The GDK would make part of what your asking possible, but theres alot more to it than just a GDK.

 

GDK will be for map/skin/mod development mostly.

[PiousAugustus99]

Thanks a lot Loruus...Well, I was wondering, what if you wanted Qui Gonn and Maul to just fight? Doesn't exactly have to be anything near the movie...but just have Qui GOnn attack Maul...Would that be plausible?

[Joruus]

Sure thats easy enough just with a pair of skins to represent them and a level for them to fight on.

 

The bots aren't wholly and totally incompetant, in fact they're very good for computer AI opponents. But like any bot, they sometimes have trouble with ledges, jumping and all other manner of things.

 

Needless to say, all you'd need to do is develop your level in JORadiant, and then make sure you build an AAS file once you've fully compiled it, (the editor should be able to do this for you.), an AAS file is basically a zones file that the Bot AI reads and translates as all passable surfaces on a map. Without one, your bots will generally either stand still and do nothing, or run into walls and get stuck there trying to run through them.