Understanding CryEngine 3 code: player character

Now, I want to know about the player character, especially about the way it's set up code-wise.

Add me to Google+

Well, if you want to. 

I'm slightly changing my "posting policy" on this blog. From here on, I will only post on the blog articles I wrote. For links or random thoughts, I'll use public posts on Google+. So if you happen to be interested in what I have to share outside of my articles, you can follow circlify add me to Google+. I'll also share there the links to any new blog post. Just click on my name on this post and it should send you to my G+ profile.

And no, I don't have Twitter and I don't like it :)

Understanding CryEngine 3 code: loading a level

Last time I took a look at the startup sequence of a CryEngine 3 game. Now, it's time to investigate what happens when loading a level, up to the spawning of the player's character. This will eventually lead us to the Lua side of the engine.

The investigation will start from when the player selects a level from the main menu.

Understanding CryEngine 3 code: Starting the game

I'm starting to look at the programming side of the CryEngine 3 Free SDK. I've been quite surprised to see that the official documentation gives little to no information on the overarching concepts and systems that are present in the engine. I then decided go down the brutal path to understand the system, which is putting breakpoints (almost) everywhere, and see what happens, in which order.

As usual when I do that kind of self-teaching, I find that writing up the results of my investigation helps me making sure I know what I'm talking about. And it might as well be useful to other people.

UDK vs CryEngine 3 SDK - Exporting animated meshes

We've seen how to make and export static meshes, now it's time to look at meshes you can play animations on. As in the previous article, I'll investigate how the pipeline expects the data to be set up, then take a look at how you export that data, and what happens in the process.

Note that I'm focussing on non-character objects (i.e. humanoïds, animals, etc) because, well, characters aren't the only ones that need animations, and because it is slightly easier for me to generate data for them. I will cover characters though. Someday.

Why should I care?

Pretty much the same as usual, to see how restrictive or flexible the pipeline is, what's done in the editor, what's done in the modelling package.

Animation Chronicles - Episode 7: First animation, playblast and graph editor

I am now all set to animate my helicopter. I'll need a bunch of animations to make my tests and I'll start with a simple one : a looping animation of the rotors turning. This will be the opportunity to talk about a few of Maya's animation related features: referencing, playblasts, and the graph editor.

Animation Chronicles - Episode 6: Rigid skinning

Preparing a new article for the UDK vs CryEngine 3 SDK series, I had to rig a non-organic object (read: not a character) in order to test the animated object pipeline with something simple. It also gave me the opportunity to make a skeleton from scratch and learn about skinning (or binding, in Maya language), which is the topic of this article.

For a number of reasons that don't need explaining, I chose to rig a vehicle, an helicopter to be precise. I took the Black Hawk from the CryEngine 3's sample assets. However, it wasn't rigged, so I had to it myself as I wanted to try and export this model into UDK. Good exercise.