wiiuse Forums

Tink! Bang! Clank! A ball races through an amazing machine built from a variety of simple parts. You, the player, have meticulously assembled this machine to get the ball to its final destination. Now you can stand back and watch your handiwork as all the pieces fall into place. Will it make it all the way to the end? Watch and see!

Description:
Contraption is a fully-3D, physics-based puzzle game that uses Ageia PhysX and OpenGL.

In each stage, the player will be expected to complete partial machines or build a machine to move the ball to the goal. As the levels increase in difficulty, the player will be exposed to new, different parts that they will be expected to use to complete the level. In the most difficult levels, the player might be required to use parts in complex combinations or unusual ways in order to progress.

This is a five-month project we have been doing with a team of six people. We are currently four months into our development and we just passed Alpha. We plan to make a public beta available via download around the first week of March.

[url=http://www.benretan.com/img/grid.png]
Working on a Contraption[/url]

Website:
http://www.benretan.com

On this website, you will find information about Contraption including a weekly developers blog about the progress of the project. I'm currently a week behind on the blog but now that I have the Wiimote working with the project, I'll be putting an update up soon.

Expect more screen shots as the project continues.

Well I just put up a new update on the progress of our project in the Developer's Blog section of my site including screen shots of our game being used with the wiimote and wiiuse. I was in our debug mode when I took these, so you will notice the an OpenGL grid being drawn on top of our normal grid texture.

Contraption Update - Week 15


[url=http://www.benretan.com/img/wiicomputer.jpg]
Wiimote being used with Contraption on a computer monitor[/url]

[url=http://www.benretan.com/img/wiiprojector.jpg]
Wiimote being used with Contraption on a projector[/url]

[url=http://www.benretan.com/img/achievement.jpg]
Our new Achievement System[/url]


-Ben Retan
Technical Lead
Eclectic Entertainment

Looks awesome, can't wait to try it out

What in your opinion is the best way to learn OpenGL? Any favourite books or online tuts? I won't be studying it at uni for another year and I just can't wait that long, lol.

I was lucky enough to study directly under Richard Wright who is the author of the OpenGL Superbible.

He just released a new version of the book about six months ago and it's an excellent book that will tell you everything you need to know about the basics of OpenGL programming.



After you learn the basics from that book, if you want to go on to some more advanced OpenGL techniques, I would recommend checking out the book More OpenGL Game Programming. It has sections on hightmaps and skydomes that I liked a lot.

That is awesome, I have that book. It's very good, but I found a lot of mistakes -- one I remember in particular was a function prototype was incorrect and the description for it was for a different function.

I took two courses at college, they were in OpenGL but focused heavily on the math aspect. The math is much more involved than you would expect when you first start, even for basic things like moving the camera.

Here are some resources I used, but keep in mind I'm not too fantastic with GL (the SDL example I released with wiiuse was a hackjob, I'm a little better than that, heh):

For learning OpenGL, I found the following helpful:

• OpenGL Programming Guide (Red Book)
  http://opengl.org/documentation/red_book/
  
• Intro to OpenGL lecture notes by David M. Mount
  University of Maryland, pdf
  These are quite good for learning OpenGL and the math behind it.
  http://www.cs.umd.edu/~mount/427/Lects/427lects.pdf
  
• Gametutorials.com
  This site has a lot of good example code demonstrating different parts of GL. It's no longer free, but you can probably find a good bit of the stuff in some website caches.
  http://gametutorials.com/
  
• NeHe
  Lots of tutorials but the code is frankly quite ugly, disorganized, and I found it difficult to follow as a beginner. Still a decent resource though.
  http://nehe.gamedev.net/

Eventually you'll want to put some of that to use and make something neat looking (like this awesome contraption game). I was always a fan of ID so I tried doing some work with the Quake III stuff.

I made a Quake III model animation renderer (screenshot here, nothing too fancy but it was fun) and a basic Quake III map renderer which used these resources:

• MD3 Model Format
  http://www.icculus.org/homepages/phaethon/q3a/formats/md3format.html
  
• Unofficial Quake III Map Specs
  http://graphics.stanford.edu/~kekoa/q3/
  
• Rendering Quake III Maps
  http://graphics.cs.brown.edu/games/quake/quake3.html

Quake III seemed fairly simple (except the documentation was a bit lacking at places, especially aligning the model's body properly) and might be a good place to start if you're interested in going in that direction.

You're going to need textures if you're doing 3D, and unless you use something like the SDL (and I recommend learning the SDL because it's damn nice) you're going to need to load image data yourself. The targa format is straight forward and pretty easy to implement. You probably want to write a system to cache textures so you don't have to load them multiple times too.

• TGA
  http://organicbit.com/closecombat/formats/tga.html
  http://www.gamers.org/dEngine/quake3/TGA.txt

I really recommend reading through those lecture notes as well as the RedBook and Superbible. All three of those in combination should give you a great start. The math is really important so don't blow that off while you're going through the basics or you'll have to go back and redo a lot of what you already did.

You'll probably want to learn the SDL or GLUT too. OpenGL does what you want, but setting up a window in OpenGL is kind of rough. A toolkit will let you setup and manage OpenGL windows (creating the window, keystrokes, mouse movements, etc) much more easily. GLUT is pretty easy to use. SDL may be a little harder but I really think it's worth it just to start off with that. The SDL website has a wiki with all the info you need. Also NeHe has tutorials in both GLUT and SDL so you can either work off of those or use them to compare the differences.

Hope something here helps.

This post was way longer than I thought it was going to be, sorry.

benretan, was the game 'The Incredible Machine' an inspiration to this? I loved that game, I think I still have the 3rd one.

Wow guys, thanks for all the info. I'm slowly reading the Red Book now and I've skim read through some of the NeHe stuff before, thanks for the link to those lecture notes.

And the MD3 stuff, that's great. I was already planning to use MD2 models in my project (since I had some good documentation and they seemed sufficient) but I'm sure MD3 models are a lot more versatile. Really helpful stuff, cheers again.