Zero Gear spotted in 3DWorld magazine!

We have small mention in this month's computer graphics magazine 3DWorld! The issue focuses on open source technology, a lot of which we use in Zero Gear. If you see it on news stands, check it out!

custom character crafting

Pior Oberson is the first person to make some custom content for Zero Gear! He has modeled a new character and hat for the game which I got into the engine today, check it out!



here is a video of it in action

Zero Gear: Space Bunny custom character by Pior Oberson from marshmonkey on Vimeo.

I wear Eyewear

A few pieces to go into the garage that I did this weekend:

and a Shoe car!

Go-Juice!!!

Here is a list of some of the fuel that is driving development right now:
Grand Ole Party
Arcade Fire
DeVotchKa
The Kills
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Pixies
The Presidents of the United States of America
Spoon
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Led Zeppelin (You don't need a link)
Nine Inch Nails
R.E.M.

We listen to a lot of KEXP.
Dave is listening to a Pandora station he created: Whiskey In The Jar

And I get to listen to a jackhammer outside my window every day until they have decided they had enough fun breaking up cement...

Rock 'em Sock 'em Monkey

Just a short note to show you another character I made today, a sock monkey!

Garage part deux

Woohoo! This is our 50th post since we started the Zero Gear development blog! I am just taking a quick moment to post a revised GUI mockup of how we want the garage to function. This will hopefully be another GUI programmed in flash, and will feature floating elements that can be positioned by the user. Hopefully you will be tooling around in this garage soon!

A Mini Map With Maximum Enjoyment

After getting Hikari working, we wanted to test it.

We wanted to create something we could use in game. Something that would be difficult or time consuming to create manually. We also wanted to see how well it held up. What better test than a Mini Map?

First, here is the Mini Map in action:


It was created by Dave's brother Ian and supports rotating, zooming, and any number of icons on the map. It was written in ActionScript 3 and is a Flash element that is being rendering in our game using Hikari.

It performs quite well. There is barely a FPS drop and it is pretty smooth.

You can see the full source here and the data file here.

Here is a quick summery of what I needed to do to get it working in game.

I call the ActionScript
loadMap(imageUrl:String, mapWidth:Number, mapHeight:Number):void
function from Lua, passing in the name of the mini map image, the width of the map in game units (1 unit is a meter), and the height (or depth in 3D).

I can then call the ActionScript
setPlayerPosition(x:Number, y:Number, rot:Number, zoom:Number):void
function, passing in the x position, y position (or z in 3D), the degrees rotated around the y axis, and a zoom amount (based on speed of the player).

There is a similar function for setting data related to other players called setObjectPosition().

From there Ian takes care of the rest and that means I have time to watch an episode of Dexter instead of writing a Mini Map in C++. Yay!

race GUI mock-up

As we are starting to build pieces of the GUI for the much anticipated race mode for our game, I spent some time mocking up a general outline of what it might look like. What do you think? We will use this as a guide to build the real pieces. Click to see the bigger picture.

more screenshots added to media page

I have added 6 more screenshots to the Zero Gear media page. Go check them out!

Screeeeech! Tink! Boooom!

As you may have noticed in our last video, we have finally gotten some sound effects for Zero Gear. This is all due to our partnership with Kaamos Sound, which is run by Tapio Liukkonen, a friendly and frosty fellow who lives down the street from Santa Claus in North Finland near the arctic circle.


Tapio found our game online and was very excited to help, we are excited to be working with him because he is very passionate about his work. Here is a sound sample of some of the work he has done for Zero Gear:

Tapio braves bears, junkyards and go-kart dealerships on a regular basis to find and record the source material he needs to transform into crisp, clear sounds. Here is a picture of him with his giant fuzzy microphone.



You can look forward to some of Tapio's great sounds in Zero Gear!

New Video! Fallout gameplay mode and 3 Items!

Thanks for patiently waiting, (well most of you) we have reached another milestone in the development of the game. This video was from an online playtest we held to test out a fresh gameplay mode called "Fallout" (where the object is not to fall out of the level) along with our very first implementations of 3 different items. There are also a few new characters thrown in and some other things we have added along the way. You might also notice another new thing for Zero Gear, sounds! We have been working with a mysterious character from the icy north to provide Zero Gear with sounds. We will reveal all about him in another post soon! Enjoy the video!


Click to play video

Hikari - In Game Flash GUI

It seems lately the Holy Grail of game GUIs has been Flash. Scaleform is an example of a commercial GUI based on Flash. This does not work for indies because of the cost.

Hikari is a great option for Ogre users. It was just released yesterday and I already have it integrated into Zero Gear. It is still new and needs a little work but thanks to it being open source (LGPL), we should start seeing a lot of support from the community.

P.S. One thing to mention is Hikari only works on Windows.

I like turtles

see!

Join our Steam Group!

We want Zero Gear to be available on Steam when it is ready to be unleashed on the world. Until that happens, you can show your support and desire to see a game like Zero Gear on Steam by joining our Steam Group! Brian and I are usually in the group chat room as well, so stop by and say hello!