Platinum Arts Sandbox - Free 3D Game Maker Forum

This is an E-mail I wrote to Mike, he wanted me to post it on here just encase anyone had the same questions, or if you have any answers for me. SO please write back, I would love to start production on the game.


E-MAIL:

Hello,

I'm not sure if you would consider this a technical question, but her it goes....

I am Ian Moats, and I want to create a children RPG with your software, but I've seem to com into some problems...

One, I don't understand how to add NPC characters to the game.<---------- Found this in the FAQ, ignore it it was my own stupidity.
Two, Can you only use blender? or is their another 3d modeling program that is compatible.
Three, I watched your rpg video and i would like to have those spells and what not, thing is that this Cube Scripting is new to me, I just learned FPI a few weeks ago. SO how do I set up a GUI like that with spells and stuff so I can give the children a lil more of a challenge.
Four, how do I create enemies? Is there a certain script I need to insert to make the character attack the player?
Five, how do you "build" the game when you are done? DO I need to compile it myself?

All in all, the program is great! I love how easy it is to mold an entire world with just the editing feature. I do hope that more content will be available in future releases.

P.S. will there be "packs" that contain models and stuff that we can download and insert into our games?

Adding NPC to the game. I'm new to Sandbox so I havn't looked yet how Sandbox adds a NPC, I'm concertrating on learning the mapping part and adding static models.
I have a list of free programs other than Blender you can use for Sandbox

All the below programs are free:
Wings3d, a great modeler with a outstanding uv mapper.
http://www.wings3d.com/

Blacksmith 3D, You can paint your models in realtime 3D. The freeware 3D painter limits your export image size is 1024 x1024 which is more than enough for Sandbox
http://www.blacksmith3d.com/blacksmith3 ... ftware.php

Artweaver, a 2d paint program like photoshop. It supports layers. Some texture artist like to paint on the flat 2D uv map image for textuing and other texturing usage.
http://www.artweaver.de/index.php?en_version

Misfit Model 3D, to add bones and animations for your NPC or other models, plus to save your model as a md3 file with the animation data. be sure to get the lastest beta version
http://www.misfitcode.com/misfitmodel3d/

MD3Compile, a very quick and easy converter for md2,3ds files to a md3 file. I use it for converting my static 3ds models into a md3 file plus to rebuild my 3ds model's normals.
http://www.quakeunity.com/file=481

There are of course other programs you can pay for that work for Sandbox but I just gave you the free ones...
I will let others answer the rest of your questions but just take your time and learn one step at a time, your a long way from compiling and putting the game outthere...

daddyrooster wrote: One, I don't understand how to add NPC characters to the game.<---------- Found this in the FAQ, ignore it it was my own stupidity.
Two, Can you only use blender? or is their another 3d modeling program that is compatible.
Three, I watched your rpg video and i would like to have those spells and what not, thing is that this Cube Scripting is new to me, I just learned FPI a few weeks ago. SO how do I set up a GUI like that with spells and stuff so I can give the children a lil more of a challenge.
Four, how do I create enemies? Is there a certain script I need to insert to make the character attack the player?
Five, how do you "build" the game when you are done? DO I need to compile it myself?
P.S. will there be "packs" that contain models and stuff that we can download and insert into our games?

1. this depends on the game module you're using, if you're using our RPG module, you do it by adding a spawn entity and assigning an NPC to it (but we'll see when 2.4 comes out)
in the FPs module, we fake this by assigning dialogue scripts to triggers
2. you can use any modeling app you want, provided it can export to compatible formats (obj, md2(do not use), md3, md5), we just recommend blender
3. at the moment we store everything inside data/game_rpg.cfg, you'll find plenty of examples there of the newer style
4. the needed dummy values exist, alas the AI doesn't yet
5. you only need to compile the binaries if you've modified the source code for said binaries
6. that depends when mike says we've added too much to sandbox, at the moment we intend to have ALL the content ship with sandbox

Thanks to both of you, this is really useful.