IrrAdventure - Part 1 - First steps

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Creation of the new project

The first thing you must do to create your adventure game is execute the makeProject.bat script (or makeProject.sh if you are on Linux). It creates a new folder named "project" which contains a new empty project. Modify the name of the Project.exe and Project.sh executables as you wish.

Creation of the 3D world

Create your 3D world with 3DsMax, or maya, or another 3D infography software. Then, create 6 cameras on the scene, which will be exactly at the same point, and all with an horizontal FOV (focus) equal to 90 degrees. Each camera must look at a different direction, and have an angle equal to 90 degrees with 4 other cameras. So one camera look at the front, one look at the right, one at the back, one at the left, one at top, and the last camera look at the bottom.

You must now generate a bitmap picture for each camera.

If you use 3dsMax 2.5, you should automate the procedure, in "Rendering" - "Video post", creating new sequences and new scene evenements. It should give that :

3dsMax picture

3dsMax picture

Save the created pictures somewhere.

Open these pictures with your favorite drawing editor (the best is Photoshop or theGimp). Invert horizontally the picture for each file (because of a problem of Irrlicht). Save these pictures on ".jpg" file format, with an high quality compression.

Create the "0" folder in the folder "data" of your new project.

Copy the jpg pictures in this "0" folder. The pictures must be named back.jpg, bottom.jpg, front.jpg, left.jpg, right.jpg, et top.jpg, in accordance with what it represents in the scene.

First test

Launch the game. The pictures are drawn !

Modify the mouse cursor

If you don't like the mouse cursor, modify the "event_mouse.bmp" and "normal_mouse.bmp" files. You can define a new size if you want. The black color is transparent. The number of pictures and the speed of the animation are defined in data.xml in the lines :

<normalMouse nbPictures="1" timeAnimation="0" />
<eventMouse nbPictures="4" timeAnimation="300" />

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