First a note to Blender Artists: We’d like to begin preliminary support for Blender and get some Blender Artists around, what do you think? Let us know at the forum.

There are two new tutorials up around the site and there has been a lot of new information added to the game engine wiki. Some improvements have been made to the pipeline for artists, so even if you’ve used the tools already, you’ll want to at least skim through the asset export tutorial.

The first game engine tutorial to share here today is the script installation tutorial itself. If you’ve already installed the scripts, take a peek at the bottom of the page and catch a savory tip for automatically updating the scripts when new versions roll out. In the future there will be more formal installation routines when scripts are updated less often, but the tip at the game engine wiki will make this as painless as it gets.

The second tutorial is the max to game engine export tutorial. After you’ve installed the scripts, you need to put some models in the game engine, right?  This is as quick and dirty as it gets. Go through the steps, see the model in the game. The game engine export tutorial like anything else could use some improvement, please make suggestions and don’t hesitate to ask if there is something unclear. That’s why we’re here.

A semi-important milestone, I suppose. The actual number is 50044, including exporters, lua, maxscript, etc. If you include generated code the figure is nearer 180000. If you include dependencies, the total will be well over half a million…

As we’ve been working on adding procedural object / vegetation support, it has been necessary to revamp the physical material framework within Grit.  This has required changing the grammar of the tcol files, so if you update svn you’ll have to re-export your tcols using the updated maxscripts or they will give you errors inside Grit.  The maxscript is a bit ‘fresh’ but hopefully no serious bugs, if you find anything, please point it out to us on IRC.

Summary of changes:

Materials are now given by string (none of that hex number rubbish anymore) and users can easily add their own materials (see common/phys_mats.lua for examples).  The materials don’t do much yet but they will get fleshed out with various gameplay and behavioural features as time goes by.

The physical materials are now very similar to the graphical materials, they exist (by default) in the directory of the lua file in which they are defined. Tcol files will look in their local directory for physical materials just like mesh files look in their local directory for graphical materials.

Note: When using the tcol maxscript, don’t try and use the GRIT_PHYSMAT material anymore, just assign a normal material with the name you want.

The new system should be a lot more powerful and user-friendly than the old system so any hassle bringing existing tcol files up to date should be worth it.  Thanks!

This screen-shot was digitally enhanced during the down-scaling process. lol.

While our designs are still works in progress, JostVice has worked magic on the game engine forum and I am doing some work here on the site to compliment that.

At this time of writing, I’m feeling like the web page is a little too orange, while the forum just needs some default icons replaced to be brilliant.

Aside from this, there are a couple of forum topics I’d like to point you to. The first is a place to discuss the recent changes to the website and forum and the second is a topic related directly to Grit development: Help us decide the base location of the community game world.

There are a lot of things going on behind the scenes, although we’re not quite ready to spill any beans about the latest advancements to the Grit Game Engine. Join the forum to tell us what you think so far.

UPDATE: You can now select a color preference

Spark is going to stop compiling the .zip releases that can be downloaded from the web. Instead, everyone that wants to be up-to-date should use SVN.

You can check this quick guide to SVN in the forums about setting up SVN to use with Grit. It is intuitive and useful and ensures that everyone can stay up to date at a time where the engine changes so much that releases are a wasteful duty.

There will still be zip releases, but as those are quite slow to do (Changing OS to compile) it will only happen when there is a good bunch of new features to brag about from the SVN.

I broke the forum, after a lot of working on it and then a lot more working on it to fix new things that kept popping up, so needless to say there is the Google cached version to resurrect your topics and posts, but they are gone on-site. There is nothing wrong with SMF, it just seems that to get what we need out of it, I kept having to break and fix it. We will need all need a new account.

We have changed to PHPbb simply as a wider used, seemingly more easily-administered forum once things are set up. Most people will probably be happy to hear that, and while I’m sorry we lost our first bits in the forum, I am definitely glad it happened before it was more populated with content. If we were much bigger it would have been really upsetting, I’m sure.

We will have the forums in order for posting again soon, in the mean time you can grab your new account and watch the Grit RSS for a short announcement that says the preliminary topic and category structure is ready and open.

The newest pre-alpha snapshot will be back on the forums within 24 hours.