• New and improved forklift!
• Awesome tilt controls for the camera
• Remade scores system (instead of competing against each other with milliseconds, you know how well you compare against other players world wide).
• New levels

And of course all the goodies of the earlier version (realtime physics, great gameplay and the Mole). Here is some pictures of the new version:

Sun setting in Valhalla Expedition base camp

Well, I think it’s time for me to pull the plug on this project. At least on my own behalf. I think I should take a moment to look back and write something down about this project. Game developers usually write up post mortems for their games so I think I’ll take a shot on that even though our project was a mod (but large enough to be a expansion itself).

Starting out

I started modding out of sheer boredom. I had some plans on various mods for various games (like making a mod for The Witcher based on the Finnish horror movie Sauna). Fallout 3 won as a platform mainly because of the nostalgia it gave me and because it was still quite fresh (I started planning the mod even before the game came out).

The aim of the mod was to add Europeans, mainly northerners, to the Fallout lore. I created the basic structure of the plot, wrote it down and posted it on some forums with some basic ToDo lists in hopes to form a team. That didn’t work out too well since most of the topics just turned into flame wars about how I was contaminating the fallout lore with filthy European influences

Also, generally people are not too interested in helping out someone with just an idea. They want to know that you could pull off the project by yourself if necessary. People want to be sure that there is something in it for them before they’ll sacrifice their time to help you.  That taught me very well that ideas aren’t worth anything unless you can implement them. That’s the main thing I want to say to all starting out modders and game makers. No one will finish your project for you, so don’t go looking for a team unless you are ready to do all the heavy lifting yourself.

Another attempt

After failing early on to gather a team, I tried a different strategy. The aim of this strategy was still to find a team to help me with the project but my method was quite different. I decided that the best way to attract attention to the project would be to prove others (and myself also) that I could pull it off. Fallout modding that time was still quite premature (the GECK wasn’t even released yet) and the community was craving for new weapons to the game. So, armed with a copy of Blender and Fallout Mod Manager (basically a hex editor at the time) I started making my own weapon mod, the Valhalla Rifle.

Render of the Valhalla Rifle

Rifle in game

The rifle is inspired by the Finnish SAKO TRG sniper rifle, but not a direct clone. This mod was one of the first unique weapon mods in FO3 and it became quite popular (you can spot it in many Fallout 3 related youtube videos for example and almost all fan-made weapon packs for the game). One of the videos I made about this rifle was actually featured on YouTube’s .

Through the rifle’s popularity I started recruiting people for my larger mod project. I managed to get quite a crowd together but in the end only a few were really interested in doing some actual work on the mod. There were however a few people who were genuinely interested in the project from the start. This group later became the coreteam of the mod:

• Istvan, pretty much wrote all of the dialogues in the mod and helped me to fill in the spots with the background story
• Illyism, crazy scriptkiddie
• KrazyKommy, GECK editing and QA .
• Erki, our star voice actor

We also had numerous of other contributors and if you’re interested you can check the full list here.

In the next part I will write about the planning process and early phases of development. To be continued…

Hopefully the results wil be something like this.

The equipment I ordered arrived yesterday. It was actually a bit of a workload since I don’t have the routine for it yet. Cleaning and disinfecting the equipment took longest because I wanted to do it right. That is the part where most screw up and get contaminated beer.

I think I messed up with the sugar a a bit. The manual said to add 0.8kg of sugar. I had 1kg form which I removed 2dls of sugar and poured the rest to the brew. It turns out that 1dl of sugar is 90g of sugar, so that means that the final brew ended up getting 20g extra. Oh well, I doubt it’ll make much difference but that’s something I need to bear in mind in future.

I didn’t trust in the quality of my tap water so I bought some spring water from the local super market. That pushes up the costs a little, but I hope it will be worth it. The cost of ingredients per litre is around 0.90€ which is quite cheap in comparison with the normal prices here in Finland.

The fermentation took quite a while to start. I finished setting it up around 5 pm but the airlock hadn’t started to bubble even at midnight. That was quite weird but I think it is because I took the barrel to the coldest spot I could find in my apartment. Cold slows the process down but I’ve heard that it reduces the taste of yeast in the final product. Nevertheless, when I woke up this morning it was happily bubbling and therefore the fermentation had begun.

Why?

Because I want to I have made some homemade beer when I was younger but that didn’t go too well. It tasted awful. Here in Kajaani, one of my classmates started making his own beer, which sparked my own intrest in the subject again. His beer was quite decent but I think I can do better. Much better

How?

I cheated. Like in gamesdev, you must always cheat in order to achieve something great. That’s why I decided to order the ingridients and equpiment online. After a bit of searching I stumbled upon on these:

The 1st image is a picture of the equipment I ordered. To be honest, I don’t know the engilish names for that stuff. But it is pretty much the stuff you need for the beer to fermentate. The next one is the image of the malt extract container. Not too interesting but I have heard that every blog post should contian pictures

Nevertheless I am still waiting for those to arrive. When I get them and get em setup I will update my blog.

Yup. That was the logo of the site. I really enjoyed working on it and the site grew everyday with about 10 new users. The community site included news, wiki, forum and later even an e-commerce sections. Forums, of course, where the most lively part of the site.

Hosting and creating the site allowed me to update my HTML, PHP and graphical design skills. I gained so much knowledge about these technologies that I was actually able to get a job at the company that was running the servers for the site. Even while working I continued to also work on the community site. During that time the site went through numerous revisions and improvements.

E-commerce

Veepeli Multimedia e-commerce site

About 6 months before the launch of AoC there were some demands from the community for an bulk order of the game for cheaper price. I asked around for discounts from retailers but they all were pretty hesitant to sell the games any cheaper. Some even gave me offers that didn’t undercut the cheapest pre-order prices at that time. That felt quite ridiculous.

I did some research on the subject and called some companies that import the game to Finland. Their prices were a lot more reasonable but they only sold the games to other companies. I did some more research, ran couple of polls on the site and then decided to start my own company for this purpose.

The company’s name became Veepeli Multimedia. I threw together an e-commerce site to sell the games online (seen on the picture). I think it worked out quite well actually. I still remember the day prior to the launch when my living room was so full of the Collector’s Editions that it made moving around really difficult. Nevertheless, I got the all packed and posted on time. Didn’t even get any complaints

After the success with AoC I tried to sell some other games on the webshop as well. That didn’t work out so well, since I didn’t have a community for those specific games backing me up. Also, AoC as a MMO kinda flopped so there wasn’t much of a market for it’s gamecards.

In 2009 I decided to pull the plug on the site. There wasn’t really any visitors on the site except for the loyal search engine bots It was kinda sad to quit it, but I needed to move onto other projects of mine. Nevertheless I think the project was a great success considering how much experience I gained while working on it.

Yeah, but enough about that. I was at Tuska Open Air last saturday and I saw Sabaton again. Great they were, as usual.

Pics or it didnt happen:

But enough of that rambling. Here is how I managed to fetch wordpress user profiles into unity.

Unity JS

function Awake() {
	GetCookie (display_name);
	//This is what you are fetching.
	//See http://codex.wordpress.org/Database_Description#Table:_wp_users
}

function GetCookie (query:String){
	//Path to your PHP file
	var url = "http://domain.com/cookiecheck.php?q=";
	var getCookie = WWW(url+query);
		yield getCookie; // Wait until the download is done

    if(getCookie.error) {
        Debug.Log("There was an error getting cookies: "
				+ getCookie.error);
    } else {
		result = getCookie.data;
    }
}

function OnGui () {
	if (result != null) {
		GUI.Label (Rect (10,50,280,20), result);
	}
	else
		GUI.Label (Rect (10,50,280,20), "Waiting for yummy cookies!");
}

Server side PHP cookiecheck.php

$query=$_GET["q"];

require_once('/path/to/your/wp-config.php');

global $current_user;
      get_currentuserinfo();

if ('' == $user_ID) {
        print("invalid User");
      }
else {
	print($current_user->$query);
}

It is nothing major, but I spent a good amount of trial and error to get it right. Hopefully this article will save someone else from that trouble. Oh, and big thanks once again to the guys (and gals) at #unity3d@irc.freenode.irc.freenode.net

Here is some screenshots:

You can play it at Wooglie!

Oh and rate it there as well! Grrr…

I have been looking at so many pictures of abs that my girlfriend prolly thinks I have become gay : )

The Zbrush interface is at first really like climbing a tree without hand or legs. But once you get used to it, it works out quite well. I will be posting updates when I make more progress.

Oh, and that character I am making will be hero for my upcoming Zombie Mayhem game. His working name is Zack ; )

UPTADE 14.4.2009

I did some more work on the arms and proportions. Check em out and feel free to give C&C .

Well… I bought Aiptek 14000u graphics tablet mainly to speed up my work with textures. The tablet is quite fine actually, sleek design and good pen. Pretty good bang for your buck!

Bur the thing i had problems with was that the damn tablet lacks support for two monitor setup… It was pretty frustrating. I tried everything to get it to work, from re-installing windows (tried out Windows 7, which is nice by the way) to manually editing the driver files. No luck with that.

After about a week I decided to do some extra research on the subject. It turned out that the damn media tablet was actually a Taiwanese Waltop tablet. Luckily, the Waltop site had more recent drivers to download than the Aiptek site. I installed the Waltop drivers and a new menu popped up in the tablet setting. This new menu was about working area! I could set the tablet to work on the screen I wanted it to work on : )

So the morale of the story is don’t spent days trying to get your Aiptek tablet to work with your two monitors! Just get the drivers for the real product you bought, meaning Waltop media tablet.

Oh, and do not bother with mailing Aiptek support…