Games, Sketches, and Thoughts

One of my office friends is making his own arcade game cabinet. He was lucky enough to get the game’s electronic board from eBay. The game was Xain’d Sleena, a platformer -shooter game from Technos Japan (1986), which was his favorite when he was kid. He told me that sometimes he played it with his father.

Xain'd Sleena, image courtesy from www.mamedb.com

This reminds me of myself, who also grows up playing arcade games. Thanks to MAME, I can play again all those games. Unfortunately, there is one game, which is really really my favorite but not playable in MAME: SKY ROBO or Tatakae Big Fighter. A shooter game with a mecha-robo.

Tatakae Big Fighter (Sky Robo), image courtesy from www.arcadeflyers.com

I don’t really know why I love this game. Maybe because the amount of coins I spent playing it, how suck I was in shooting game, the memory, or maybe just the nostalgia factor

So what’s your favorite arcade game?

Another experiment with Away3D After successfully loading Metaseq (MQO) file using Away3D, I want to do a simple animation.

Currently, Away3D supports bone animation using Collada. Collada would be great for animation but I don’t have any 3D editor to generate Collada file. Unfortunately, I’m kinda allergic to Blender

Luckily, Away3D is also able to do vertex animation using MD2 or the Animator class. After reading the frame/vertex animation tutorial (http://away3d.com/tutorials/tutorial-how-to-use-the-animator-class), I decided to give it a try.

I still have the Mikoto animation files that I created for Tokusatsu Agent. Haven’t used Mikoto for very very long time but it just take me 30 minute to get used to it again. I took the running animation and saved some keyframes into 6 MQO files. Using my Metaseq library, I load all 6 MQO files, get the vertices data, and pass them to the Animator class.

The result is quite satisfying. Just click the pic below for demo. The source code still look ugly but just e-mail me if you’re interested.

More experiments and optimizations will come so stay tuned

Two weeks ago, I started playing with Away3D and working on parser for Metasequoia. There were some codes for that (from sleepydesign or libspark) but they didn’t work with the new version. I have been changing the code so it can change the materials/texture of the model once loaded.

FinallyI made it. Click the picture below to see the demo

Click the ‘read more’ below to see the and download the code. It is still in very early version, buggy and some MQO models are not displayed correctly. I am still working on it. But if you want, feel free to use it

Note: The code is only work with the current trunk version of the Away3D version 2.4.0/3.4.0 FP10 (tested on rev. 2039)

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