Visionaire: Integration of 3D Characters into a 2D Adventure Engine

DA/PR Echtzeitgraphik

 Michael Wimmer, Alexander Hartmann

• Description
  
• Task
  
• Tools
  
• Requirements
  

Visionaire Studio is a 2D adventure game engine which is used for many successful games like the fan adventure "Zak McKracken - between time and space" and the commercial game "The whispered world" (adventure game of the year 2009).

Currently all animations, including character animations, must be created as a sequence of 2D images (see here). This is not only time consuming for the game developer but also bad in regard to performance. Each frame has to be loaded from a graphics file and is then stored in textures. The loading of images is slow and the textures need a lot of memory.

The task is now to add support for 3D models used as in-game characters to replace 2D character animations. It must be able to load a character model from a commonly used 3d format (e.g. Collada). Further it must be possible to define character animations (e.g. character walking, talking or picking up an item) from animation files created by 3d modeling tools.

Tools and settings have to be added to the Visionaire Editor to define the mapping of the 2D scenes to the 3D world. This is necessary for a correct integration of the character into the scene. This includes the camera position and parameters, light sources and the plane where the character walks. It is not yet clear what the best way for this mapping is. It should be easy for the user but still be powerful, and not too hard to implement (it is not our goal to create a 3D modeling editor module).

Additional features like Cell Shading or Shadows could be added optionally.

Visionaire is a popular adventure game engine and has many active users. The 3D character support is already highly anticipated and will be used by many game developers. A successful project may bring you a good reference.

Screenshots, further information and a free download of "Visionaire Studio" can be found at our portal. This lab is co-supervised by the Visionaire team and the university.

Good C++ experience is needed. Additional experience in OpenGL, 3d modeling and wxWidgets is helpful. Visionaire is written platform independently but currently only runs on Windows (compiled with Visual Studio). At the moment we are in the process of porting it to Mac OS X.