Platinum Arts Sandbox

I believe quin wants everyone to introduce themselves before we get started on sharing 1337 4w350m3 f4c75 about the cube 2 engine, which others may not know about, development tutorials on how to add certain features to your mod, tutorials to create simplistic and good looking art, etc.

I'm Hirato, from the sandbox project, I handle pretty much all the code and script related stuff, and strangely enough, a good deal of the art too Calimer (aka. mike) is the other member of the team, he 'founded' the project', and these days seems to handle all the PR stuff. As of this writing, we're currently up to release 2.2.0, with Mike doing a 2.2.2 test release this Friday, just so that people can see how we're progressing to 2.3 :)

Sandbox is aimed a lot more at kids, as such, violence was removed, in other words, you can't blow stuff up, or dismember others... though there's the exception of pushing them into the lava :P, but there's a nastylava var, so lava doesn't necessarily have to kill. Due to the removal of violence, we focus a lot of our attention to ambience, mood, setting (regarding maps), and we try to make the interface as easy to use, and informative as possible, though, anyone will straight away realise, it's not much different compared to sauer, even if we have received comments about editing being easier in sandbox, compared to sauer.

Code wise, we're completely up to date with the sauerbraten CVS, along with many features of our own, sandbox can be customised a lot easier, compared to sauer. we also try to do a lot of examples for people to follow. If you look at our collection of maps, specially those by me, you'll notice that they each take certain aspects to huge extremities, like mansion and the spotlights, forest and the huge abuse of mapmodels or village and the [very natural looking|smooth] terrain.

While talking of features, I've ripped the rpg module out, and integrated moviecube into our code base, in return I contribute bugfixes to the moviecube brach, if you'd like a play with it, just run the svn sandbox with -gmovie, you can look at the semi-official moviecube site, here (yes, I know it's a sourceforge site :P), offtools (Thomas), provides a lot of extra animations with his machinima mod (moviecube), so I would suggest you check out his version, if you want your character to wipe crumbs from his shirt, hug the air, and point in various directions, while we do support this stuff too, we haven't animated the models, specially since I don't have the blend files geartrooper used for robochimp.

Other features, I'm especially proud of, are...

• Ability to change the hud colours, and textures in realtime, without relaunching the game, or recompiling


• The fifth entity attribute, we've already put it to rather creative uses, mostly as a bonus trigger range on mapmodels, lensflare sizes, and fadetimes of many other particles


• Miscelaneous edithud information, despite the fact that it may seem pretty bloated, this is one of the things that make sandbox easier to use


• Particles 11! that's right! we have text particles! :D


• we got rid of the need for const char *savedconfig, configurations are now saved as config_${cl->gameident}.cfg, and each module can define their own loading logo image :D


• There are functions that rename the window, based on what's happened, like when you're loading a map, calculating lightmaps, generating PVS data, etc.

I can't think of anymore, besides, I've probably yapped on long enough, if anyone wants to check out the project, please visit:

http://kids.platinumarts.net

If you want some eye candy, here's some screenshots for you of 3 different maps, two of which are still in production. PS: freaking insane resolution warning.