Article for Blender Art Magazine

[antoine]

We are working on an article for Blender Art Magazine. You can help improve ctdabomb's current revision. We would really like to replace some of the lower quality art assets. We could use a level designer and are willing to start a new level and document the process with screenshots. The article's submission deadline is March 5th and there is not a size constraint because it's only available in digital form.
http://blenderart.org/

The theme for this issue is “Imagine the Possibilities”

A new year has arrived filled with possibilities for artistic growth and learning. In this issue we are going to look at your personal projects and goals for 2013. What do you hope to learn or accomplish with blender this year. The possibilities are endless, so let the possibility party begin.

Looking for tutorials or “making of” articles on:

Personal Projects/Creations
Any tool or technique

The next topic is "Imagine the Possibilities". Not sure if STK would fit into that one?

I think the article fits the theme nicely. "Imagine the Possibilities" is perfect for STK track design. Look at what you guys have already made; you can race in space, under the sea, in a fairy land, on an alien planet, in the snow and in a haunted house. We could say something along the lines of "Design a level in any setting and then easily play it in SuperTuxKart. Just make the scene using our custom scripts and then load the scene into STK. Let your imagination go wild and then race through it with your friends and family."

The article is a tutorial which is something they are looking for. And finally, the STK developers have made custom scripts that extend Blender and this shows how extendable Blender can be for game designers.

Not as a tutorial. The possibility of using blender as a all-in-one art pipeline might be interesting.

Great idea.

From their web page:

In this issue we are going to look at your personal projects and goals for 2013. What do you hope to learn or accomplish with blender this year.

We could fit into that by saying that we want that many people will be using blender to create tracks for STK. Or perhaps 'Using blender to get more animated tracks' or so.

More levels, more animated levels, and more animated characters would all be great.

[Jooost]

Very nice! I do think you should tell a little more about the game itself, maybe with some screenshots, and talk about stkaddons.

[hiker]

I do think you should tell a little more about the game itself, maybe with some screenshots, and talk about stkaddons.

Definitely - the article is more a tutorial (which is not suited for a blender magazine, see tutorial thread), then a real article at this stage.

A potentially outline of an article:

• About STK
  
  • What is STK, game play
    
  • Screenshots
    
  • Open Source nature of code and all assets
    
  • Media repository with all blender files and textures
    
  • Addon manager to support publishing of tracks and karts
    
  • Briefly(!) about development tools and libraries - C++, irrlicht, ... and usage of blender
• Blender
  
  • Use of blender to create all 3d art assets, using a b3d exporter
    
  • Extended blender to also include all meta information about tracks and kart
    
  • Some examples (which should go with the screenshots mentioned above - we do not need to include all things mentioned here, just some suggestions)
    
    • Show usage of drivelines, define skyboxes, music etc... (not all, but one screen shot)
      
    • Perhaps explain how animations can be exported (skeletal animations as part of the b3d file, which is handled by irrlicht), and IPO data is exported and then used by STK
      
    • Perhaps kart animations, show how we define which frames are used for what animation
      
    • Defining alternative/hidden ways
      
    • Explain that the data is then exported into xml files which is read by STK
      
• Outlook
  Not exactly sure tbh - some ideas for brainstorming:
  
  • Support for different game modes (e.g. battle mode AI, which needs more meta-information for arenas, which is not handled atm)
  • Perhaps automate some currently manual work (e.g. perhaps create drivelines automatically based on textures??)
  • Anything else?

Consider this just a quick start for discussion

Cheers,
Joerg

[antoine]

Format information
* The magazine is published in landscape format ‘750pt x 570pt’, so keep that in mind while writing articles or preparing screen shots.

* Take care to include only the important parts in the screen shots. For example showing settings of rendering tab should have only rendering tab unless the article needs other wise.
* Format for the article submission is either ‘plain-text’ , doc or odt format please. If you are submitting the article in HTML then make sure there is, minimum use of DHTML and tables, you can use default HTML tags like h1 for headings etc.
* While writing the article always enclose shortcut keys like this [Shift+D].
* While writing the article always use Add>>Mesh>>Cube for menu items.
* For images PNG will be preferred, JPGs are fine too but we prefer uncompressed formats.
* All the submissions should be properly archived. Keep all the text and images inside a single folder and then compress the folder. zip, tar.gz, tgz, tar.bz2, rar, or * 7z are also supported.

[antoine]

I sent the editors a message asking about doing a 1-2 page article giving context about STK and then a tutorial. I'm waiting to hear back from them. Here is a start to the article part. Suggestions are welcomed, but I particularly need help with the sections "STK and Blender" and "Outlook".

If we can have both an article and a tutorial then I think we should just briefly list what the scripts do. We can explain more in depth during the tutorial.

[antoine]

@ct.dabomb
I don't know if you are sill working on this, but do you think you could make part one of the tutorial intended for blenderart magazine? Maybe it could include up to the point where you first make the track.

[antoine]

I haven't heard any responses from the STK team. Should I hold off on writing the article until the tutorials are of better quality? Or does the team think experienced blender users can make do with the tutorials in their current state? I am looking for "go for it" or "hold off for a while". Launching a level design contest via the magazine article makes sense as blender users are the target audience. Once the article is out, I would post to other sites as well. If it's not in the upcoming March issue, the following issue is in June (four months from now).

Here are some options.
1) Write the article for the March issue, announcing the contest
2) Same as above, but don't mention the contest (announce the contest in a later issue).
3) Wait until the tutorials are better to write the article, at which point also announce the level design contest

[Auria]

I sent the editors a message asking about doing a 1-2 page article giving context about STK and then a tutorial.

it may also be nice to know their answer

at this time I may suggest to put it on hold a bit. The proposed article seems like it may still not be ideal for a magazine. For instance there is little point in listing acceptable licenses or how to use SVN in a magazine IMO, it would be better to have a video tutorial and direct people there

[antoine]

Ok, I will remove the SVN and licensing info. Then I will send you and hiker a google doc version of it.

About the video tutorial, once the team feels good about the script, consider asking the blender community to try it out before actually recording the video. They might provide important feedback, and save someone the trouble of having to rerecord the video.