AgentKeeper becomes OpenSource. Let's work together!

[Flipflop]

Hey Guys, I'd like to introduce my Project that I have been working on the last 2-3 Months, because I want to change this to a "Team" Project.

We have our own Area now here in the Forum here: AgentKeeper Forum

Some People might notice this Project from the Thread "Another Dungeon Keeper Project" in the OpenDungeons Forum here.

Screenshot

My Name is Philip, I am studying right now ITMC (It-Management and Consulting) at University of Hamburg. It's a Master-Informatic topic, with focus on IT-Consulting. But honestly, I am more a Nerd than a consultant. Whatever...
..lets start with the Project:


1. Motivation

• I learned to Love Game-Developing (origninally came from Business/Enterprise-Java-Coding)
• Work as Student for Money at University Hamburg with the Jadex CoreTeam together.
• They give me the Freedom to make a Game with Jadex
• So I can work almost Full-Time at the Project (only "almost" because of the stupid courses and projects and examinations of the University..... ^^)
• The Game is now also an experiment to show how good are BDI-Agents suitable for a Game.

2. Information about the Gameplay

• DungeonKeeper 2 alike game.
• You are the AgentKeeper, a "bad" Person/Devil
• Genre: Real-time strategy/god game
• Only indirect Control of your Creatures.
• Build up your own Dungeon in the underground
• Fight against Heroes with (maybe) tower defense Elements
• Care about your Monsters, otherwise they will dump you.

3. Information about the Project

• The Project uses a lot of Features from Jadex, a Platform/Software for ActiveComponents developed by my Supervisors at University Hamburg: http://www.activecomponents.org/
  Uses...
  
  • Jadex Enviroment Support for World Model. The GameLogic is inside a Grid2d-Space
  • Jadex BDIv3 SoftwareAgentSystem for AI
  • Jadex JMonkey 3d Visualization(coded by me as my Bachelor Thesis, and heavely extended for AgentKeeper).
• Modern 3d Grafics with the JMonkey Engine. http://jmonkeyengine.org/
• Whole game Coded in Java
• Most of the Assets are from the OpenSource Community.
• OpenDungeons and AgentKeeper could benefit from each other

4. Why make it a Team-FOSS-Project?

• I like to get more Help by this, I feel we can make something really big
• I work "almost" Full Time for the Project. So I have to time to organize and coordinate the Project and the same Time still coding.
• I want to learn a lot about FOSS-Developing in a Team.

So that's enough for short introduction.....let's show you something about the Game:

Short Video: (more can be found under the same YT account):

youtu.be/beY3NGaYG44

The Code(GPLv3) and Assets(most are CC-BY-SA 3.0) : https://code.google.com/p/jadex-agentkeeper/
It is a Maven Project. To Build it you need Maven.
If you also want the Sources from the Dependent Jadex and Jadex3d Support you can find it here(also nightly builds if you want): http://www.activecomponents.org/bin/vie ... d/Overview

A mini-Playable Demo: https://code.google.com/p/jadex-agentke ... loads/list (there is a JAR inside)
(Sorry: is not optimized and tested yet on Mac and Linux). Just a very "quick-and-dirty" Version to show you in which direction it goes.

5. What has to be done (in short)

• Project
  
  • Need Contributors!
  • Need a good Discussion/Organization Board. Maybe the Project can become a featured Project of this Board?
  • Need a better Structure and well organized "credits-lists" for all the Assets.
  • ...
• Code
  
  • Most Obvious: Finish the Game ^^ But besides that there are some smaller things to fix:
  • As you can see its still on a Canvas Window (its because the 3d Support is original just a visualization for Simulations run in Jadex...that's why there is still Canvas/Swing stuff is around. A transfer is needed to a "normal" native JMonkey application
  • Some code is very Dusty and even worse: in German.
  • Still lots of Code without Comments
  • Testing/Enabling on Mac and Linux
  • ...
• Graphic/Assets
  
  • Need a new/better Gui-Elements/Graphics
  • New Tilesets for Claimed walls
  • New Monsters
  • New/More Animations for the Monsters already there
  • Logo? Start Screen?
  • ...

I think I forget to mention 75% of the things I want to mention....but when you are too deep inside a Project it is really difficult to switch to the "external" View.

But this should be enough for the Moment

- Philip

[Skorpio]

Good job Flipflop! If you need help or have special requests, you can always ask on the Open Dungeons forum.

[charlie]

Really cool.

I edited your post to fix some spelling errors and embed the YouTube video, hope you don't mind. I tried not to fiddle too much with it so it still retains your style of writing (we don't demand the Queen's English standard ).

[Julius]

Great! Maybe we could add a sub-forum for the project?
I also like the idea of including tower defense elements... could be a nice way to "modernize" the game-play and attract younger players who never played the DK games (which are now like a decade old?).

Can you post some specifications for the gui elements you need? Might be a nice first entry for collaboration to make something out of what can be found on opengameart.

Oh and, typical German mistake: "Informatik" e.g. what you called "informatics" doesn't exist in English AFAIK, it's called "computer science" But enough with the spelling lessons, we really don't require any minimum level of English here! In fact we tried having multi-lingual forums before, but that experiment failed, so right now even google-translations are welcome

[Flipflop]

Yeah, I already asked for a Sub-Forum at FreeGameDev.

Yeah, people who played DK are less and less active in Open Source GameDev I think

Yes, I have lots of todo´s and specifications/ideas for the GUI and lots of other Ideas, but I want to wait until I get an extra Area for that. To make it more Structured. With lots of explainations about the Project.

I think the Project is very easy to handle, even for non Programmers.

Hey! Is my English that bad that you think I just use google-translations? Ohoho... ^^

Update about the Project: We Made the SVN connected with our Jenkins Server. So every Night you got a new Playable-Nightly-Builded Version of the Game!!
I case you forget where the Project is: here: ^^ https://code.google.com/p/jadex-agentkeeper/ click on the ZIP and enjoy it after extracting ^^

Right now you can see a new Dungeonheart and Portal made by someone from Hamburg too, I just added some cool Fog-Effect.
Ah and the chickens, (you can find them in the Hatchery) but they don´t have animations jet...have to do that..or..maybe someone here would like to give it a try? You can find them here: http://opengameart.org/content/posable-poultry
They have already a (good?) Rig.

- Philip

PS: Please more Feedback about the Project. Even bad parts. Really interested how the Game is seen in the Community and non-DungeonKeeper-Fans too

[Julius]

Naa, google translate would have not made that "informatics" mistake

Not sure if you have done so already, but an content license guideline making sure all contributions are freely licensed (e.g. CC-by or CC-by-SA or similar free software compatible licenses) would be probably wise to do right now. All the content from OD and OGA should be fine, but if you got external contributers, please make sure they agree to a proper license too.

About the chicken... well maybe a full blown model is really too much for such a small part of the game. How about you take this nice chicken sprite (http://opengameart.org/content/lpc-style-farm-animals) and give it a 2D normal-map treatment ( http://www.asantee.net/ethanon/normalma ... almaps.pdf )?

[Flipflop]

I think I give now Credit to everyone who want/need so in the Credit.txt, just hope I dont forget something/someone

The Chicken is cool (and besides that I loved the Chickens in DK 2 a LOT!):
I use the very very low poly Version without any subdivision modifier. So its only really only a small amout of poly´s more (175).
I want to make them Pickable and they should walk around a little bit, idle and/or Pick. I just need an Walk, Idle and "Pick" animation. I already started to watch some Tut-Videos, you have to know I am not the "biggest" Blender-Expert yet So I maybe would need one Day to make it, some talented Animators can do that in, I don´t know, 1-2 hours?

[Flipflop]

Level Editor Tutorial! Enjoy guys

Tutorial Video 4:

Using the Map Editor


youtu.be/hWPcLIpTBfE

The steps in Short again:

• Update SVN!
• Load the Map in the MapEditor that is already inside the SVN
• Change Buildings, Maptypes, Creatures as you want
• Refresh the Game and enjoy the result!

If you have Questions or Feedback post it here: Video Feedback