I was playing the game Unmechanical and I came across a section of the level that really struck my curiosity.

I saw a level designer use various objects and code to create the illusion of a faucet running water into a pool with all the visual effects entailed.

The amount of creativity needed to perform such a feet intrigued me to the point of thinking about it. The following video explains my thoughts.

Please watch from 0:17 to 2:52 for the explanation.

I would love to hear everyone's thoughts of either how the illusion of that faucet was created or my idea of a community created game, OR BOTH!!!!!

Thanks!!!!!

nine'O'three

IMHO, this is really a 3D art question. It's like playing with building blocks, except the building blocks can be animated in a couple different ways, and also you can seamlessly glue two blocks together, or cut a hole in one and fill it seamlessly with a different material. Plus there are blocks which are translucent or have invisible edges but visible middles.

What do I mean by different types of animation? Well, you can have a block that stays the same shape, but the texture on its surface is animated. (Or the light source(s) included in the block are animated, like a searchlight or a flame.) OR, you can have a block which cycles between two or more shapes. Some 3D systems also include a fog or plasma effect that allows an object to be filled with an irregular material that may be animated.

How would this work in a community? Probably like this:

- Player A creates a funnel shaped object. It's just a plain solid with a flat texture. It goes into the community shape library.

- Any player can paste one or more funnel shapes from the library, adjust their proportions, basic color, simple opacity, and orientation. Player B flips the funnel upside down and makes it translucent blue. They stick it to their faucet model, package the whole thing as "running water faucet" and put it in the community objects library.

- Player C creates an animated tiling water surface texture. Probably one version for directional water and one for still water. It goes into the community animated textures library.

- Player D creates an animated shape, "round ripple".

- Player E puts it all together: they apply the still water animated texture to a flat surface, then replace a circle of the water surface with the animated ripple shape. They center the faucet+water over the ripple, and apply the animated directional water texture to the outer surface of the water spout.

And so on, if you want to add steam and bubbles or w/e.

Sunandshadow,

I had no idea that you could create the illusion of movement by using animated textures until you explained it to me. Thank you.

There are still so many common things about game development I am clueless about. The only thing I spend my time doing is thinking of fun toys and game mechanics. I really enjoy learning about these other aspects.

In your comment you also mentioned "community libraries". A quick check in the community tab on this site shows me a community gallery. Is that what you were referring to? If this site does not have a community library as you talked about, any idea where one would exist? I have been toying with the idea of making a website dedicated solely to developing games as a community but if a websites like that already exists I would love to join the fight.

Thanks again for your help sunandshadow.

Oh I was assuming you were talking about a game where the game would be built around a 3D modeling program, and the communal aspect of the play would be players creating and sharing assets with each other. In a case like this the game itself would be responsible for hosting the community libraries. There are several existing games which do encourage players to create and share assets - Second Life is one of the most obvious, because that game's core concept included players being able to sell created content to each other for real money. IIRC ArcheAge is intending to do the same when it launches. The Sims and Spore are two big examples of the non-commercial approach, where players share their creations for only social rewards; Landmark also had some kind of contest going on where player-built locations could win use in EverquestNext, though that's different from re-use by other players. But these are the games you should look at (not EQN, the other ones) if you are interested in modular 3D systems where players can build animated structures and scenes out of building blocks and textures.

As far as game-independent libraries, the problem is that the various 3D modeling programs aren't interchangeable; you can't just texture and animate a model in one 3D program and then combine it with someone else's model from another program. There are multi-system marketplaces like Turbosquid and 3D systems with their own system-specific marketplaces like Poser...

I'm mainly a 2D vector artist myself, so 3D art isn't an area where I'm really an expert about what all communities and marketplaces there are. I keep waiting for a user-friendly NURBs-based 3D program since that would be the equivalent of 2D vector art, but there's just too much inertia behind polygon systems, no one wants to switch to something incompatible and with bigger hardware requirements, the same way few people want to switch to vector graphics from raster graphics.