Team Based Development Contest?

[Pryme8]

So, I noticed that every once and a while the forum has development contest.  So it got me thinking that it would be really cool if we could do a Team Cloud Based Development project, where each team would have their own separate post where they collaborate in an environment were everyone can see how things progress.  It would be interesting to see how different groups handle with the logistics of team management and trying to achieve a goal.
I figured the actual competition would have only a certain number of rules like: project must be include babylon.js, teams must consist of at least 3 members, development must be logged in the teams assigned form thread, and other then that leave it pretty open besides a theme for the competition perhaps. The pay off to all this would not be a "Winner" per say but the chance to perhaps get your project published and your team paid.  I believe this will be easy to get publishers interested in our competition especially if we are able to pump out more then one marketable product from our community, I will also take it upon myself to reach out and make specific contacts with certain folks that know me and I can pretty much guarantee that if it does not suck we can get you paid (and even some that are really bad still get paid).

I know what you are all thinking... why waist my time?  Why change from the normal competition format ect, and the simple answer is progress my friend progress, success is not a one man show, you need to surround yourself with people of like minds in at least aspirations of goals, we can all sit here and chat game theory and do our own projects all day but what happens when HTML5gameDevs BJS division decides to do something with all this ridiculous amount of talent and knowledge we have just floating around...

A lot of you have day jobs, and all of you have lives...  but for real why not?  Lets make some money people.

Anyone interested?

[OMAR]

I'd suggest one big joint project built together by Babylon.js developers. This can be a type of game or even a demo that pushes Babylon.js to the limits in terms of graphics, physics etc. It can also increase awareness of Babylon and attract more developers and contributors to the project. Some engines already implement this strategy (Unreal Tournament by Epic Games for example). This demo can also be used as a way to track down bugs, considering we will really put our brains on it. However it will need some time obviously, yet result might be worth it. I'm talking about something like Sponza but more feature-rich Babylon app. With nice gameplay logic added on top of it, Babylon can ultimately result in triumph of AAA Gaming on Web 

[RaananW]

That was actually what I wanted to do for the January challenge, and we can try it for April's challenge. I just think that coordination here will be the most interesting task and the real challenge, which will defer from the main purpose, which is a Babylon challenge. 

The next challenge will be a 2 months challenge, I am still working on the details. Will probably be published this weekend (don't quote me on that  Got, as usual, a lot on the table).

Edit - well, without the whole "getting paid" part. This is way out of my scope  

[Pryme8]

well, the if you make it they will come premise kinda works on this...  Ill do my part to draw attention to the right people.
But as far as management of the competition would it be possible to make two threads for each team, one public that they can post non sensitive stuff about development on it, and then a private one that only the member of the team can see for the duration of the competition so they can do some real brain storming and idea bouncing then make the private one public on the conclusion of the competition?

[ozRocker]

Payment with competitions usually comes from sponsorship / advertising.  Only catch is that the competition would need a LOT of exposure for someone to be willing to sponsor

[Pryme8]

its not payment for the competition, its payment for making a completed product to the team. Its not a guarantee but at least it is possible. 

not to mention if your team develops an game that works on cellphones as well as consoles then your market goes up substantially and there is nothing stopping your team lead from registering the team as a fictitious business entity and strapping that tax ID to a DEV account in the for mentioned markets, have a contract deciding residual profits, set up deposits of purchase to automatically dependence to members accounts upon item purchase dependent on their contracted amount, give release information to some specific people and sell a million copy's at 1.99 each...  

I know what your saying yea right... but um yes, this is how it works.

[JohnK]

18 hours ago, Pryme8 said:

A lot of you have day jobs, and all of you have lives...  but for real why not?  Lets make some money people.

Anyone interested?

If I was going to take part in such a competition and had even a small hope of making some money at the end then I would want some agreement or contract between the group members before we started. An agreed percentage of profit depending on my contribution. Of course then I would need an agreement on how contributions were defined and measured both in terms of quality and quantity and an agreed system of recording these.

Personally I am much happier making a small contribution to now and then to BJS, the forum and sometimes the monthly challenge knowing there is no money involved. Not that I'd make much money anyway as my skill set is limited.

Would love to see a major game developed using BabylonJs however and the idea of an open source top game developed through contributions as and when by the talented members of this forum could be a goer? All it needs is someone with the right skills and motivation  to take on the management.

 

[Pryme8]

Yea I would encourage any teams to have a standard agreement digitally signed before they got to heavy into Dev.

[ozRocker]

I'm happy to get paid nothing to be part of an outstanding, significant project.  Babylon.js is sooo close to being able to make impressive games (not silly little bouncing sphere games).  It can now blend animations.  If animations could handle root motion I could do everything I do within Unity3D (without the bloat of Unity3D).  I'd even be happy to write extensions for 3rd person or 1st person games for nothing.  As you all know, my main profession is a 3D scanner.  Getting people familiar with webGL frameworks helps my cause.

[GameMonetize]

Can you explain me what root motion is?

[ozRocker]

34 minutes ago, Deltakosh said:

Can you explain me what root motion is?

Basically its when you have a bone that you define as the root (usually the hip bone, but you should be able to select any bone).  When root motion is applied all transformations to that root bone (rotation and position change) do not apply to that bone, they apply to the whole mesh instead.  With root motion disabled you might see a guy walking forward, then when the animation loops the person suddenly jumps back to the start and walks forward again.  With root motion enabled the transformations for the root bone is not applied to that bone, but is applied to the whole mesh instead, so if you loop the animation the man will keep walking forward till he is off the screen.  The whole mesh is being moved permanently.

In my MMA animation here you can see both fighters start back at the same position.  Root motion is disabled here.  If it was enabled, they would start in the position they finished and would keep moving forward till they were off the plane.  It is simply taking the transformations to the root bone and applying it to the mesh instead.

Currently the only way I can see in Babylon.js to make a man walk continuously is to remove all hip animation (so he's walking in the same spot) then to manually move the mesh back or forward.  That kind of technique just looks weird, like the guy is sliding around.  Root motion is very precise.  There's no foot sliding.  The data for the root bone is already included in most animations therefore it should be used, not erased and replaced with weird sliding motions.

[Pryme8]

Yea root motion is awesome, any animations that change the root of the objects postion in the 3D file effect it's physical location in the scene and can be looped. 

 

So so instead of telling Babylon to move the object you tell it that the root motion is what moves the object and then you let the animations manipulate the object

[JCPalmer]

In my QueuedInterpolation extension, if I ever finish it , does convert root translation to a mesh position change.  I see 2 major problems with doing that with the official animation system:

1. BABYLON.Skeleton does not actually have a root bone.  Technically, you can have as many as you want. QI, just tells you to fuck off if there is more than one bone without a parent.
2. BABYLON.Skeleton does not actually have a mesh.  Technically, you can have as many as you want. QI, is before render based (though scene before renders are used), so the mesh is implicitly known.

 

[GameMonetize]

ok understood.

as jcp mentioned, this will be require a new kind of skeleton and bones mechanism.