Polyball ship game

User Code & Projects
1

Hey jme developers and fans!



I just want to thank everybody for making such a nice game engine. It turned out to be the perfect solution to build an interactive two player ship game. It was running nicely during a whole ball night at Polyball 2007, the biggest (~9000 guests) decorated ball in Europe held at ETH Zurich, Switzerland.



You might wonder what e 3D game has to do with waltz, salsa, and other ballroom dancing? Well, the answer is, that we wanted to experiment with some ‘interactive’ decoration. To match the theme of this years ball, which was about pirates and ancient ship battles an  interactive ship game was built. Two ball guest were able to battle each other on a 10 meter screen by operating self made steering wheels and a cannon fire button. People enjoyed it very much and many glorious battles were fought all night long…  :smiley:



1200×473




1284×1046




Some tech specs of the setup:


  • 4 projectors (2x2 configuration)

  • single computer with two matrox dualhead2go

  • JME rendering at 2048x1536 resolution (20fps)

  • self made steering wheels, using optical mouse for rotation tracking

  • rugged fire buttons connected to mouse buttons

  • setup at 4 story atrium over 2 floors looking at huge 10m screen, visible from all floors



Special thanks for the nice WaterRenderPass! It was the killer argument when looking for a suitable game engine.
Keep up the nice work!

Cheers,
Nemo
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Awesome! I especially like the idea with the optical mice for the steering wheels :slight_smile: I think I might steal that for a private party if you don't mind!

3

Well done, quite an acheivement

4

That is outstanding.  Just shows what can be done with a good base platform and some clever engineering.  Your control scheme and creative utilization of the bits and pieces of an optical mouse is fantastic.  Getting jME up and running on a 10m screen is good like climbing the rope in gym class!  :-o



Awesome job.

5

Wow.



That's pretty awesome.  Nice work!  I wish I could have seen that in person.  :slight_smile:

6

That is awesome! Any videos from the event?

7

Most triumphant!



Great use of JavaMonkey to make a location-based attraction. I'd definitely like to see videos too!

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Huh!, I don’t see any reference to jME or the game in the website  :’(

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I know its been said before, but nice work! thanks for the pictures, theyre quite impressive

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Awesome! So fun to see different uses of jME :slight_smile:



Well done!





Edit: This is yet another incentive to improve the water rendering stuff. asap :slight_smile:

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Thank you for your nice comments and feedback. Unfortunately, there are no videos so far. We just made photos as we were too busy keeping our girls dancing :wink:



Regarding the 'optical mouse interface'. Keep in mind that windows and linux merges (OR) the input of multiple mice. The proper way would be to access each mouse individually as a device instead of the higher level mouse-pointer (like in jme). In our specific case we were able to mechanically separate the two wheels by placing one mouse in X and the other in Y coordinate-direction. A slight crosstalk was unavoidable but it was absolutely not noticeable while playing this type of game.

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Nemo said:

Regarding the 'optical mouse interface'. Keep in mind that windows and linux merges (OR) the input of multiple mice.

The new JInput version (not used by jME currently) is capable of separating multiple mice.