Workflow of Aeolus

Hey there! Welcome to my blog on the workflow of Aeolus.

In this blog I will be going through the design and development flow of our levels. This will probably be more intricate next week after we add more tools and components to our game engine. Until then, here is our flow of work to get a level into our game.

To start, our flow begins in Maya. This work flow is assuming the assets for the levels are done and the concept design of the level structure is complete. We would load all the assets we need in, then we would make sure each object has the following in our game's resources folder:

-Maya scene : For you to work in
-Script : Additional parameters
-Fbx : Mesh export for engine
-Hkx : Physics export for engine
-Material : Auto generated the first time object is loaded

Once all of those are made and put in the right locations within our resources folder, we are going to want to export our level scene. The level scene would have all of the rigid body objects in the position and orientation you want. Here are the steps to export the havok scene correctly:

Havok Export Settings
Tranform Scene
Create Rigid Bodies
Create World
Write to platform
- MAKE SURE YOU DOUBLE CHECK THE FILE NAME YOU ARE SAVING
- Must be Binary + Packfile
Preview tool

The preview tool is there to ensure everything in your scene is right. The biggest thing that tool spots out is if mass has been applied to the right objects in the scene.

Now that the models are RB's and in the right spots, we want to add our locators for intangible things like sounds and particles. it is important that there is at least one camera locator in the scene or else the scene will crash in Aeolus.  Each locator needs to be named in our naming convention so our parser can read it properly. Here are the locators so far that are working in the parser:

Only Locators are exported for the level
Scenery Locators
"Scenery_<Script name>_0"
Player Locator
"Helicopter_Player_0"
Particle Locators
"Particle_<Particle Effect Name>_0"
Camera Locator
"Camera_MainCamera_0"

We set it up like this so we can have many different scenery objects like different buildings with different amounts for each. There would be different particle types like smoke, fire, flares, lasers, etc. Later we hope to have multiple cameras to give a more cinematic feeling in our game with a small camera system to work through them all. 

We would only export the locators in the scene and then we load all of the models and particles and sounds etc. once in the initialize if there was a locator made for it.

Then at the end of the day we will get a maya generated level in our game! Best level editor ever, thanks maya : D