Make a Video Game in an Hour with Reality Factory

This tutorial will guide you step by step in making a bare bones 3d video game with Reality Factory in hopefully less than an hour.

Steps

  1. Download Reality Factory.
  2. Install RF in the default location at a drive root.
  3. Browse to the C:\RealityFactory\tools and click on RFEditPro.exe which is the blue head icon in version .75.
  4. Click on the 'Texture' tab under the new, open, save icons. Pick a texture that you like.
  5. Click on the templates tab. In the tool bar there will be 2 icons each with an arrow in a box. Select the dark blue box if it is not already selected. In the templates section, click on the cylinder icon.
  6. On the right side of the screen there will be parameters for the cylinder that are grayed out. Click 'Customize Template' to make them editable. Change the 'top of cylinder x size to 1024 and the z size to 1024 also. Change the bottom x and z size to 1024 also. The Y size can be left at 512.
  7. Click 'Add Current Item To World' or press Enter. In the perspective view you will see your new room
  8. To move around the perspective view, click and hold the Left Mouse Button to dolly forward and backward. The RMB will cause you to rotate at a fixed point and the MMB will allow you to pan perpendicular to the viewing plane. If you have a wheel you can use it to dolly too, although the LMB has more precision.
  9. Make sure that the icon with the dark blue square is selected and click on the arrow next to the words Act Material. Scroll down and select Player Setup
  10. In the tool bar, click the icon with the perpendicular arrows. This is the move button. In the Orthographic (2D) top view move the blue dot so that it is somewhere in the room if it isn't already. Press Enter.
  11. Go back to the entity list and select Player Start. Using the same method to move as before, move the blue dot to just above the ground in the side view and near the center in the top view. This represents the bottom of your players feet.
  12. At the top menu click Build/Compile. Check 'Preview in Reality Factory' and click OK. Click Ok again to preview.
  13. Click Done twice and enjoy your creation.

Tips

  • Reality Factory is open source and FREE. It is why I used it for this tutorial. Much newer engines exist and some can be purchased very cheap by students. Did you know that if you own the games Unreal Tournament, Far Cry, Quake, or a multitude of other games, the manufacturer includes the engines/editors? This is the whole basis of the Mod phenomena
  • Read the docs. There is a ton of information on RF and a big community. ask questions in the forums, people will help you out. Also look for a book in the tutorials section called 'making games with Reality Factory' by Dan Valeo
  • Get to know everything in the RF folder. It has many components and several are very important in making visually nice games. It also has sub folders for organizing media elements and scripts. Read the INI files in the Install folder, they are wonderful for someone new to programming to explore a little logic. They are also where you will find many attributes such as health. Also get used to the scripts, they are much like C++ only fun to read.
  • Don’t make your levels bigger than 4000 textels, 2000 in the positive direction and 2k in the negative x&y. If you feel this is still too small, you can scale down the player scale in the entity properties box.
  • This form of map is called BSP. It stands for binary space partition. It is becoming obsolete. Soon after you feel comfortable with this software, head over to MayaPLE and download Maya PLE. Maya is becoming the industry standard in polygonal modeling. With an exporter available at the RF site you can import your Maya creations into RF using static mesh entities.

Warnings

  • All textures that you make for RF must be sized in powers of 2, so 256x256 or 512x512, 512x256 can be used but can give odd results. Remember, no spaces in the original bitmap names, as they are transferred into the .txl file. This will almost always cause weird results.
  • RF does not like any spaces in any of its file names. This means don't put it in 'Program Files'.

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