I found when I was putting together the various puzzle layouts in the Steely Taws puzzle game, that there was always a bit of shuffling required here and there to get everything to fit or to more or less line up on the same level. This was because I had not standardised the component sizes or origins when I made them, so to make things easier to layout, I have modified a number of the components to conform to a standard size.

The standard size is based on a the “wooden parts” of a straight deck 12 units long, x 4.25 units wide, and 3 units deep. For components that span several levels, the difference between the top and bottom deck surfaces is 6 units. The curve deck, tee-deck, and four way deck have been sized to accommodate these standard unit sizes. In addition to that all origin points have been set so that all models are on the same level when appended or linked to a scene. Hopefully that will make it quicker and easier to build new layouts.

You can download the blender models and textures as a .zip file from here: Standardised_Component_Blender_Models.zip

Here is a gallery of the standardised components. Please click on the image for a higher resolution image.

At this stage the active elements such as the elevator, the box switch and the bridge have not been standardised, but I may sort them out in the future and update the downloadable files containing them.

The advantage of having a library of standardised bits is that you can use them to automate some of the level generation process. My Partner Elfnor was play testing the first puzzle level for me and observed that the layout could be automated using the Sverchok plugin for Blender that she is making use of for a lot of her Blender creations. The image below is a render she made from one of her computer generated networks using these standardised components. To find out more about how she was able to generate game levels using Sverchok, take a look at her webpage; Elfnor’s Blender Game Level Generator. Elfnor’s automated level generator was used to create the second puzzle in version 3 of the Steely Taws game.

Sverchok Generated Steely Taws Level

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Note:

The Steely Taws game and components presented here by Hamish Trolove are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.