Mana Games

[sqlartist]

Hi there, I have been developing and trying to understand how to develop a Unity or Unreal 3D Tennis game for a few months and various degrees of success. I have found Unity engine to be the most useful for what I set out to do. I am not a programmer by trade although I am an expert in SQL databases - literally no help to my goal here

So just wanted to say hi and thanks for such an amazing self developed game. It obviously a passion project and jut stunning and the fact that you continue to create new versions and allow people to mod is just a sign of a really switched on developer.

I am still learning how to play the game before I even try out the Championships or online game - but Im taking it slow as well as trying to understand the whole modding setup. Both character and stadium mods I am trying to understand. Can I ask if there was a stadium - or rather my tennis court that had been scanned using LIDAR or photogrammetry, could this potentially be used as the base for a stadium?

Also There are quite a few tennis games in the world and have been hundreds since 1957, so this is understandable. However my idea is to potentially open a huge market to a game called Pickleball. Its the worlds fastest growing sport and is a bit like Tennis, badminton and swing ball combined. Its a lot of fun and has some unique traits. The early versions of the Tennis game I developed I noticed that by changing basic parameters of tennis to Pickleballs parameters then potentially I could create a Pickleball game. Now this is the interesting part. There are currently 2 pickleball games in the entire world, the first is a RPG with the most basic of pong style controls and the second is a rather good Virtual Reality version which is turning out to be really nice.

But no-one has created the Pickleball game in the style of your Tennis game or Top Spin etc.... on any platform either.

Fancy a challenge? I'm not sure how you license or how to go about it - but I do think its a monumental opportunity to be the first proper game in the worlds fastest growing sport. I have a lot of research already and actually used ChatGPT to change the code I had used for the Tennis game to use the attributes required for Pickleball. Things such as the court size, layout, boundaries, physics of the ball and the type of bat is different.

I would have mailed privately but wasn't sure if you had a public email

Anyway, best regards

Trevor

ps. Have you looked at Unreal's Metahuman? I have created avatars using a simple phone scan to uploading into Metahuman, creating an amazing model of myself and then down sampling the incredible model to a file that can then be used in Unity or Unreal. I am trying currently to use this model to make a new player in TE4. Someone who knew what they were doing could easily achieve this. As I am learning everything on the fly its taking me a while longer to map the bones and textures to one of the many different FBX structures and taxonomies !!

[manutoo]

Hello,

1) I have no idea how to work with LIDAR or photogrammetry, but as long as you get a 3D mesh & textures, it can become a stadium after some additional work ; but if you mean about Modding TE4, then right now it doesn't handle loading brand new stadium. If you're serious about making a stadium, I could try to make the game load it, though.

2) I'm not interested to make a pickleball game ; I'm not an expert in that sport (I watched something like 5 minutes on Youtube, coz my local tennis club is building 3 pickleball courts and I wondered what the fuzz was about). Even if a prototype could likely be done in a couple of days, converting TE4 into a sellable pickleball game would be months of work at least, it's not an easy task.

3) The contact form is here : https://www.managames.com/mail_en/ ; but the present topics aren't too private, so it's ok for the forum...

4) I looked at MetaHuman 2 years ago when it got released at 1st (IIRC) ; it couldn't configure models at runtime, so this wasn't that interesting for me, plus it's legally not possible to use it in Unity. Anyway, from far (ie: the default view in a tennis game), the quality difference isn't that big. If I was making a game with a lot of close up on characters, that'd be great to use it, though.

[sqlartist]

thanks for the considered reply.