Tuesday, June 30, 2009
I SURVIVED THE NIGHTFALL- Kei Kasai
We're finally finished...its been a long winding road full of challenges and as the course finishes I cant help but feel glad and proud about where I'm at, and how I strongly survived and acomplish a lot. I have finished all my tasks, worked with some brilliant people, learned new things, and most importantly have produced high quality work for my team and of course for myself. For the past weeks I've been helping our marketing person Stephanie to produce posters, box art, etc., also have worked on with the trailer with Tame and Jason, the final version will be edited by Steph and can't wait to see them on the big screen. Thanks everyone! Ciao!
Friday, June 26, 2009
Tim Bewick - Week 25
We are handing in our gold milestone today! This week I worked on making mouse wheel scrolling alter the zoom level of the sniper rifle, I made the multi player menu correctly display the players and their names and remove them when they leave. I also helped fix memory leaks and bugs.
FORUM
Just incase anyone missed what i wrote on the whiteboard, i have set up a forum so we can all keep in contact after the course has finished, the URL is:
http://gdfeb08.forumotion.com/forum.htm
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Battlecruiser Operational
Greetings Command.
For the past several weeks i have been doing all kinds of crazy random things for the project, from creating particle debris objects too further LOD'ing all my objects.
I enjoy doing small parts for loads of diffrent parts of the game, keeps things alot more intresting rather then working on one long boring thing.
Now that most of the art stuff is finished, the work load has become alot lighter which is nice, since the game gold is due in four days we cant add anymore new assets, due to time restrants, but all our planned assets for the enviroment, plus extra have been creating ;)
Im looking forward to the final build on friday, as our game is already quite fun to play and with the final annoying bugs knocked out i think we will have a solid fun game, especially in multiplayer.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Michael Bastiaens - Monday 22nd June
"Captains Log 22/6/09"
We are in our final week of production and all thats left on my side of things is a few more re-exporting issues to do and im still the main person changing and attempting to balance the game through the LUA scripts. I also suggested the idea of making a yellow coloured tooltip whenever a player finishes researching a weapon to give the player more feedback so they arent just being bombarded by blue tooltips. Some of the issues ive been balanced include making the guns fire faster but do less damage to increase the pace of the action in the game, ive also decreased damage from enemy snipers and made them shoot slower as there was an issue where whenever 3 or more appeared you were pretty much guaranteed to die. Ive also adjusted the enemies that appear each wave trying to ramp of the difficulty of each successive wave in smooth progression. Other than that theres nothing else much to report and yet again no pictures.... However if you still have a hankering for some images.... heres a link to my competition entry since im working on a new reel in my spare time over the weekends; http://www.cgcoach.com/beta/index.php?option=com_kunena&Itemid=340&func=view&catid=19&id=2993 Enjoy XD
-Michael
We are in our final week of production and all thats left on my side of things is a few more re-exporting issues to do and im still the main person changing and attempting to balance the game through the LUA scripts. I also suggested the idea of making a yellow coloured tooltip whenever a player finishes researching a weapon to give the player more feedback so they arent just being bombarded by blue tooltips. Some of the issues ive been balanced include making the guns fire faster but do less damage to increase the pace of the action in the game, ive also decreased damage from enemy snipers and made them shoot slower as there was an issue where whenever 3 or more appeared you were pretty much guaranteed to die. Ive also adjusted the enemies that appear each wave trying to ramp of the difficulty of each successive wave in smooth progression. Other than that theres nothing else much to report and yet again no pictures.... However if you still have a hankering for some images.... heres a link to my competition entry since im working on a new reel in my spare time over the weekends; http://www.cgcoach.com/beta/index.php?option=com_kunena&Itemid=340&func=view&catid=19&id=2993 Enjoy XD
-Michael
Tim Bewick - Week 24
During Week 24 I got quitting back to the menu and starting a new game working (this was quite a task). I also worked on the HUD, made the avatar be revived when they are healed by team mates when incapacitated. I also changed the crosshair when debris is picked up to show you if it can be dropped.
Friday, June 19, 2009
CARRY ON MY WAYWARD SON!!! YOU HAVE COME SO FAR AND NOW YOU'RE ALMOST DONE!!
So the game is set for gold on friday, and its getting really stable now. We have had some great feedback from play testers and we are doing the best we can to deal with their issues.
Unfortunately there is still no networking.....BUT ITS SO CLOSE!!!!!
Unfortunately there is still no networking.....BUT ITS SO CLOSE!!!!!
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
A HighPolyMonster Production, :)
Well, today was definitely very interesting. We got the chance to present what we are working on to some of the school. I was really surprised by the turnout and it kind of blew me away that alot of people seem quite interested to see what we have. I was even more surprised to see the animation classes there as well, especially after all the grief we have been giving them during this production. Thanks to everyone for turning up.
Having said that, there are still some things that I need to work on for the next presentation. First is volume. I thought I was loud enough, apparently not. I'll be reaching for a microphone the next time we give a presentation which will probably be sooner than later. Also, I want to make the next presentation more interactive, which is what it should have been today. The point for the presentation was to get people interested in the game, and also to get some playtesters to help us track down annoying bugs. I think we did manage to get some people interested in the game, we even got three playtesters in who helped us track down some bugs which Roy managed to fix today which was really cool. Hopefully we can get more this week.
At the moment, the team has entered crunch mode. The main focus is stability, gameplay and bug fixing. Luckily alot of the gameplay code is exposed to Lua so some of the suggestions for game improvement made by testers can be "tweaked" easily enough. Hopefully things will pull together nicely for our hand-in next week. Pray for us, later days.
Having said that, there are still some things that I need to work on for the next presentation. First is volume. I thought I was loud enough, apparently not. I'll be reaching for a microphone the next time we give a presentation which will probably be sooner than later. Also, I want to make the next presentation more interactive, which is what it should have been today. The point for the presentation was to get people interested in the game, and also to get some playtesters to help us track down annoying bugs. I think we did manage to get some people interested in the game, we even got three playtesters in who helped us track down some bugs which Roy managed to fix today which was really cool. Hopefully we can get more this week.
At the moment, the team has entered crunch mode. The main focus is stability, gameplay and bug fixing. Luckily alot of the gameplay code is exposed to Lua so some of the suggestions for game improvement made by testers can be "tweaked" easily enough. Hopefully things will pull together nicely for our hand-in next week. Pray for us, later days.
Tame Tahana
Ok now the animations are all ready for the programmer, which they are finding quite hard to get running smoothly. The animations now have Sequence Layers, which allows certain animations to have a higher priority over others.
For example: Run Forward would have level 0 priority, Idle Left would have level 1 and Machine Gun Shoot would have level 2.
Now this seems simple enough but the blending between animations is proving to be very challenging. I am relying on this to be completed to view my animations not only running smoothly but having it also run in Multiplayer aka Co-op mode.
Right now I am "on-call" with the programmers working with the animations just in case they need any help. Other than that I am working on Animations for our credits, check it out at: http://www.youtube.com/user/tametahana
Ka Pai
For example: Run Forward would have level 0 priority, Idle Left would have level 1 and Machine Gun Shoot would have level 2.
Now this seems simple enough but the blending between animations is proving to be very challenging. I am relying on this to be completed to view my animations not only running smoothly but having it also run in Multiplayer aka Co-op mode.
Right now I am "on-call" with the programmers working with the animations just in case they need any help. Other than that I am working on Animations for our credits, check it out at: http://www.youtube.com/user/tametahana
Ka Pai
Monday, June 15, 2009
Tim Bewick - Week 23
I worked on displaying intro screens when the game is started during last week. I also worked on displaying tooltips when your team mates choose skip to night in multiplayer and I made the menus use widescreen textures when the game is run in a widescreen resolution. I fixed a couple game crashing bugs in the AI as well.
Friday, June 12, 2009
Michael Bastiaens -Friday 12th June
"Captains Log 12/06/09"
With the ever looming deadline fast approaching things are starting to get a lil hectic and its time to start thinking about where we are all heading for jobs and sorting things out for said jobs. This week I took part in a video interview which I am very fearful of seeing since im pretty damn sure I said some things that were REALLY high up on the "Most cheesiest lines" list. Apart from that brief bit of excitement work continued as usual. I made a few more sounds and tweaked a couple more. Ive also been tweaking the LUA scripts while testing the game as well as trying to find a few bugs here and there. Last but not least... We finally managed to get the corpses with an alpha texture on it. It was surprisingly difficult and not as straightforward as it seems...thank you gamebryo for that little headache.
Sadly no pictures this week. But on a lighter note... its ROY'S BIRTHDAY!! HAPPY BIRTHDAY ROY!
-Michael
With the ever looming deadline fast approaching things are starting to get a lil hectic and its time to start thinking about where we are all heading for jobs and sorting things out for said jobs. This week I took part in a video interview which I am very fearful of seeing since im pretty damn sure I said some things that were REALLY high up on the "Most cheesiest lines" list. Apart from that brief bit of excitement work continued as usual. I made a few more sounds and tweaked a couple more. Ive also been tweaking the LUA scripts while testing the game as well as trying to find a few bugs here and there. Last but not least... We finally managed to get the corpses with an alpha texture on it. It was surprisingly difficult and not as straightforward as it seems...thank you gamebryo for that little headache.
Sadly no pictures this week. But on a lighter note... its ROY'S BIRTHDAY!! HAPPY BIRTHDAY ROY!
-Michael
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
HMMMM
I'd be lying if I said I wasnt worried at this stage. The networking and animations are still not finished and the entire thing is due in less than 3 weeks!!!!
The good news is that both those things are almost done and the rest if pretty much finished. Just need to do a bit of play testing and more bug fixing and that should be us.
I have been helping out with the networking and I have fixed a lot of the minor issues. I am going to be getting the respawning in multiplayer fixed up...touch wood.
And ah its a great way to stay in shape..
The good news is that both those things are almost done and the rest if pretty much finished. Just need to do a bit of play testing and more bug fixing and that should be us.
I have been helping out with the networking and I have fixed a lot of the minor issues. I am going to be getting the respawning in multiplayer fixed up...touch wood.
And ah its a great way to stay in shape..
So...can I have a job? [insert fake laugh here]
Well, two and a half more weeks to go before we are finished coding...Its getting close. The past few days have seemed to drag on in class and the main reason is that the Incredibuild trial version we had expired. Incredibuild has been a godsend for our class and has cut-down 17min build times to around 2-3mins. Luckily Roy managed to score us an extension and we were up and running again by the end of the day.
We were pretty lucky this week to get a visit from Phil Mayes from Krome Studios in Australia. He gave us some helpful insight into what we, as budding game developers, can expect when we take our first steps into the industry. The fact that he was smiling constantly did provide hope for the near future. He was also kind enough to give us feedback, tips and criticism for our game which was much appreciated. One cool suggestion was making things "sink into the ground." At the moment, when a player absorbs anything in the game, it simply disappears. I had hoped to hide this using a particle effect but he suggested we just make it slowly go under the ground and then remove it. Simple and effective. That will probably be my task for tomorrow morning.
I have been working on the Reaper melee attack and also trying my best to fix a pure virtual function call I've been getting with the AI agents. I have tracked the problem down. One of the things I hate about PhysX is that if you set the orientation of a shape so that it is now entirely inside a trigger volume, the trigger callback does not register that the shape has entered the trigger. The same thing is true for exiting trigger volumes as well. The agents themselves use triggers as sensors. Shapes are recorded as they enter and exit certain sensors so that the agents can steer away from them. Sometimes, not all the time, if debris is destroyed while in the sensor, and the agent begins steering away from it, a pure virtual function is called because the shape knowledge that the agent has contains the wrong information. Getting this to happen has been such a mission.
Anyways, I'll probably continue looking at that problem. I've also got to get the mother attacking when a target comes in range using one of three melee attacks. Fun times ahead....Later days.
We were pretty lucky this week to get a visit from Phil Mayes from Krome Studios in Australia. He gave us some helpful insight into what we, as budding game developers, can expect when we take our first steps into the industry. The fact that he was smiling constantly did provide hope for the near future. He was also kind enough to give us feedback, tips and criticism for our game which was much appreciated. One cool suggestion was making things "sink into the ground." At the moment, when a player absorbs anything in the game, it simply disappears. I had hoped to hide this using a particle effect but he suggested we just make it slowly go under the ground and then remove it. Simple and effective. That will probably be my task for tomorrow morning.
I have been working on the Reaper melee attack and also trying my best to fix a pure virtual function call I've been getting with the AI agents. I have tracked the problem down. One of the things I hate about PhysX is that if you set the orientation of a shape so that it is now entirely inside a trigger volume, the trigger callback does not register that the shape has entered the trigger. The same thing is true for exiting trigger volumes as well. The agents themselves use triggers as sensors. Shapes are recorded as they enter and exit certain sensors so that the agents can steer away from them. Sometimes, not all the time, if debris is destroyed while in the sensor, and the agent begins steering away from it, a pure virtual function is called because the shape knowledge that the agent has contains the wrong information. Getting this to happen has been such a mission.
Anyways, I'll probably continue looking at that problem. I've also got to get the mother attacking when a target comes in range using one of three melee attacks. Fun times ahead....Later days.
Monday, June 8, 2009
Art Update ! -1st Lieutenant
Finally had the time to post all the things I've been doing for the past weeks and for some reason I wasnt able to post the 1st Lieutenant's update that I finished ages ago so I thought that since I'm just finishing our Marketing materials now I'd post this up too. Cheers
Art Update ! UI / HUD
Hi ya'all , been very busy for the Beta and updated all the designs for the HUD/UI, they're all running and implemented thanks to Tim ( who did an amazing job implementing and helping me with everything ) and the constant feedback/help from Will, Roy and Blake. Will keep you updated Cheers!
Friday, June 5, 2009
Tim Bewick - Week 22
We just handed in our beta. This week I worked on getting Kei's new menu graphics into the game using Crazy Eddie's GUI tools which are not very user friendly. I also made the HUD graphics work properly in widescreen resolutions. Today I just worked on bug fixing. We have just three weeks until the gold milestone is due and then we do our post mortems for a week and then that is the end of our course.
Grr?
BETAAA!!! It was beta hand-in today and I must say that I am pretty satisfied with where we are at for the moment. There are a few cool things that are in the game. First is the particles. The particles that are not blantant placeholders look soo cool. The one I am most impressed with has to be the Mortar. When you are chilling out on one side of the level and you see a blue thing being lobbed in your direction from the other side of the level, you can't help but be impressed!
My main focus for a while now though has been trying to fix random bugs and crashes. As with all software development cycles, you fix one bug and a whole lot more end up rearing their ugly heads. This will probably be my focus for the rest of the development. This, and random AI stuff as well, including getting the Mother to swipe at the player when it is near them, and also have the Reaper swipe when it makes no sense to lunge. There are still some issues with animation blending which Im confident can be fixed. The environment artist also wants AI agents to push things out of their way because it looks "cool." We'll see what I can do. Until next time, later days.
My main focus for a while now though has been trying to fix random bugs and crashes. As with all software development cycles, you fix one bug and a whole lot more end up rearing their ugly heads. This will probably be my focus for the rest of the development. This, and random AI stuff as well, including getting the Mother to swipe at the player when it is near them, and also have the Reaper swipe when it makes no sense to lunge. There are still some issues with animation blending which Im confident can be fixed. The environment artist also wants AI agents to push things out of their way because it looks "cool." We'll see what I can do. Until next time, later days.
Michael Bastiaens -Friday 5th June
"Captains Log 5/6/09"
Today is our Beta hand in and its been a rather hectic week of trying to troubleshoot a number of issues. There are still a couple kinks that need to be ironed out such as the alphas on some textures not showing up which means I need to wait on a new shader which would just add to Josh's mouting list of things-to-do so at the moment that seems to be a bit of a gold milestone fix as there are bigger fish to fry.
Ive spent most of this week re-exporting a number of assets but ive also redone some of the other placeholder art assets for the rocket projectile and the mine. Ive also worked on a number of the overheat textures for the weapons and top things up ive also done a few sounds like the exploders explosion which has lots of chunky flesh and blood splash sound effects mixed into the big bang ;)
Next week ill probably be doing some more asset re-exporting as well as cranking out more sounds as soon as the LUA script gets updated so I can fill in the blanks.
-Michael
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Tim Bewick - Week 21
During week 21 I worked added cheat modes into the game, I added the controls menu and players can now set their controls which get saved in their profile. I also worked on some of the other menus, the HUD and I fixed some problems with the rocket launcher and the avatar's TakeDamage function. I also fixed some errors that happened when the game exits.
Beta is due on Friday!!!
As some readers have probably noticed, the blog posts are starting to become more few and far between. This is due to the fact that Beta is on friday and everyone is working very hard to make the game more and more awesome.
We had a little demostration today which went quite well. We have some cool particle effects working but most importantly the enemies are ruthless and they can hunt you down and get you!!
The main issues to deal with on friday are the animations and the networking. There are still some issues with animation blending, mainly that I cant switch off the certain animations when I need to because of a limitation in Gamebryo's animation system. I am currently in the process of a work around for that. As for the networking, the deal with that is getting the animations to sync across the network. Most of the code to implement this functionality has been implemented in the past but since the overhaul to the animation system, it has to be refactored into the existing code base. I am aiming to have this complete by the end of today.
Other than that, guys are just working on touching up stuff so that we can get play testers in to play our game and help us tweak it.
Anyway thats my 2 cents.
We had a little demostration today which went quite well. We have some cool particle effects working but most importantly the enemies are ruthless and they can hunt you down and get you!!
The main issues to deal with on friday are the animations and the networking. There are still some issues with animation blending, mainly that I cant switch off the certain animations when I need to because of a limitation in Gamebryo's animation system. I am currently in the process of a work around for that. As for the networking, the deal with that is getting the animations to sync across the network. Most of the code to implement this functionality has been implemented in the past but since the overhaul to the animation system, it has to be refactored into the existing code base. I am aiming to have this complete by the end of today.
Other than that, guys are just working on touching up stuff so that we can get play testers in to play our game and help us tweak it.
Anyway thats my 2 cents.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Animations and other stuff
They way the animations were being implemented has been given a complete overhaul due to the discovery of some of the art tools available to us. I am aiming to have this done by the end of next week at the latest.
On a side note, the mortar is now broken which is annoying because I had it working a wee while ago. So that also needs to be fixed along with a few other bits and pieces.
Other than that, things are going well. Just gotta piece it all together next week so we can playtest and tweak it for gold.
Choice!!!!!!!!
On a side note, the mortar is now broken which is annoying because I had it working a wee while ago. So that also needs to be fixed along with a few other bits and pieces.
Other than that, things are going well. Just gotta piece it all together next week so we can playtest and tweak it for gold.
Choice!!!!!!!!
Friday, May 29, 2009
Michael Bastiaens -Friday 29th May
"Captains Log 29/5/09"
This week has been pretty hectic. Ive been working on a whole bunch of things from sounds to weapons. Ive made up a number of unique game sounds so far for the weapons and some of the destruction sounds and I am now waiting for some updates in the LUA scripts so I can add in some new sounds when the time is right.
Ive also spent a lot of time making corpses for all the enemies and have been exporting them out a number of times. On a more demoralizing note.... We have recently found out that ALL the assets need to be re-exported in the future due to a shader issue and how Maya deals with the Gamebryo shaders.... which brings me to my next point. Maya seems to hate Gamebryo when the hypershade is up. There is an incredibly annoying crash which tends to occur frequently when the hypershade is open. It crashes the UI in maya and until the issue is resolved it locks up all UI in all programs essentially disabling the right hand mouse button. If this ever happens to anyone simply close the hypershade in Maya and it should fix the problem. This error has only started happening since the computer was reformatted.
The last thing ive worked on this week is a new and improved rocket launcher projectile which has been rather uplifting considering all the annoying issues that have been occuring this week.
Ive gone with a kind of WW2 Shark head paint style on the missile (WIP Shown below) and along with the rotating fins and epic smoke trail its gonna look sweet az XD
-Michael
This week has been pretty hectic. Ive been working on a whole bunch of things from sounds to weapons. Ive made up a number of unique game sounds so far for the weapons and some of the destruction sounds and I am now waiting for some updates in the LUA scripts so I can add in some new sounds when the time is right.
Ive also spent a lot of time making corpses for all the enemies and have been exporting them out a number of times. On a more demoralizing note.... We have recently found out that ALL the assets need to be re-exported in the future due to a shader issue and how Maya deals with the Gamebryo shaders.... which brings me to my next point. Maya seems to hate Gamebryo when the hypershade is up. There is an incredibly annoying crash which tends to occur frequently when the hypershade is open. It crashes the UI in maya and until the issue is resolved it locks up all UI in all programs essentially disabling the right hand mouse button. If this ever happens to anyone simply close the hypershade in Maya and it should fix the problem. This error has only started happening since the computer was reformatted.
The last thing ive worked on this week is a new and improved rocket launcher projectile which has been rather uplifting considering all the annoying issues that have been occuring this week.
Ive gone with a kind of WW2 Shark head paint style on the missile (WIP Shown below) and along with the rotating fins and epic smoke trail its gonna look sweet az XD
-Michael
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Particles.....
Hello E!
So I have been working closely with an Artist trying to get all the games particles in and working as they have been described to work.
Gamebryo's Maya tools have proven to be horrible horrible when it comes to particles.
First we find we can't use all the particle options Maya gives normally after several failed exports. We later find in the docs in this tiny little piece in the middle of a page the options that are available in Maya to use.
We found some exports still didn't work with the apparently 'will work options' and it took a lot of trail and error before we could assitain what we could use.
The next issue we had was the sorting of the particles. They decided they wanted to draw over everything and anything. We found hidden in Maya some flags that could be set to allow for z testing and writing.
Then a new frame rendering system was implemented and the particles got shitted again! Now their alpha wouldn't work (stayed pink) and they wouldn't draw in front of any objects! Turns out they were being placed in a new root node that didn't have any an alpha accumulator set up on it properly and wasn't being updated correctly.
The next issue was that all the particle systems were Animating at the same time. Turns out a specific cloning process had to be adapted to allow for the time controllers to not be shared. The time controllers also needed to be set to app initialised so we could start and stop the particles when desired.
For a long time I was getting the time controllers out of the node hierarchy purely by chance, and when we started implementing a new particle system that system would not work. It took some time to realise the system could be opened in the asset viewer and the node properties could be viewed for what each node contained. Knowing the correct hierarchy now I could access all time controllers on all particle systems and work with them.
Turned out the particles could not be added to the scene and then removed and added again, they simply did not want to work second time around, something to do with gamebryo internal code. So I revamped the entire particle system so it was better designed to work with all we had learned and loaded each particle we would potentially use in the scene node first and simply moved to and off screen location and moved to the desired location we needed. This however is still and on going issue with reloading the game second time round because the particles get removed and re added to the scene node and still fail to work after a complete deinitialise and reinitialise of the game world.
Another error occurred where a particle was complaining off not having a colour value set, reset the colour value in Maya and re-exported until it worked. Not sure what the exact fix was but it works now...
After all these painstaking errors managed to get all the effects in and playing. Still need to change the way the game deinitialises and restarts so we can have particles on the second playthrough.
Managed to get particles to attach to other nodes in the scene graph so they follow them around.
Frame rate badly effects particles created with a vortex field, they go widely offtrack.
Managed to get looping effects working.
These are only the problems we have faced that I can remember, I'm sure there are plenty more and they have taken a massive chunk out of our development time to get working...
Screens of the particles to come later......
So I have been working closely with an Artist trying to get all the games particles in and working as they have been described to work.
Gamebryo's Maya tools have proven to be horrible horrible when it comes to particles.
First we find we can't use all the particle options Maya gives normally after several failed exports. We later find in the docs in this tiny little piece in the middle of a page the options that are available in Maya to use.
We found some exports still didn't work with the apparently 'will work options' and it took a lot of trail and error before we could assitain what we could use.
The next issue we had was the sorting of the particles. They decided they wanted to draw over everything and anything. We found hidden in Maya some flags that could be set to allow for z testing and writing.
Then a new frame rendering system was implemented and the particles got shitted again! Now their alpha wouldn't work (stayed pink) and they wouldn't draw in front of any objects! Turns out they were being placed in a new root node that didn't have any an alpha accumulator set up on it properly and wasn't being updated correctly.
The next issue was that all the particle systems were Animating at the same time. Turns out a specific cloning process had to be adapted to allow for the time controllers to not be shared. The time controllers also needed to be set to app initialised so we could start and stop the particles when desired.
For a long time I was getting the time controllers out of the node hierarchy purely by chance, and when we started implementing a new particle system that system would not work. It took some time to realise the system could be opened in the asset viewer and the node properties could be viewed for what each node contained. Knowing the correct hierarchy now I could access all time controllers on all particle systems and work with them.
Turned out the particles could not be added to the scene and then removed and added again, they simply did not want to work second time around, something to do with gamebryo internal code. So I revamped the entire particle system so it was better designed to work with all we had learned and loaded each particle we would potentially use in the scene node first and simply moved to and off screen location and moved to the desired location we needed. This however is still and on going issue with reloading the game second time round because the particles get removed and re added to the scene node and still fail to work after a complete deinitialise and reinitialise of the game world.
Another error occurred where a particle was complaining off not having a colour value set, reset the colour value in Maya and re-exported until it worked. Not sure what the exact fix was but it works now...
After all these painstaking errors managed to get all the effects in and playing. Still need to change the way the game deinitialises and restarts so we can have particles on the second playthrough.
Managed to get particles to attach to other nodes in the scene graph so they follow them around.
Frame rate badly effects particles created with a vortex field, they go widely offtrack.
Managed to get looping effects working.
These are only the problems we have faced that I can remember, I'm sure there are plenty more and they have taken a massive chunk out of our development time to get working...
Screens of the particles to come later......
Monday, May 25, 2009
Sunday, May 24, 2009
org hungry, org want eat
So recently we've got the particles working, which has been an absolute pain to SORT out, excuse the pun.
Our main issues were with gamebryo's depth sorting and lack of support for most of maya's nifty particle features (maya being our 3D package of choice). Then there were the little things, like particle systems syncing themselves to the same play time, particle life span and emitter animations; it will ALWAYS look weird when bullet impacts sync themselves together so they can play at the same time regardless of creation. And finally no animated textures, and when animated textures were implemented no syncing to the particle animation; everyone likes an animated billboard looking out of place in a animation right?
Thanks to some lifesaving shader work from Josh we fixed our depth sorting issues and implemented our sprite sheet animated textures. And thanks to Eli and the discovery of NiPSEmitParticlesCtlr (time controller) hidden way down the .nif hierarchy (close to Atlantis I'm sure) we managed to fix our syncing issues.
As for our limitations with Maya, well... In retrospect the use of Maya for particle system creation probably was not the best choice (as gamebryos particle support for 3DSMax is exceptional in comparison). A large amount of fields and features (especially ramps over particle lifespans) were greatly missed (although ramps are VERY expensive to calculate on the fly), but with a lot of planning we were able to escape with some acceptable results.
Although we will be using 3DSMax to get some effects (streak particles... not supported with Maya, but are in 3DSMax ~strange) and some of the outcomes of our effects are less than desirable in certain situations (billboard explosions fail in nooks and cranny's).
Next was the implementation of a day night sky dome. The approach to this was very similar to layered paper. Clouds can animate around a center pivot following a spherical path, while the sky dome (which in this case is a sky sphere ~fancy) rotates slowly across it's x axis continually; wallah a dynamic sky. The changes from day to night are handled by a interpolating texture, keeping 4 stages for gradual texture change (day -> dusk -> night -> dawn) textures can interpolate to gives an even MOAR dynamic sky (lovely ^_^)
this is roughly demonstrated in my notes above (the images detail a bit of thought process, pretty diagrams and such... and a few doodles)
Tweaking shaders to get desired results is something we got on top of and sat on recently. Characters especially were something quite frustrating to get right. The behaviour of the rim light was much too strong and was awkwardly lighting characters feet (which looks funky in a dark environment as the character literally floats). After a little head scratching with shader sliders the conclusion was to include a height gradient to kill the rim lights influence closer to the feet (this gives the illusion that character slowly emerge from the darkness rather then floating ~huzzah chutzpah).
Finally, Level of Detail meshes. Thankfully this isn't something that causes brainpain (TM), as some earlier prototyping and research cleared up the programmatic implementation and the artist pipeline. Gamebryos support for Maya LOD groups makes LODing assets... well... easy? However connecting LOD meshes for characters to BoneLODs is a little (a lot) less forgiving for pipeline execution and looks like it could eat a little time in the future (oh dear).
And appropriate exit based off of the introduction
"HALT I AM REPTAR"
Our main issues were with gamebryo's depth sorting and lack of support for most of maya's nifty particle features (maya being our 3D package of choice). Then there were the little things, like particle systems syncing themselves to the same play time, particle life span and emitter animations; it will ALWAYS look weird when bullet impacts sync themselves together so they can play at the same time regardless of creation. And finally no animated textures, and when animated textures were implemented no syncing to the particle animation; everyone likes an animated billboard looking out of place in a animation right?
Thanks to some lifesaving shader work from Josh we fixed our depth sorting issues and implemented our sprite sheet animated textures. And thanks to Eli and the discovery of NiPSEmitParticlesCtlr (time controller) hidden way down the .nif hierarchy (close to Atlantis I'm sure) we managed to fix our syncing issues.
As for our limitations with Maya, well... In retrospect the use of Maya for particle system creation probably was not the best choice (as gamebryos particle support for 3DSMax is exceptional in comparison). A large amount of fields and features (especially ramps over particle lifespans) were greatly missed (although ramps are VERY expensive to calculate on the fly), but with a lot of planning we were able to escape with some acceptable results.
Although we will be using 3DSMax to get some effects (streak particles... not supported with Maya, but are in 3DSMax ~strange) and some of the outcomes of our effects are less than desirable in certain situations (billboard explosions fail in nooks and cranny's).
Next was the implementation of a day night sky dome. The approach to this was very similar to layered paper. Clouds can animate around a center pivot following a spherical path, while the sky dome (which in this case is a sky sphere ~fancy) rotates slowly across it's x axis continually; wallah a dynamic sky. The changes from day to night are handled by a interpolating texture, keeping 4 stages for gradual texture change (day -> dusk -> night -> dawn) textures can interpolate to gives an even MOAR dynamic sky (lovely ^_^)
this is roughly demonstrated in my notes above (the images detail a bit of thought process, pretty diagrams and such... and a few doodles)
Tweaking shaders to get desired results is something we got on top of and sat on recently. Characters especially were something quite frustrating to get right. The behaviour of the rim light was much too strong and was awkwardly lighting characters feet (which looks funky in a dark environment as the character literally floats). After a little head scratching with shader sliders the conclusion was to include a height gradient to kill the rim lights influence closer to the feet (this gives the illusion that character slowly emerge from the darkness rather then floating ~huzzah chutzpah).
Finally, Level of Detail meshes. Thankfully this isn't something that causes brainpain (TM), as some earlier prototyping and research cleared up the programmatic implementation and the artist pipeline. Gamebryos support for Maya LOD groups makes LODing assets... well... easy? However connecting LOD meshes for characters to BoneLODs is a little (a lot) less forgiving for pipeline execution and looks like it could eat a little time in the future (oh dear).
And appropriate exit based off of the introduction
"HALT I AM REPTAR"
Friday, May 22, 2009
Michael Bastiaens -Friday 22nd May
"Captains Log 22/5/09"
This week I was chopping and changing between tasks which included working on the spawn marker, creating sounds, creating other new assets such as scavengable weapons and enemy corpses. I also did some more exports of the weapons as well so its been a pretty hectic week all up. Despite the numerous schedule changes I managing to keep on track on both sides of the schedule just in case we end up reverting to the previous schedule. In any case, next week ill be working on some more enemy corpses and then who knows at this stage XD. The following images are the scavengable weapons in the game which the player finds in order to research the corresponding weapons.
-Michael
This week I was chopping and changing between tasks which included working on the spawn marker, creating sounds, creating other new assets such as scavengable weapons and enemy corpses. I also did some more exports of the weapons as well so its been a pretty hectic week all up. Despite the numerous schedule changes I managing to keep on track on both sides of the schedule just in case we end up reverting to the previous schedule. In any case, next week ill be working on some more enemy corpses and then who knows at this stage XD. The following images are the scavengable weapons in the game which the player finds in order to research the corresponding weapons.
-Michael
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