Tim Bewick - Week 13

This week I worked on the HUD, rendering tooltips that have graphics and text, and I made the animations for the characters activate and deactivate properly when they are supposed to.

Michael -Friday 27th March

"Captains Log 27/3/08"

This week I have been working on the Machine gun type weapon and the also got a start on the sniper rifle. At the moment I am using an all Maya approach to the creation of the normal maps for the weapons to make less detailed objects a little bit more flash. Despite some graphics issues with the computer at the moment im getting through the weapons allright. So enough chit chat and more eye candy.

First up... this was a pretty funky graphic error that was popping up a little bit now and then. Just in case it happens to you just whack space bar and then go back to your perspective window and it should all be sweet.

Next up are some images of the machine gun WITHOUT the funky crazy background error. There are some images of the low poly version as well as a image showing the high res model which was used for the low poly model. I also have the current normal map with the unwrapped UVs but this still needs a fair bit of touching up in photoshop especially when the model is finally textured.

This last image shows my current work in progress for the sniper rifle. So far ive finished working on the barrel for the rifle.

Next week expect....very little because we get our last holiday of our course! So until my next week....Take Care!

-Michael

Hello E!

This week ive been working on getting the menus restructured and workig correctly. I have been creating layouts for the menus and putting early programmer art on them. I have got them linking to one another and poping off and on the stack correctly. I am now working on getting the functionality for the menus written and working, starting with the Lan Lobby menu so we can host and all join a hosted game. Some screens of the menus in their early stages are below.

JASON BUNKER

This week i worked on pass two for enviroment assets, all enviroment assets are almost finished upto pass two.

Next week is our holiday, time to catch up on sleep then first week back i will begin modelling the shotgun, both for the first and third person models.

Rockets, Mines and Explosions...Oh Joy

Hey everyone look at this really cool thing I got working!!!




In this video I can lay a proximity mine near the enemy grunt and then provoke him to follow me, hence running over the mine and exploding. The explosions are done using Force Fields in NVidia's PhysX SDK. I then shot a rocket at a car and blew it away.

Yes the explosions are not perfect and yes they have to be tweaked, but there is plenty of time for that in the coming milestones. I think I can safely say that that one is knocked on the head.

Its been a while...

Wow, it has been a while since my last post..it's been a busy few weeks. The team had their first "Walk-and-Talk" milestone last week which was really interesting. Although the gameplay elements were still a little lacking, the game shows a lot of potential. When you have team members trying to compete in a game of car stacking, finding fun in something that seems really mundane, it can have a positive affect on team morale. This raised some interesting questions too...how can we use this to our advantage? What kind of cool gameplay can we derive from it? These will probably be things that will be addressed over the next few weeks. The easiest solution, and something that is definitely proven to be successful with Microsoft's XBox360 is an achievement system. This could only add more fun to the game.

In terms of what I've been working on, AI is what I've been putting most of my energy into these past few weeks with Jono. The agents are still quite "simple-minded" at the moment, they will follow the player if the player starts shooting at them and that is pretty much all. The planning works really well though. The next step, and what I've been working on, is trying to get some scripting working. This has been quite a task but is almost at a stage where I can get other team members to define some actions and goals for particular agents.

That is eveything I think. Stay tuned for more updates. I'll try my best to be more consistent with posts, later days.

Catch up

The last few weeks have been stressfull with the clock never seeming to turn off. The main tasks I've been working on have been the Menu Systems and the sound. The menu's were probably the task I am most pleased with in terms of the way that the functionality managed to synchronise with Lua so well. The only major issue that came from the menu system was the lack of documentation on the Gamebryo GUI elements. A major flaw in our design in relation to using the gamebryo GUI elements was the lack of functionality in terms of a way to create some form of textbox or listbox. As this was discovered approximately 1 week into the coding of the menu's, (exposing to lua, implementing button functionality and renderering) the flaw in our ananlysis of gamebryos capabilities hit my time pretty well not due to a difficulty in converting the code but to trouble with building the Crazy Eddie Graphical User Interface into our project. I feel my experience and skillset when building and intergrating new middleware is good but CE threw a curve ball with the amount of dependencies required to build their libraries into a static lib (They release their static lib to import in their DLL). So therefore our project gained the expat, Freetype and PCRE libraries as well. The task ate my weekend but it was nice to only require about an hours worth of code tweaking to go from not linking or running with CEGUI to being able to use our menu's.

The Networking requirement of my tasks I've been able to set onto the backburner for a while now that I'm no longer working from a branch in SVN. Its much easier to edit changes quickly with the networking and manage any issues with the current build without requiring to reintergrate and rebuild the Trunk against the networking Branch.

Started working on the sound system this week and am able to get my sounds and sound engine to process while attached to our scene graph meaning we can update with the sound positional and velocity data efficiently. Unfortunately not a single peep has been made from my headphones these last two days.... and I'm still unsure why. I've dealt with FMOD before and have found dealing with their engine and docs nothing but a pleasure. One of the holdups as to why the sound took longer than a day to imlement was that I attempted to build against a LIB in Gamebryo that is not included in our version of Gamebryo "DOH", but after writting out the code to link this library I was left with a very over-the-top implementation of a sound system.... that don't work :(

Have taken on a few other tasks mainly to tidy up our codebase and work on bugs we have in our Mantis server. Bugs dealt with by me were the level shutdown and reload so that the player can exit a game and restart without exiting the application, The refactoring of some code in our environment class to seperate out our scene loading from the actual environment manager, while doing this I was able to also solve an additional problem with not all physX object we were loading containing a sorter on their void* userdata(I Think) so that our game won't crash when gameplay elements collide in our physX world and try to tell each other how to act.

ART STUFF

Hello everyone... I'm back, better and stronger than ever :D, for this week, aside from the task of creating the Scientist, 1st Lieutenant and the Grunt, I'm also resposible for the UI/HUD and here's the 1st Pass. Me, Tim and Roy worked on it oh and Josh for the High Poly Monster logo.

START MENU

HUD DESIGN 1


This week would be an awesome task as I'll create the 2nd pass for the Scientist, 1st Lieutenant and the Grunt so watch out my space....Cheers!

Tame - Week Entry

Last week was our first of many milestones. All the characters were successfully exported with animations on all of them.

All of the animations were based on a core cycle of animations with minor tweaks added to each character to help make them more unique to themselves, for example: the Scientist has the elbow and feet pointing more inwards whereas the males have them more outwards, the aliens right now are just basic, I am still to add their own unique style.

One small change that helped a LOT was the addition of a NEW rig for the skin to be attached to and be driven by the animated rig. This was done by the NEW rig being frozen in the world space and the joint orient. With this done there was some error with the weapons pointing in the wrong direction, once I found out about this the problem was very easy to fix. There needed to be another bone, which needed to be oriented from the Elbow to the Wrist and then parented to the NEW rigs elbow joint. With this done, the problem was sweet as!

Another minor problem with the NEW rig was when the animations were BAKED into the bones, the joints were rotating all wrong aka Gimble Rotating. I found out that some of the joints were rotating at specific animations, which appeared as normal in Maya but when viewed in Gamebryo showed up easy. This again was fix due to a little "tutuing" and again things went on sweet as!!

So the animations for the Scientist, Captain, First and Second Lieutenant were completed as well as the base animations for the Reaper and Grunt. The Exploder has some animations, but they still need to be thought out on what it is actually going to be doing in the game.

http://www.youtube.com/user/tametahana

On to Alpha!!

Week 12 - Blake

This week iv been reexporting, updating and replaceing assets in the level. 

Michael -Monday 23rd March

"Captains Log 23/3/09"

So we had our milestone hand in on Friday and things seemed to have gone pretty well with the game changing in appearance on the Friday itself. I had been working on touching up the textures on the alien Mother so with out further delay here are the pictures of the latest Mother with the textures.

The images below are screenshots from Maya and the last of the images is the diffuse color pass map.

So now that its Monday im awaiting my task list which I assume will be about workin on the weapons and such..... so until then....

Have a nice Day! XD

-Michael

Tame - Last Weeks Entry

The other week I received ENDORPHIN!!! And for a few days I had a "tutu" on it to see if I could at least get one of "our" characters into the software and export the animation into Maya then Gamebryo.

The first task was very confusing because the skeleton had joint orients on them, which Endorphin does NOT like so after this I found out that another Rig needed to be created exactly the same as the current one but with the joint orients being frozen in the world space. After this was tested the rigs worked in Endorphin,which I felt was a major boost that later on helped with the making of the NEW rig.

With the task of importing our rigs into endorphin, I created some animations with it and exported it into maya.

Heres the link to the animation in Maya:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBqX3gUmctE

One major problem I found in Endorphin was we could not use the pre-done animations on our rig. Although the behaviours are very helpful and are very cool, the animations just wouldn't work. I found out that our own animations could be used if exported as FBX files, but the Endorphin ones were dominantly more realistic with what looks like Motion Captured animation.

Oh well!!

BRING IT ON!!!

JASON BUNKER - Three Week Blog

This blog will be for the last three weeks, for these weeks i have been working on the same stuff, and didnt want to spam each week with the same posts.

So for the past week i have been working on created all envrioment assets upto pass one, last week i finished pass one of all assets and have begun working on pass two.

Screenshots to follow:

Aircon

Bench

First Milestone Done and Dusted!!

So our first milestone was due in on friday. We had a few hiccups along the way but in the end, I feel that we came away with a result.

We have an environment with physics, a little bit of AI, some networking, and a lot more gameplay than I expected. It is surprisingly fun, stacking up stuff and building up what might be some sort of fortification.

Being the project manager, I have spent majority of my time in the last two weeks working on little bits and pieces. I managed to get a resource cache up and running as well as some functionality for proximity mines using triggers in PhysX. The explosions still need to be tweaked a bit since PhysX's force fields are not playing nice but its nothing me and the team wont be able to handle as we are all very talented individuals.

So its another 4 weeks of coding, then a 1 week feature freeze until Alpha is due. Its looking good so far!!!

Tim Bewick - Week 12

This week our first milestone was due I worked on coding the HUD, getting the avatar to play more of its animations and tweaking their weights and priorities. Here are some screenshots of the game in action.

The first is from earlier in the week; I stacked these cars using the nano hand. The second screenshot shows the HUD and a grunt under some cars.

Hello E!

This week we had our first Milestone due, it went very well and we got alot of errors fixed quite fast with the help of the Mantis error logging system. Though many more errors were found everytime we fixed one, but thats a good thing.

I made a game time manager that manages the game time for night and day, so it spins the HUD icons and controls the speed of the sun and skybox and lighting. I also fixed a large number of errors with classes I had been working on.

Our Milestone build looks quite good and is really starting to form a game! Still a long way to go though!

Hello E!

Last week was spent mostly getting all classes and objects working together and touching up a few things with character movement, setting up physics flags and other little bits and pieces. This week we are feature freezing and logging and working through all the bugs in our game to date using Mantis!

Tim Bewick - Week 11

During Week 11 I got the zooming for iron sights working properly with the appropriate zoom for each of the weapons. I got HUD Elements Rendering with scaling and rotating. I changed all classes so almost everything is forward declared in the header files.

Feature Freeze

So this week is a feature freeze to fix everything we have before our first milestone.

Week 10 -11

been very busy the last two weeks making pass one assets and redesigning the level. 

Michael -Friday 13th March

"Captains Log 6/3/03"

Well this week I started off by creating the base textures of the Mother alien. Once that was completed I was about to start the caging process in Maya to get better normal maps but we had a class meeting and one of the issues brought up was the fact that everyone in the class seemed to want to have the grunt alien redesigned. So this week I also went about creating a new design for the grunt which involved the concepting phase and then I also had to rush through and get a new placeholder completed for the grunt as well.

So enough chit chat and lets bring on the images of this weeks art from my side of the world.

First up is the base colors for the Mother. Just to reinforce the fact, these are the base colors painted in ZBrush. What I then do is use these base colors and then paint all the detail into them in photoshop.

This is the new look for the Grunt Alien. It was designed to fit into the theme of the aliens more as well as allowing for customized weapon arms. Similar body parts can be seen such as the Reaper style legs, the exploder style head and the Mother style weapon arm. The image after than is of the Grunt ortho drawings for modelling purposes.

As usual the placeholder has be colored in Bright pink for awesomeness XP. The image after that shows a wireframe for the place holder model since ive heard many people are actually reading these blogs I thought id just put that up for a little extra eye candy.

Next week is setting up for the kind of hand in so it will be a mass exporting week. Ill also perhaps get to start on caging the Mother. So until then... Farewell

-Michael

Hello E!

Last week I worked on the night manager, it keeps track of the game time, and spawns new enemies at different locations around the map. It will load the wave infomation from a lua script and create the enemies of the percentages provided. It will take the round time and convert it to a time between 9pm and 9am based on how far the round is through, this time can also be used to move thew sun and moon in game. Enemies can also be spawned from spawnpoints based on cardinal directions North South East West.

Looking at our level in-game I fear it is still much to massive and will take ages for enemies to reach the players. I would personally take a smaller part of the city and focus on that like a courtyard or park

Tim Bewick - Week 10

During Week 10 I created a class for the enemies and got three of them into the game. They don’t do anything yet though. I also made the machine gun and sniper rifle be able to shoot the enemies and they take damage. I made the nano hand be able to drop stuff you pick up so now we can stack stuff. I am working on particle effects for bullet impacts at the moment.

Michael -Friday 6th March

"Captains Log 6/3/09"

After finishing off the texture for the Exploder I finally started the mission of creating the Mother for the first pass. I pretty much started from scratch for this model and it was hard work since most of the creature couldnt be mirrored over since the entire creature is for the most part assymetrical. I am now currently in the process of sculpting the lower level details on the model its its progressing along well. We also had a few guest lectures this week which gave us a great insight on the current state of the industry as well as a really great talk from an artistic standpoint.

So now onto the artistic side of the blog post... The images. This week is all about the Mother alien. It shows a picture of the base Maya model that was imported into Zbrush and then some of the recent sculpts of the Mother. After the sculpting is done for the model I will be caging it again in Maya since it will undoubtedly be required to get better normal maps when I start baking them out.

Thats all from me this week. Until next time..

-Michael

This Week

Lost track of the blog week...

But yeah, the animations are getting there! The base movement animations for the avatar is fully blocked out, they need a bit of tweaking but thats coming. Some of the enemies were also blocked out including the Exploder and the Reaper and they both are successfully working in Gamebryo, whether they work in the game is still to be seen...

We finally got ENDORPHIN...HOORAY!! Well sort of, in order to use it, the animations sort of need to be final so that probly wont be in real use until either the alpha or beta milestones :( We will use endorphin nonetheless next week to see what animaitons we can potentially create.

I will update my youTube page weekly so keep in touch and comment if you can! More help means smoother animations :)

http://www.youtube.com/user/tametahana

Sweet as caz!!

Our framerate, culling, and how occlusion guards are not really helping

So we have been having a few frame rate issues which we thought were caused by not properly culling stuff. Anyway After a few occlusion guards and some profiling, it is apparently coming down to waiting on Semaphores.

Oh and By the way. We are going to have UI up and running real soon. I can't wait!!!!!!!!!

We'll keep u posted

Jason - Last Weeks

Last week i completed a pass 1 of assets 26-53, they are modelled and uv unwrapped, and ready to be textured, im pleased i managed to model and unwrap these far ahead of schedule giving me two weeks to work on the textures :)