Nightfall - Production Blog

I SURVIVED THE NIGHTFALL- Kei Kasai

2009-06-30T14:10:00.006+12:00

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!

Tim Bewick - Week 25

2009-06-26T14:37:00.002+12:00

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.

Its all over red rover!!

2009-06-26T13:47:00.003+12:00

So thats it, our game is done and dusted. What an experience!!!!!!!!

Its all over red rover!!

2009-06-26T13:47:00.001+12:00

So thats it, our game is done and dusted. What an experience!!!!!!!!

FORUM

2009-06-26T09:06:00.001+12:00

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

Battlecruiser Operational

2009-06-23T08:49:00.002+12:00

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.

Michael Bastiaens - Monday 22nd June

2009-06-22T15:22:00.002+12:00

"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

Tim Bewick - Week 24

2009-06-22T09:16:00.002+12:00

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.

CARRY ON MY WAYWARD SON!!! YOU HAVE COME SO FAR AND NOW YOU'RE ALMOST DONE!!

2009-06-19T22:59:00.002+12:00

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!!!!!

A HighPolyMonster Production, :)

2009-06-17T19:45:00.002+12:00

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.

Tame Tahana

2009-06-17T11:49:00.002+12:00

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

2009-06-15T19:15:00.001+12:00

Awesome, apart from the animation syncing, the networking is almost done and dusted. I just need to fix up the respawning part. Oh and I would love to test the whole reviving a team mate thing but too many class mates are pre occupied with other stuff *cough* Dota *cough*

Tim Bewick - Week 23

2009-06-15T09:26:00.002+12:00

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.

Michael Bastiaens -Friday 12th June

2009-06-12T14:41:00.002+12:00

"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

HMMMM

2009-06-09T20:53:00.002+12:00

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..

So...can I have a job? [insert fake laugh here]

2009-06-09T20:49:00.004+12:00

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.

Art Update ! -1st Lieutenant

2009-06-08T09:59:00.005+12:00

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

2009-06-08T09:09:00.007+12:00

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!

Tim Bewick - Week 22

2009-06-05T16:45:00.002+12:00

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?

2009-06-05T16:42:00.002+12:00

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.

Michael Bastiaens -Friday 5th June

2009-06-05T12:10:00.003+12:00

"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

Tim Bewick - Week 21

2009-06-03T12:14:00.002+12:00

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!!!

2009-06-03T11:54:00.002+12:00

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.

Animations and other stuff

2009-05-30T13:23:00.002+12:00

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!!!!!!!!

Michael Bastiaens -Friday 29th May

2009-05-29T15:46:00.002+12:00

"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

Particles.....

2009-05-28T14:41:00.003+12:00

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......

Tim Bewick - Week 20

2009-05-25T10:23:00.001+12:00

Week 20. I worked more on tooltips, Made the death camera not be able to rotate so it could go upside down and improved the weapon selector which now has new art thanks to Kei. Here are some screenshots of the weapon selector:

org hungry, org want eat

2009-05-24T11:28:00.008+12:00

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"

Michael Bastiaens -Friday 22nd May

2009-05-22T15:55:00.002+12:00

"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

2009-05-22T15:52:00.006+12:00

Been working on the level for the 4 weeks since my last post,

all objects now have phx on them and you can destory parts of the buildings and walls

Good Times

2009-05-22T15:52:00.003+12:00

This week has been good times, i have finished all LOD for my assets, including the Shotgun, and have begun modelling a extra asset, with the possibilty of more extra assets on the way.

Also begun doing some testing of all assets in the level and wrote down any chrash errors and passed them onto the programmers.

Particles and Networking

2009-05-21T21:02:00.001+12:00

So we have particles working, and the networking is on its way.

Tim Bewick - Week 19

2009-05-19T13:38:00.002+12:00

I spent most of Week 19 working on tooltips that tell the player how to control their avatar when they first play the game. I made them so they only appear to tell you how to do something that the player has not done before. I also fixed the avatar's jumping and worked on the loading bar.

Whats left to do in 3 weeks.

2009-05-18T19:27:00.002+12:00

Fortunately not that many tasks, unfortunately those that are left are giving us headaches. We finally got some networking going, just need to smooth out some of the animations and physics with our friend mister linear interpolation. Then tweak mother giving birth, AI path finding, a few animations, a few particles and fix a few bugs.

Its gonna be mean, the game is really fun.

Art Update ! LOD

2009-05-18T10:12:00.004+12:00

Some quick update ya'all :P here's the LOD for both Scientist and 1st Lieutenat, I just realised that I havent posted the 1st Lietenant so watch this space later. Cheers!

Man I'm Beta!

2009-05-15T20:51:00.003+12:00

The team has just finished week two of a five week period before beta hand-in and the pressure is starting to mount. During this time, the main focus for the team has been to try and fix features that have been implemented so far as well as getting the gamer experience properly implemented.

My task has been the AI routing. This has given me a lot of trouble over the course of this project. The main challenge has been the fact that the environment is almost completely dynamic. I have been running into cases where the AI agents will almost always get stuck running to a waypoint because the path that it calculated has become invalidated. At the moment, AI agents are using a combination of pathfinding and steering behaviour. This kind of works but I still need fallbacks incase something wrong happens. Some suggestions have been given to me from peers, Darius, and Jon, our new GD Tutor and resident go-to guy. Here are the approaches that I will be trying over the next few days:

- Keep track of waypoints that have been successfully traversed. If the AI agent takes too long to get to its next waypoint, have it backtrack. Add a working memory fact that will change the cost of the edge that could not be traversed so that future AI agents will avoid going that way when pathfinding. Once the fact has expired, reset the edge cost back to the correct cost again. By setting a time limit on how long that edge cost can stay modified, it should stop the edge cost from being invalid for too long (NB: The time limit probably would not be needed if the environment was not dynamic....then again, the agents would probably not get stuck either).

- Place trigger areas around the map that could be problematic for simple pathfinding. If the agent gets into this area, have them perform some action to minimise the possibility of it getting stuck. For example, there are stairs in the area where agents tend to get stuck. I could place a trigger area at the bottom of the stairs that could make the agents jump to the top rather than just walk up it.

- Have designated areas in the map where AI agents can return to where they can easily get to certain areas in the level. If the agent gets stuck, have it try to get to one of these areas where it can begin its search again.

At the moment, I am leaning towards the first one. I'll be back with my progress in the next few days. Keep posted, later days.

Michael Bastiaens -Friday 15th May

2009-05-15T16:02:00.004+12:00

"Captains Log 15/5/09"

This week ive been working on creating LOD groups for the enemies and their weapons and such. This process also included creating different resolution textures which was a relatively straightforward task. Once I finished this, I started working on improving the current sound library in order for me to start editing and creating new sounds next week. The last thing I worked on this week was a last minute request to create a new and improved spawn marker which has since taken up a higher priority and so I was working on the spawn marker for the better part of today. So the following are images of this weeks work and next week there should be a textured spawn marker and some new sounds which means that there wont be that many pictures next week. So until next week!

-Michael

Jason Bunker

2009-05-14T14:41:00.003+12:00

For the past several weeks i have been working on creating LOD versions of all my assets, all assests now have two levels of LOD, which are all ready to begin being exported.

I have also been building several test levels for programmers, and making changes to them at the programmers requests, which i enjoy because it gives me a chance to get some experiance with the Gamebryo Scene Viewer, but the asset viewer can get annoying.

Screenshot one is of the shotgun with three levels of LOD, the left is 1000 tri's and a 512x512 texture, LOD 2 is 500 tri's and 256x256 resolution texture, and LOD 3 is 25o tri's and a 128x128 resolution texture.

The second screenshot shows one of the quick levels i have created for programmers to test stuff.

Tim Bewick - Week 18

2009-05-12T11:34:00.002+12:00

During week 18 I worked on tooltips, I added made the avatars use more of their animations, I made the avatar's character controller change its size when the avatar is crouching.

Michael Bastiaens -8th May 2009

2009-05-08T15:00:00.003+12:00

"Captains Log 8/5/09"

Ive just been working on finishing off the weapons. So now they are textured and I set up the Level of Detail groups on the third person weapons as well. Next week ill be working on creating level of detail groups for the enemies.

-Michael

Animator Entry

2009-05-06T15:56:00.002+12:00

From the last post theres just been a lot of cleaning the rig and animated files, adding the new up-to-date meshes and tweaking the rigs to fit these changes. This has had some annoying additional work to be done, including adding bones to fingers to create a less "star fish shape" hand, as well as having to tweak the rigs in general...but oh well its all done now.

With that out of the way, there were a few more animations added including standing_idle, crouch_idle as well as some Endorphin animations done today.

Check them out here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7B82QsxvPI0

Chur chur

Beta Time

2009-05-05T09:24:00.000+12:00

So its beta time and its coming along nicely. All features bar about 2 are present. very little has been cut and we are working on fleshing out the core game play experience better than it currently is.

Some more update -The Scientist

2009-05-05T09:21:00.005+12:00

Here's the Scientist- Cheers!

Some Update!

2009-05-04T14:02:00.004+12:00

Last week aside from finishing the Texture,Normal and Specular Map for both Scientist and 1st Lieutenant, I worked with Tim with some UI stuff including the loading screen and images of playable characters for the Character Selection Screen. I'll post some more later so watch this space :) Cheers!

Hello E!

2009-05-04T09:44:00.004+12:00

On Friday was Alpha hand in and everything went really well, so off to celebrate for a drink! Tho we are not where we want to be at this stage I feel we can work hard and get a really good game out the door at the end of it all. At the moment our game runs really slow (1 frame/s!) with the actual level we want to use so profiling must be done and the slow parts of our program reworked. Since pre alpha milestone I have been working mostly on the game menus with a little bit of game logic tasks to do here and there. Sum screen of the current menus are below...

Michael Bastiaens -1st May 2009

2009-05-01T15:46:00.003+12:00

"Captains Log 1/5/09"

This week was our alpha hand in week. I spent most of the week working on sorting out the normal maps on all the weapons and exporting them as well as starting up on a few base textures. Below are some of the latest images of guns in progress.

I would talk more but....yeah... Until next week!

-Michael

Tim Bewick - Week 17

2009-05-01T13:05:00.003+12:00

The alpha milestone is due today. This week I worked on a loading screen with a loading bar and the learn to play menu. Here is a screenshot of the loading screen.

Michael Bastiaens -Friday 24th April

2009-04-24T15:59:00.006+12:00

"Captains Log 24/4/09"

This week was spent working on the Grunt. I managed to get through the scuplting process as well as texturing and then went ahead and made the different weapons for the grunt which are the Short Range Gun arm, Mid range Gun arm, Long range Sniper Arm and the Rocket Launcher arm all of which have been normal mapped and textured as well. Some nights were long but were by for enjoyable to say the least with the few of us that did stay those extra few hours. In any case theres a whole bunch of images so without further a do.... here they are.

Usually Id explain what the images are but this blog is so frustrating when you put in so many images so Ill just let you all bask in the art and take it all in XD... Until next week take care all

Jason - Shotgun

2009-04-24T15:49:00.001+12:00

This week i have been texturing the shotgun, this proved to be quite a challange due to the guns being made by nano bots an idea for a look was hard to decide

Also the fact that since the weapon is made on the spot by the nano-bots it would therfore have not recivied any damage or grunge but im quite happy with the final result, i just need to get the shader all setup and try to get the normal maps working correctly in Gamebryo.

Tim Bewick - Week 16

2009-04-24T14:37:00.003+12:00

This week I worked on the death camera for the avatar, rendering the third person model for the avatar while using the death camera, making the avatar become incapacitated and die, and regenerating the avatar's health.

You Can Harvest This Corpse

2009-04-24T14:28:00.002+12:00

Art Update ! -1st Lieutenant- Detail Comparison

2009-04-22T12:40:00.004+12:00

Some quick update on how the Normal Map turn up, Cheers!

tick tick tick

2009-04-22T08:36:00.003+12:00

Tim Bewick - Week 15

2009-04-21T09:27:00.003+12:00

During week 14 I made the weapon selector, made the third person avatar able to dynamically blend between aim up, down and forwards animations by interpolating the weights of the animations, made the camera rotate and move when the avatar leans and enabled the weapon overheating.

Art Update ! -1st Lieutenant

2009-04-20T09:37:00.003+12:00

For last week I finished detailing the 1st Lieutenant and will start baking the Normal Maps and AO for both characters (Scientist and 1st Lieutenant), aside from that I've also helped Tim with the weapon inventory based on the design created by Jason. Cheers!

Two more until Alpha

2009-04-19T14:50:00.002+12:00

What a week!!

Things are actually starting to come together, its awesome. There is still a lot of work to do though. I think the idea of eliminating that feature freeze a week before alpha is probably the best idea to come up yet...Thank you James for that one!!!

That will give us an extra week to get every last little feature into the game. Then we can spend the majority of the Beta period, fixing and integrating them as well as a little polishing hopefully.

Phew, where did my week go?

2009-04-17T23:54:00.003+12:00

This week has gone by so quickly! As the team nears closer and closer towards the alpha milestone, features are quickly beginning to get added to the game. I must say, things are looking quite good. We were lucky enough to have James from Sidhe in again. For all you budding game designers out there, James offered some great advice.

1. Make sure that when designing a game, have a FOCUSED idea of what is going to happen. This should be based almost entirely on the "gamer experience." This will help prioritize goals and features for the game.
2. Introduce the player to the important elements of the game gradually. The player experience should be enough to keep the player interested without boring them or overwhelming them.
3. The first ten minutes are critical. If the player is not hooked by then, then their is something wrong with the current design. It's better to have a game with a polished ten minutes of good solid play, than a game that is half-assed that lasts one hour.

These tips have come in handy this week, and with James's help, we were able to draft up a sample playthrough. As with all projects, the initial design can sometimes become inapplicable as the project evolves hence the need for a different sample play through description. Keep posted for how our game develops.

Blake - Week 14

2009-04-17T16:26:00.001+12:00

Been doing a lot of asset upgrading, i think their starting to look pretty ok

Michael Bastiaens -Friday 17th April

2009-04-17T16:19:00.003+12:00

"Captains Log 17/4/09"

Its another week done and another week closer to our alpha milestone. As with the approach of most deadlines people tend to start working longer and harder around the class and more and more of the game is starting to take shape. This week I started by finishing off the sniper rifle for First person and have completed the first person cage for the machine gun and was about to start creating the normal maps for the object but I was then informed that I was going to take over finishing off the Grunt. Although it was not totally unexpected that I would be working on it, it did mean I had to take a pause from working on the weapons but heck getting to work on the grunt and getting back to Zbrush and Photoshop is a welcome change. So without further delay... here are the latest images of this weeks work.

First up is the First Person Sniper Rifle with the normal map applied to it.

This next image shows the wireframe on top of the Machine Gun weapon for the first person camera angle. All that was left for this to be completed was the process of transfering maps from the high res model on this current model.

These last few pictures show the screenshots of the current Grunt Sculpt in Zbrush. At the moment I am now dropping base colours onto the model so I can then work on them easier inside of photoshop. I did make one mistake in this process in which I forgot to unwrap the low poly model before importing it into Zbrush which is that much of a problem it just means I need to take the extra step of importing the high res models into Maya and then transfering maps or mixing it up with a little X-Normal depending on the results of the normal maps.

Well thats all from me for this week. Next week ill be continuing to work on the Grunt and should be getting out a colour map all sorted out by next week and depending on how much Maya will crash on me I might get out a normal mapped version of the Grunt as well. So until next time....

-Michael

pretty extracts

2009-04-17T16:05:00.002+12:00

Jason - No idea what week were into now - Shotgun!

2009-04-17T14:25:00.002+12:00

For most of last week and this week i have been working on the shotgun pass-1 and pass-2 and am pleased that the modeling has been finished, alot of the shotgun was organic which isnt my strongest modelling point.

This shotgun is my second complete model because i didnt feel the previous one was upto standard, next week ill begin unwrapping, and texturing.

Unfortinutly alot of my enviroments that needed to be fixed i have only just managed to get around to exporting today, after the update to gamebryo 2.6 my whole maya-gamebryo plug in died and the machine required a wipe and reinstall, which sadly took I.T over a week to get it done, which held up asset exportion but all is good now, and pass 2 of all enviroment assets is complete.

Shotgun:

Yes, We can research now!!!

2009-04-14T22:40:00.001+12:00

So as the title so abruptly suggests, we can research new weapons nows, I got that a few hours ago. I would have posted a movie but unfortunately it still needs some tender love and care from an artist to make it look pretty. It displays a nifty tool tip though!!!

Tim Bewick - Week 14

2009-04-14T09:25:00.002+12:00

This week we moved from Gamebryo 2.5 to Gamebryo 2.6. There had been a few changes to the way animations worked and I converted our code to work with the way Gamebryo 2.6 does it now. I also worked on the game's tool tips and I got the nano-bot bar in the HUD to show the amount of nano-bots the player has. Now I am working on getting the avatar to die properly.

Michael -Thursady 9th April

2009-04-09T17:04:00.003+12:00

"Captains Log 9/4/09"

First week back from our holidays so it was time to kick the holiday habits and get down to some serious work. This week I was continuing with the weapons and managed to finish modelling and normal mapping the remaining weapons ive been assigned to for the third person views and have started moving onto the first person guns now. The normal maps still need tweaking in photoshop but thats a task ill be doing later on. Also there seems to be a hint going on that I might be moving onto the grunt as well which would be all good in any case. Now for the pictures XD

First up is an image of the high poly and low poly rocket launcher with wireframes. The image following that is the normal mapped rocket launcher with untouched normals. They still need tweaking in photoshop before I feel satisfied with them.

Next up is the High Poly and Low poly sniper rifles. The image after that is the normal mapped third person rifle and the very last image the start of the first person sniper rifle model.

Well now its the end of the week since we get another short break due to Easter but after that ill be working on the first person models and I might be assigned to do the Grunt so until my next post take care everyone and everything!

-Michael

speaking in first perosn

2009-04-08T09:15:00.002+12:00

progress update on the mine layer

the firstperson camera rig setup

Art Update !

2009-04-07T09:48:00.004+12:00

Here's the initial sculpt of the Scientist, originally I should be detailing the Grunt last week but since Mike like to do it then I decided to give it (I'm generous). Anyway here's the Scientist and for this week I'll start the initial sculpt of the 1st Lieutenant so watch this space =D

Cheers =)

And ah, its a great way to stay in shape

2009-04-06T21:19:00.002+12:00

Hey everyone,

So we have approximately 4 weeks left until Alpha. Which means a feature complete game. Its gonna be tough but a lot can be accomplished in 4 weeks.

Known issues that we have at the moment are PhysX exporters from Maya having difficulty creating custom made convex hulls as well as some issues with Gamebryo's particle system.

I'll keep you posted

go go april

2009-04-06T08:32:00.000+12:00

shader test

character progress

first person

high vs low

Tim Bewick - Week 13

2009-03-27T13:57:00.002+13:00

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

2009-03-27T13:39:00.003+13:00

"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!

2009-03-27T13:30:00.003+13:00

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

2009-03-27T13:27:00.002+13:00

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

2009-03-25T20:08:00.005+13:00

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...

2009-03-25T19:42:00.007+13:00

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

2009-03-25T19:42:00.006+13:00

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

2009-03-23T10:28:00.008+13:00

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

2009-03-23T09:57:00.001+13:00

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

2009-03-23T09:27:00.001+13:00

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

Michael -Monday 23rd March

2009-03-23T09:17:00.003+13:00

"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

2009-03-23T09:07:00.003+13:00

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

2009-03-23T09:05:00.002+13:00

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!!

2009-03-22T19:01:00.002+13:00

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

2009-03-20T16:11:00.003+13:00

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!

2009-03-20T15:55:00.002+13:00

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!

2009-03-16T10:08:00.002+13:00

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

2009-03-16T09:39:00.002+13:00

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

2009-03-16T09:32:00.001+13:00

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

Week 10 -11

2009-03-16T09:02:00.003+13:00

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

Michael -Friday 13th March

2009-03-13T16:41:00.003+13:00

"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!

2009-03-09T12:57:00.002+13:00

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

2009-03-09T09:34:00.002+13:00

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

2009-03-06T16:10:00.003+13:00

"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

2009-03-05T18:18:00.002+13:00

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

2009-03-04T22:17:00.002+13:00

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

2009-03-02T09:20:00.001+13:00

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 :)

Shotgun Grunt: I know what must be done.

2009-02-28T10:55:00.003+13:00

So for the last 2 and a half weeks I've been working on getting the AI logic and pathfinding code working. Finally!!

The pathfinding was easy enough, this is 'bout the sixth time i've written it. What I've mostly been spending my time on is what we call planning. Where at any time an ai guy looks at whats going on and makes a plan on what he should do next. If you want to know more check out this guy's site: Jeff Orkin - http://web.media.mit.edu/~jorkin/goap.html.

Its an interesting thing to know how a technique logically works inside out, the reasoning for it and everything about it; but its another thing completely to code it in C++, let alone into a group of other inter-connecting systems like physics/multi-threading/etc.

The thing with coding any sort of algorithm is that if you know both above pieces then the actual typing of the code into a compiler and running is disguistingly smaller than 2 and 1/2 weeks. Like the pathfinding code which I wrote and tested to a point where it was fully working in 1 day.

It's 'cause, as most coders know that 80% of time is used debugging. The thing is there's a direct relationship with the amount of time spent on debugging versus the amount of understanding of what is being coded in the first place.

Moral of a post that's subject has changed five times is: Understand the concept, understand how to represent the concept in code, understand how the code will interact with other systems, then code it.

Its alive......ALIVE!

2009-02-27T18:27:00.003+13:00

It has been quite an exciting week. The game is coming together very nicely. We have a placeholder level loading up with the physics data. We can run around with the avatar. We can move blocks around the environment. We can play with a teammate over the network. All-in-all, its been a very good week. I am not going to lie though, there have been a few hiccups along the way.

First thing was the awful frame-rate we had. The game was running at 3 frames per second! We have managed to squeeze out 30 frames by fixing the updates for the scene graph and making all the physics objects kinematic during loading. We can probably squeeze out more frames by adding occluders.

The next thing was node rotation and placement. Once the game was running at 30 frames the team noticed that the orientation of the "passive" objects in the scene were all wrong. This was my fault because I was calling the node's "SetWorldRotate" instead of "SetRotate" function. Now that it is fixed, the level, although it just has placeholders, looks pretty cool.

That is what happened this week in a nutshell. To boost morale, Roy and Anthony suggested an afternoon of playing games. It worked very well and probably won't be the last time it will happen during production. Until next time, keep on keeping on, and stay tuned for updates.

Hadouken

2009-02-27T16:39:00.002+13:00

caging process on second lieutenant

mapped captain

Its coming along quite nicely.

2009-02-27T16:27:00.002+13:00

Like the title of the post says. Its coming along nicely.

Most of the major systems are online, we are only lacking a HUD and a menu system and some enemies but they are not far off. We have a level, a character and weapons as well as some basic networking functionality.

We are having issues with our frame rate, some more culling is needed.

Until next week. We will keep you posted

Week 9 - Blake

2009-02-27T16:23:00.002+13:00

This week I was able to start creating the models to replace the placeholders