Month: July 2011

Glowing

Update : Boy is there lots of tweaking left =P… After I get all the objects ready it will be time to tweak the lighting and effects.. I plan on release the first beat without sound ;).. I want to focus on visuals then add the music. When I was in college I used that trick as a good way to push myself farther as with music almost any video is better =)..

OK TONIGHT I START TESTING THE UNIVERSAL Mission Europa Patch! =0…..

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HDR and BLOOM in..This will be an option for those that prefer better looks to frame rate. There is a reason not many games are using it as it is a fill rate killer. (BIG TIME).. so I think I will ask the player in the begging if they prefer frame rate or graphics then let them adjust in game if they like. Right now it is still running at a great speed. If I can unload the gpu a bit more it might never be an issue. I do not have a iPad 1 though… We will see.

PLEASE IGNORE THE FRAME RATE! This is in the simulator on a Mac Mini base piece of junk =)..

Now the Bloom will definitely be a Option as it is a fill rate HOG… The volume shadows also. As newer devices get better with the fill rate it will only get better =).. Right now it is screaming at 30 fps at all times on my iPad 2.

Wow.. Got M.E. running on iPad

Update:
I plan on this weekend updating the COLLECTORS build to universal (with a few bug fixes).

As for tonight I am going to try and get the stencil buffer shadow volumes working in my render to texture bloom code(Nix that fixed on to the blooming =) ). For some reason it is not showing at all. While it works fine when using the standard frame buffers… this could be fun. =) Hopefully soon I will be back to the character code soon. After that it will be time to create the characters (I have already started). Then I will be able to start making the first level of game-play! I am pretty excited about reviving the Dungeon Keeper type gameplay. I am really excited about the prospect of having AI pets that you grow =).. Back to the day job!.. I sure wish I could do games full time again without the unstable as hell game industry job =P…..

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I like it a LOT… I might have to take a break from the new game and see if I can get a HD Universal version out.. I need to put some time into it adjusting the interface but I think I might try to get an iPad version out this weekend time permitting =)….

–> CLICK <– these shots to see them in high res iPad love!..

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If you missed it yesterday I finished the volumetric shadows and you can see them here.

Awesome!! I am very happy with the last 10 or so hours put in…

Wow updating to a universal app was a one button press for me… wow… I need to look into Mission Europa and updating it to a universal app post release of the next title…I will have to adjust the user interfaces but other then that I am not sure it would take to much =)…. back to work!

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So what do yall think so far! =)..

A ways to go I need to get the glow HDR effect in (a LOT easier then the Volumetric Stencil Shadows). I will post some shots after I get that in.. but it is starting to look pretty =)…

A few more shadow issues.. then =)

Update:

Well sometimes it just takes a moment or two from behind the console.. I finally worked out all the kinks with the shadow volumes… SO many places a wrong value can mess you up. On top of that the whole time you really are not getting a great visual on what is wrong it is either there or not =)..

Video: (the shadow volumes are faintly there to show them… notice the inter shadows finally… a bit mask was killing me at last.. )

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Update: Does anyone remember this!

Just popped in my head..

R.I.P. Origin should have never sold off to EA =-/

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A few more shadow issues.. then I think I want to move over to HDR and add that system to the scene graph. Having done that one so many times it should not be as killer as the shadows were (Information on the ios stencil is convoluted as pre-3Gs it did not have one…)

I need to first separate the stencil build up pass into a building of all shadows then a screen render for the shadow itself. (I want one color for shadows as I do not expect to many light sources at once (to expensive) and I do not like overlapping shadows and the way they look even if it is correct… )

More later =)

Monday!

Update: DONE… it was a 1 off bug that was causing the issue.. argh…

A thing of beauty! =P…

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Recovering from my birthday yesterday not expecting a lot out of me today. I will be nursing my braincells back to life today. I am stuck on what I think is a driver issue of some type. When I turn on front face culling the entire screen is doing something weird with my shader after it is rendered.. anyway I will be looking at it later =)

Almost there!

Crazy times right now.. house repairs and day job… people on vacation at the day job 2/3 gone 😉

Here is the stage of the shadow volumes.. sadly I am only getting a few hours a day to get work done.. hopefully I will get more tonight and this weekend.. the remodel of the shower is killing me. I still need to finish the framing and then pour the drain pan base ..


Getting very close…something strange still happeneing

Busy times…

Update: Slow day job day… scary really… times sure are hard in the economy.. =/…
Anyway.. I had time to find my error a simple stupid error when I was checking triangles I had one leg backwards… duh.. so here

Ok now how this works is pretty clever. You first calculate all the edges either pre-calculate or on load. (I do it on load as it is pretty quick this will change later I bet). Then create the colume off the silhouette. This is again pretty easy as all you have to do is run through a hopefully VERY small index of edges and check if one triangle on the edge is facing away and one towards the light. Whaala an edge we need to extrude. Then extrude it away from the light careful to mind winding. Wind it to where the normal would face out of the volume. The last step is at render time to use the stencil buffer to write the toward faces and then the away faces increment and decrementing the stencil. You now have the shadow outline to apply =).. good stuff cannot wait to be done with this little tool. I need to finish the stencil ops now should not take to long. You can see it working in the above image. The red is the back cull the blue is the front. Where you see blue and no purple you will see shadow…i need to still cap them also whoops =) (actually I will not have to cap that one as the Z Z buffer will take care of that one….

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I am splitting coding time with sleep and ripping out a shower..The head popped off and I had to tear down some gyp board to get to it. After I had a 3 foot hole.. I just kept going =).. now a tile shower is on the way!.. I just need a clone or two..

Here is where I am on shadow volumes.. I am having troubles with the winding order.. what you want to see is purple in the back out of shadow. And a solid color in front. Not happening yet… but I never give up I will find the error in my winding code tonight in between the shower …

Here is an example of the problem =)..Nothing like a debug line system in an engine and a good one at that =)…. red should always touch blue.. here you see red touching red.. so there is a problem =)…. you can also see the silhouette formed by the calculations.

Finally

Update: Almost there. I am not sure how much I can use of this new shadow code it is a fill rate HOG.. but I will find places to use it. We shall see. I really have no other way to get a good shadow behind a wall. I might make a special case just for wall nodes and not a general shadow node. for now it is working great except for one little math bug I will hunt down tomorrow =) night!

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I have the shadow volume construction ALMOST complete. I still have to be sure the extruded volumes have the right winding order… (easy)

Here is a video.. you can see how the fill rate could be heavily effected. I have lots of methods in mid to keep that down but we shall see.. I may have to fake shadows another way for these slower devices.. not sure as it will require testing =) .. so far it is very fast!

Shadows!

Getting there. I am having some real issues with my house lately. I had to ripout an entire shower last night, change the oil in 2 cars, lay out soaking lines to hopefully fix the foundation, and fix a few doors due to the shifting (it has been over 100 for about 3 weeks).. I still got this finished =)

More later house permitting =)

Tonight I have to put in silhouette detection which is easier then it sounds. Simply run through the edges and compare the two tris connected with a fast dot product to the light if one is facing away and one towards then that is an edge to the silhouette. I use much lower poly models for the shadow run in a separate graph that can be disabled for a frame rate boost =).. it is a bit fill rate limited but I plan on working on that by limiting the depth they can travel by the floor level.

Monday!!!

Update:Ok Going with shadow volumes… hopefully the silhouette gen code is not to much.. I will surely find out soon.. going to take some time =)

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Looks like the house is starting to have foundation problems…argh.. some sprinklers were not functioning on the side of the house so it got really dry. Hopefully the watering I am doing will fix it but I am giving it a low chance.. who knows.. it would definately wipe out all profits from Mission Europa.. ( O and wife just texted that a shower head blew right out of its pipe!.. wow.. what a few days will do =P)
So today I feel like this awesome video:


Sometimes you just got to sit back and enjoy the ride =P….

Anyway I am smiling now … LOVE that scene!.. Today I have a lot of Day job stuff.. but tonight I hope to get a video of the projection stencil shadow volumes and finaly get some shadows in there.

Have a great Monday! =)

Bug sqaushed

It was not even in the collision code. In a recursion I had a line out of order and was leaving nodes in a small memory leak.. I had not run my internal memory debugger in a bit and that would have caught it.. but o well.. I might just leave the mem debugger on ;P.. Good stuff.. A kids party today then finally on to making game happen!

Since this might help others I moved this comment below into the post section as comments do not always show to everyone..I love to answer questions of any type as I might find I am wrong from others =P… Have a great Sunday!

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warkiwi Says:
what game engine do you use because i whant to make a game and im just looking for a good game engine trying unity 3 but it prity hard (not like making games is easy) im just experamenting and stuff i what to make a space game like eve but singel player offline.

Ryan:
I made mine from scratch =). I like it best that way. When I was in the big time industry nothing frustrated me like the big black boxes were handed and had to shoe horn to what we wanted. I would suggest a Scene Graph based system. Even more so with a space and ship system. That would be pretty easy to implement. I am not up to date on what is in the market these days as far as ios engines. Unity seems nice but I am just not a fan of other peoples tech to the point that I would rather invest a good 2-3 months making my own after studying the Doom,Unreal, and cannot remember the name of the other one (used in Grand Theft Auto…)..I settled down back to the first type of engine I made.. a scene graph.. Mission Europa was structured more akin to Unreal… But now I use a scene graph system with a render proto tree that is batch collapsed to a render tree thus taking 100s of batch calls and making them into one. If you have questions fire away =)..

Just remembered Criterions Renderware…

Working on implementing a fast Stencil Volume shadow projection system ;).. I do miss depth shadows but these buggers cannot even come close to the fill rate needed =/

Work it baby!

Update Bah.. collision system has a bug in it. Some how some collision nodes are not being destroyed when the in game item is.. o well.. its 10:30 on a saturday time to enjoy myself with a movie =).. I will nail it tomorrow =)

Ok today I am finishing the ability to paint or choose the walls where you press. (about 10 minutes left there!). Then I think before I get to the grueling character work I am going to get the stencil buffer shadows in.

A good quick article to explain what that means is here:
http://www.devmaster.net/articles/projectiveshadows/

I think that would be the best choice for the fill rate limited iDevices. Along with the fact that because I am not supporting devices before the 3GS I actually CAN use a stencil buffer. (The older devices do not even have a stencil buffer which has been in use now for decades…)

So off to work on getting some shadow volumes up and running =)

With this post I hit 533 posts on this blog .. wow =)..

Have a GREAT Saturday!

More tonight =)

Heading out for some top golf in Big D in a few minutes.. then work tonight!.
Tonight I need to finish the wall construction where you pick the wall type and place it. It is all there I just need to connect a few wires. =).. Then after that I will be full capable of level creation! =)…. I will then have to look at serialization of the levels later. It should be VERY straight forward. This is due to my design EVERYTHING is on the scene graph and is serialized off of a text file system I wrote. Both into and out of existence =)… good stuff.. so I should be able to just take a snapshot of the entire simulation and whaala!.. saved level -=)…

First I want to finish the walls and level creation and then move on to the character systems finally! =).. moving FAST.. and this engine is AWESOME!. I am so very very happy with it.. next game could be possibly made in a month or two!.. and not just any fart button or bubble pop game but a decent length game as it will just be content creation really! =)…

Happy Friday all =).. Off to swing a golf club!

Cube Mapping In…

Just had to add all the texturing crap in.. I had forgot to get that done early. All in now.. Maybe later today I can get time to get a shot of the new slime using the cube map for a fake reflection =).. more later =)

Update: I shot a video of the water.. I like it there. I think I will leave it at that for now.. nothing like 15 minutes in shader-land to make something awesome =P…

Made two short videos…fast shader. I need speed for what I am aiming for ;)…


Let me know what yall think =)…

Before I remove the straight sides to the water barriers I took a shot of the reflecting pool =)…

And now the rough border =)

Shader fun!

I love shaders.. I missed them so much while making M.E. .. FREEDOM!!!. Tonight I will be working on the water shader. I also will have to implement cube maps for the reflection look ups I need to do in the shader =/.. that will put the brakes on for a few hours.

For now here is the acid water with the first pass in (just the specular from the light)

More later =)

O and I tell ya… it seems graphical quality is the only selling point on indie titles these days for the IOS.. =P.. just an observation….;)

Steel door in ;) Void Door on the way… then the one last item..

Bridge in… Now I have to figure out how I want to do the water =)… Water of course is radioactive slim from the initial confrontation with the invaders =)…

Void Door In:

Steel door in 😉 Void Door on the way… then the one last item..the bridge.. After those are complete I will finally be on to characters!.. =).. Lots of loose ends out there. I still need to get the shaders and render targets set up for HDR lighting, figure out what kinds of shadows I want to do. Long way to go but a long way has already been traveled =)

Steel Door!: (Just noticed I forgot to separate the normals.. so o well.. will look different after I do that =P )

Rock,Steel, Void walls done…

Bed time update!
Wiki updated:
http://ryanmitchellgames.wikispaces.com/Game+Objects+Walls

Update Void Wall In Walls Done!

Better in motion:

Update Steel in:

update:
Stonewall in:

No art final… 😉 getting there 2 walls left 2 doors left 1 bridge then character time =-)

Update:

Owned spaces now in also.. this is what it looks like when you own an area =). You cannot place, build, or use abilities anywhere you do not control or own.

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Again no art is final.. but here is a video of the hardened walls you will not be able to dig through =O =)

Working Saturday a bit

Update: All tanks in 😉

wiki updated:
http://ryanmitchellgames.wikispaces.com/Game+Objects+NecroTanks

Tank 1:

Tank 2:

Tank 3:

Tank 4:

Tank 5:

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Got the tank wrangled in.. here is the level 5 (again no art is done until the game ships =) )

You can also see the debug menu there.. so easy to work in this content pipeline. I expect to get the last tanks in this weekend. Then I will need to create the bridges, AI Husk, doors, and walls. After those are complete I will be on the big daddy task of the new character exporter. Good stuff. With this new engine and pipeline. I will be able to really pump some games out only limited by the content creation -=)

Building levels soon!

I have all the menus in.. the systems and tools I have now really make the fastest content pipeline I have ever seen in my 14 years of game making professionally and in the App store. =)..

I need to finish the tank, the AI husk pieces, and the walls.. then I will be making levels!.. The last big step to a playable game will be the Character animation and the AI (easy one in this game compared to ME or Necro… )… !

GOOD STUFF.. Back to the day job =)

Tonight I need to get in the visibility culling node and tilt the camera up to the level I need to have it at to match Dungeon keepers camera =)