Work Week

I had a hunting trip the last few days and that should be the last of my off duty time for ME 2 for a while. I went to New York for my main job for 3 days. Caught the flu then had a hunting trip I would not dare miss. Got one spike I would post the pictures but the skinning pics might gross some out =)… Good cheap food I guess… if you take out the weapons / lease / etc lol… good family time none the less. I will post more tomorrow when I get work time. Unpacking now.

Have a great rest of the weekend all!

Finally back to me2

I had a business trip for my main job the past 4 days in nyc sooo not to much got done however I am back at it ;)..I will post as I go 😉

Time to start working on the enemies!

Running around the non polished level 1 now!.. I will add much more before launch but you never want to go to far one direction in a new engine. This way if you find out you simply cannot do something you do not loose a ton of time. So now it is time to start with Unity and their Nav mesh systems. Definitely not my first rodeo there. I favor nav meshes of A* AI any day of the week.

Excited that Mission Europa 1 has finally been approved. Necromancer rising is still in review.

Here I am running around level 1 just outside the pit or shaft =)

ME 1.0 is back on the market! Just approved

Let me know if there are any problems!

Level zero coming along! =)

Last items on the ice shader

Update:

A little more tweaking and colored verticies. Somethings up with my jpg converter its coming out to blue here as opposed to in engione

Update:

A boon for the ice shader… See how the hill fades automatically to the snow at the base! ..That saves me texturing and painting all objects to fade them =)

update:

Well we needed a better looking ice so I altered it while making the level =-)

All done for now.. Now to create the level =)…

Here are some in editor shots of the shader… the more vertical the normal (worldspace) the more snow.. the less more ice.

I had to get down to the most low level area of the shader (just above assembly). However, I now know the connections to Unity and CG shader language pretty fluently. It is really about knowing the fundamentals of how games work, Vector Math, Matrix Math, The concepts of lighting etc. Then you just have to find the knobs and switches. Things do not change much they just get easier to debug and access at higher levels. The biggest change has been the programmable pipeline for vertex and fragment shaders. However, this change just moved what you were doing on the cpu to the gpu… Again you just had to learn how the knobs and buttons turned and were pushed ;)…

I ll post when I finally finish the shader. Then I will finish the level with the pieces and not the Unity terrain system.

Have to add specular as last step

ICE SHADER DONE =)…Just playing with sliders there… Back to making the level! =)… I am not going to use Unity and its terrain engine it just looks to generic =).. More later!

Well I was hoping unities default surface shader items would cover a good spec map but I had to implement my own since I am blending textures. A little messed up right now but I should have it soon =) as seen above something not right with the specular

Still looking at specular…

Not sure I like this result but still looking… it does look like time hardened ice and snow… Thats the look I want…. probably leaving it there for now.

Shader fun

Here is my work into the blending shader for the ice and snow. This is before I use a normal map alpha channel to create a more noisy natural blend I ll post the final in a bit..

With normal map alpha helping transition…I might just make it automatic with up facing vector accumulating snow.. I think I will try that first then I would not have to paint anything =)

SWEET!

Now I have a shader that AUTOMATICALLY adds snow to up facing surfaces:

As seen below:

When rotated the snow now is on top the model… NO MORE PAINTING SURFACES FOR ICE FOR ME =)

One last thing I have to add is specualr which will be stored in the main textures alpha channel =)

Today! Camera Effects THEN Enemies!

Update: I had to modify someone else code for the alpha before I decided I would just write a shader that uses the color channel to fade between two textures/normal maps (I think). The problem I need to solve is large chunks of ice with snow on them. I think the best way is a collapsible dual texture situation with vertex color choosing the texture. This way when they are automatically batch collapsed I will not have a transparency sorting issue. Any-who back to shaders! Again still building the foundation of the game once done it will be ALL content =)….

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/vertex-rgba-blender-2-5x.254038/

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Update: I will be jumping back into CG shaders again. Sadly I have been programming in opengl and not using the native language for unity. Same stuff different syntax. I bet in an hour or so I will be up to speed. I need to do this because for some ODD reason Unity does not have a default vertex alpha blended texture. Which is needed badly to transition models to each other with a nice smooth fade and not a hard edge. Anywho off to shader land later.

Update: Actually I think I am going to replace the terrain with models now. I just do not like the look of the terrain along with the extreme number of polygons it uses to represent a decent looking terrain. =)

Here is the camera effects… No telling if the IOS will support these effects but we will find out when I start porting to IOS.

As always click for larger!

I will post some shots later of the new bloom / camera effects to increase the visual appeal of the game. Then I will start on the Enemy builder. After that the enemy AI… Then weapons and firing on both sides!… Getting there! After that I will start the room builder. I expect to have a base and level 1 working in a few weeks at this rate!..

More in a bit!

Just Played an hour of Mission Europa on my iPad Retina for testing

I forgot what a damn good game it was…. I hope more people give it a shot.. its in for testing now and tomorrow on to Mission Europa II and I have to do ME1 justice…. quite a task…. Man that was awesome reliving it…

Onward and upward!

Necro tested and in for apple…..we shall see

Mision europa I had to update my ipad retina to test it still waiting on update….

Looks like Necro Broke on 8.0 also

Update: Found part of it,,, It seems some items changed in the window creation… this could be good. As it might only take some tweaks! Necro should be done today… maybe ME1.0

Necro is fixed and will be submitted tonight…. Mission Europa 1 will be next

It seems there were changes in the view controllers / uiviews / ios code. I was able to adjust to the new standards again and we have two fixed games to submit tonight.

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Sooooo first to get them back again… and again…. at least necro shows some promise.. I see the rendering in a small window in the bottom left of the screen… nothing in ME yet.. So I will start with fixing nero and bring those fixes over to M.E. I think it is in the windows and NIB setup if it is rendering on necro… but it will take quite a bit of time to figure these out I suspect…

More later and until they are working and submitted (unless I give up and pull them) M.E. 2 will be waiting.. ;/

Looking at a break for a M.E. 1 patch

Update no progress so far on ME beyond finding the framebuffers and render buffers seem to be an area of focus.

I will keep working on it while ME2 waits =/… It is so hard to keep that level of game up to the constantly changing IOS systems. I blew 4 hours tonight with very little progress. So hopefully tomorrow I can find a bread crumb leading me somewhere. Opengl is very hard to debug when it says at some point something broke.. not sure where but it does not work in these 100,000 lines of code =/….. So ready to be under unity alone where they deal with this side of things.

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I am investigating ios 8 and what it has done to ME1.

It seems something has changed.

The render buffer in ME1 is not being created properly..Still digging not easy =/

Wow unity is a amazingly designed engine.

Very well structured I got from no muzzle flash to an animated muzzle flash added from my database to gun in 45 minutes.

In the mods that make items there is a use effect. The effect has charge hold and fire. Some have just fire like this gun. The game object is loaded on weapon model creation and then added to the local position stored in the mod database. So each mod (3 per item) can have its own use effect. This could make for some seriously awesome weapons and effects!.. So when the trigger is pulled and the weapon is active the muzzle script will play and fire bullets also!.. great stuff!

A side note is the prefab scripts point to the inventory manager for ammo and the player for location information. (direction)

More later!

How about DEM apples!

Update here is a shot in editor of the constructed arm and weapon =)… and a shot of the new position for it in game

Getting there!…Now to get the right animation in there… get the left hand holding the gun… Then get the gun shooting!!! Not bad 3.25 weeks into this!… Man this is going to be good =)

GIG EM AGGIES BEAT THE HELL OUTTA MIZZOU

More later rocking and rolling on a night off and no partying tonight =)…

That may look easy but that is a gun constructed out of 3 separate looted pieces and an arm constructed out of 2 a hand and arm!  All working off a database of mods or pieces.. Each piece has a quality setting and stats that add to the end stats. You will loot a stock or barrel or main gun piece and be able to combine them ONCE… then you may use,sell, or deconstruct to a random piece of equal or lesser value and sometimes very rarely a much better item =)…. SWEET!

Working on hands

This is single wield Rifle walk. There is dual wield just like ME 1.. I have to make animations for 1. Swords/Axes/Maces 2. Pistols 3. Rifles 4. Ability use.

I will post more of last nights work when I get a chance. I hope to have weapons in hands soon. I am just going to get the rifle working first to get the work through right. Then get it shooting. After that it is time to create the first enemies and test that. More later! I do plan on getting some good work time this weekend hopefully. I get the most done then with all the time off work.

Today I plan on having arms working in fps mode.

Update: almost had a near catastrophe with my cvs system and unit. Not very friendly with each other I will be moving to subversion soon. Tonight I got some work done and will post it tomorrow then it was movie time with the family….. Not exactly a family movie but we watched lets be cops and it was freaking hilarious…. Albeit not for the family ;/… Funny non the less. Have a great night all onward and upward tomorrow 😉

Update:

Here is a pick of where I am in the very touchy process of creating an avatar system in code and from pieces…The right hand is working and animating.. now weapons… then clean up and integration into the inventory system. Boy this is moving fast!

More Later:

Update: I wanted to update with a few other observations. After creating a Skinned mesh renderer from pieces I found many items out.I use a Main avatar and swap its mesh with one made from the pieces. Some are obvious and some problems are not. Obvious they must all use the same skeleton setup with the same names so you can index them after construction. However, a big one I learned is do not rotate the base before a render as somewhere in there if you do it will bind to the wrong pose on the skeleton. Thus all the verts go crazy. I export a base model with skin so it has a SMR (skinned mesh renderer) and the bones. I then copy the bones over from the base skeleton leaving the mesh. Then I copy the materials from the first piece as they all are the same. I then replace the mesh with a texture made from the textures of which each item has an assigned spot in the atlas. Whoops back to work more later…. sorry typing at the day job.

I ran into a heck of an issue with the blender exporter. It just stopped working exporting selected objects… so now I have to delete the whole scene besides what I want.. export… then undo… quite annoying. After I get the hands in game I will then get a weapon in the hands… After that I need to figure out how unity handles firing items etc. Then we shall have a working FPS game that only needs enemies!!! Not bad for 3 weeks of after hours work! Unity so far is still amazing.. The only knocks I have so far are some blender to unity items. (Which is really the autodesk exporter) I also wish the Mechanim system was actually done so you can construct it all via code. No worries in comes the legacy system =). All in all the legacy system maybe better anyway I do not want to setup avatars for all the different bone setups anyway.

More later =)

Got the main character pretty low poly..

Update: seen better here where the arm is attached to the character controller sky boxcam and main cam. (bending over and looking down)

Update : Might not look like much but that is a hand assembled to a arm inside an avatar animation system that has very little scripting docs… Woot!… one step farther… the steps are coming much faster the rolling my own by about 10x to 100x  =)

Tech data: I have a full set of limbs in blender I have match verticies at every joint to a template all joints must adhere to. Then I have a base skeleton with the full body for animations. At load I ditch the mesh and add in the meshes as are equipped. I load the skinned mesh renderer of both. Set the shared mesh verts ,norms, etc DO NOT FORGET BONE WEIGHTS to the new mesh ditching the old. But be sure all exported items have the same up and forward settings from the exporter. That got me a second my main had a different setting when I exported it as blender does not save its settings (lovely 30 minutes there)… any who there are some bits I skipped. I have a function that loads and combines the parts in a mesh with the corrected bone weights and indices BEFORE i do the simple copy over. now to more testing!

Pushing as low as I can go on polys. The armors should be lower as they are more mechanical. But here you can see the polys. I am hitting a slow patch figuring out the legacy system for building a character from code as I generate the characters from many pieces. One guy that makes many parts like (5x5x5) x (5x5x5)  x(5x5x5) x(5x5x5) x(5x5x5) x(5x5x5) x(5x5x5) x(5x5x5) x (5x5x5) x (5x5x5) = 95,367,400,000,000 combinations =) ( and that is just equipped items not the weapons and 8 different qualities)… Each item has 3 parts from armor to weapons. Not to mention the spells =)… The power of math and smart construction. Each weapon has three parts interchangeable with the class. Each armor piece has 3 parts possibly.

Anywho back to work…

Now for Nostalgia =)

Original mission europa game trailer:

Action RPG Game of the year from touch-gen beating epic!…

Trying to work out the generation of an avatar via script lots of wrong paths that are not allowed acces in code.. so this could take some hours! =) When I figure it out I will share =)

Found out something about unity…

Update:

It is not that bad but the fancy new Mechanim system for advanced animations does not work well with C# or any code. Hwoever! I can use the legacy system and it should have all the items I need as far as I can tell as of a few minutes research. Pretty awesome. So first I need to research the system and apply it to the test guy you see in idle in front below and then get it to work on a constructed mesh I already have working…Moving SOOOOOO fast! I cannot wait until I have all the basic systems in and working in unison to get to making a GREAT game happen! =)…More later.

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Time to get the arms on the avatar and get the weapons in his hands.. I am not sure how difficult this will be but we shall see. So far NOTHING has been difficult or slow in unity. I am still on my free trial and almost have a fully playable FPS with many advanced systems running. Months of work in after hour work over 3 weeks… CRAZY and that includes the assets I have created. I love Unity so far. Let us keep our fingers crossed the love continues =)..

More later and hopefully some arms holding weapons!