Month: May 2015

Redoing level 0

It has to be the best looking area as it is the area you spend your first time and a lot of time in. So I am not to sad Iost it..

I have about 2 hours work time and then the light mapping time to go.. I will post project pics so anyone can watch it progress.. Next to add more lights pointing at the drill site. Making it look like a research dig.

!MissionEuropa2_shot

More later!

Planning can save months!

I am still laying out level0 the base and level1 the first combat level.

Things I want to get done now are place in the animation stuff so I can for example have a corpse run and jump into the hole when you first show up … scary freaky things not just a walk and shoot game..

Then after I get it all put together I want to go through what I have written down on the wiki and  find the best way to mass produce it and in the most efficient and time sensitive way. This will require balance and dropping some items due to the time it will take to produce… =)…Anywho really trucking now! FINALLY!

More later!

Story system going well

So I want to be able to deliver what ever type of mission/story I can think of. So first I want to write out the first coulbe of levels missions. Then I will analyze the components and make sure they will work in the system I have designed. Thats where I am… If you want to follow along here is where I will be working level0-2 most probably is where I will stop…then start building the systems..

SPOILER ALERT AS IT WILL ALSO HAVE THE STORY!…

http://missioneuropa2.com/wiki/index.php?n=Story.Level0

Moving fast!

AI back up and using their weapons on my face now time to get them into the level. =)!!! I think this should be realatively quick. Then I will move on to making the story delivery / level scripter to make random things happen in random tagged locations.

Good stuff!

!MissionEuropa2_57657

!MissionEuropa2_

May not look like much but that box wants to kill me… =).. I have the ai up and running as far as chasing me throughout the level!!! It took about an hour is all!… Sweet!! No to continue forward and have the game place AI in predefined possible placements in the game -)…. THEN it is time to get them back with their weapons.. then combat!.. Starting to finally look like a game yawl….. More later!

Mad some bad ass scripts

I have always said making a game is 70% tools for a coder… those tools can make the game for you and replace thousands of man hours. Let the computer do the work. So now I have a script that looks for head nodes tagged as batch collapse. Then it batch collapses them by material. There are two types of tags. One is light mapped and the other is non light mapped. So I simply select the root node hit the new menu item I made and whallah I have 40 draw calls for a whole level !… VERY FAST!.. Then I save it as a room and set the light map scale number by hand sadly as that is broken in unity currently. That does not take much time however. So now I am organizing the rooms for the new optimization and am FINALLY PAST the batch collapsing issues AND I have a better solution mostly under my control!…..so awesome..

So back to organizing the rooms into batches… This should not take to long and the tools I have now are POWERFUL for speed!

Simple mesh combiner

It is the key…  now the game SCREAMS!!! I have control over the “batches” now. I went from 250 – 600 calls with supposed batching (not working obviously) down to 40-60 a frame… that is going to be awesome!!! So now I have a room proto. This has the level in its little pieces. Then I have a second copy that is the combine room. I save the room to a file and lightmap it. That is the room that is brought into the game…I am adding another segment of code. This will save time by me pressing a button and then the level auto collapsing. The code will look for labeled nodes that it will collapse and then go through and strip out the old meshes and empty nodes.. Good stuff.. I should have that working very soon! =).. and whallah  we are finally there to high performance rooms that can be imported and constructed at run time.

More later!

Batching does not work to the level it needs to.

Sooooo… I am going to write some code that combines the mesh renderers with the same material… Then keeps the collision objects but deletes the mesh renderer from the object after combination UNLESS it has a mesh collision. Then I could select a huge wall for example and tell it to collapse and it will go from 30 or so calls to about 3. Big improvement and I will  need it for the mobile devices… Anywho more later.

Update:

Anywho… Awesome I love the asset store… days saved for 7 bucks

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/8748

Update: Just have to add something that removes all mesh renderes and leaves the collision stuff =).

One room and main start level left

I need to get the last room lowered in light map resolution and the last level also. Then get the room gen making the levels… after that I wire in the top level….Get gameplay tweaked AI tweaked and we have a playable test level…I will distrubute builds via download from a website for Mac and PC for testing and developing the game =)… More later =)

Just plowing forward

I am working with the rooms and the room gen getting the auto gen up and running… so far smooth sailing… I am having to go into a level and lightmap it then scale down and lightmap again until I get down to 1 or two lightmaps.. Sadly there is no way to tell beast to only use X lightmaps … that would be an easy option to have but instead I have to go through the entire process to see if I hit the right number.. Wish I worked for them I could have that done pretty quick… Unwrap at X scale.. then Y scale… then go down to scale to almsot fit… test and then go again…in seconds I could save hours of programmer time…

O well you do give up a lot when using someone elses engine and I do have some thoughts that maybe I should have gone Unreal…. BUT so far so good… After a LONG battle with dynamic content…

More later… I am lightmapping right now = P…