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Urban Empires, A Multiplayer Gangster Game - www.urbanempires.com | www.urban-empires.com
Published by Strategy First
Release date - TBA
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| Thursday, November 19, 2009 |
 Inverse Kinematics + Mechs + MOAR WIN |
Posted - 11/19/2009 11:55:47 AM | HAI. I was going to hold off on this update - but I think this is so cool I have to show you right now :-o
I've been working on Inverse Kinematics, a fully-blown dynamic weather system [ rain, t-storms, clear, cloudy, overcast - more on that next update! ], I'm also finalizing the Beach Assault map...and a million other things from Squad AI programming to coding a beach shore rendering system. So much work...luckily I enjoy it more than anything 
Inverse Kinematics / Physics based Mech Walking
A while ago I had a Mech model created for Warbots, only problem was the animation looked kinda "not cool" on uneven terrain. It looked so bad, it was reason enough to not include the walking mech in the game. btw...I wish I had more energy right now to type this - I've been coding for about 10-15 hours a day ... every day. I've spent the last 20-30 hours working on this system and I finalllly got it working - because I can't give up until a problem is solved hehe.
Basically instead of running through a pre-canned animation for the mech, I rigged up a new skeleton and coded a real-time animation system that would always align the Mech's feet in a proper position regardless of it's orientation [ within reason obviously ].
I'm working on an improved walking engine, and logic, so the robot knows where to set his feet optimally, when to change foot positions, also different run periods and speeds, and of course I want him to loose his balance when he gets hit with a rocket xD...that has to wait until tomorrow.
This stuff is all a work in progress...a day of work at this point, and it's already looking reaaaaally good in motion!
I'll let the debug/progress screenshots do the talking -
Note: self shadowing, and shadow casting is disabled on the mech, it'll look much better when I re-enable it, I had to code a special type of "robot object" to make all this work....*rambles on*





Here is a screenshot that details the re-rigging process I went through ... comparison between the 'static' animation skeleton and my dynamic physics based skeleton...

Jus' me 'n' my robot.
I need to add ninjas into this game...somehow...ninjas....

Beach shore blending effect...
So many games have rough transitions between beach and water. I coded up this system to sort of smooth it out. The foam is animated, etc. It's still a work in progress.


Progress on the Beach Assault map
I made major adjustments to the map. I made it so there is shadowing on all objects, the imposter view distance has been pushed out, I added rocks, I tweaked so many things. Mostly I added craters and more variation on the beach/sand area.




All the vehicles in the game...
Let me show you my polygons...

Also, since this wasn't posted directly in my previous entry, here is the ditty on AI from last time -
Quick Aside on AI: flocking evasion, targeting, objective/order evaluation
I've made some improvements in the last day or two on the human/squad artificial intelligence, as well as the robot's AI.
Here is some incomplete code/early data structure design, and some images of how it's looking ... no comments on the style please lol...I don't know why I'm even pasting this, I just feel like including some code in an update for once xD
#ifndef WO_ARTIFICIALINTELLIGENCE_H
#define WO_ARTIFICIALINTELLIGENCE_H
#define MAX_AI_ROBOTS_PER_WORLD MAX_ROBOTS_PER_WORLD
#define MAX_ORDERS_PER_ROBOT 5
enum RobotOrderType
{
ROBOT_ORDER_STOP_ALL,
ROBOT_ORDER_IDLE,
ROBOT_ORDER_MOVE,
ROBOT_ORDER_ATTACK,
ROBOT_ORDER_DEFEND,
ROBOT_ORDER_PATROL,
ROBOT_ORDER_WAIT_DELAY
};
enum RobotStatusType
{
ROBOT_STATUS_NONE,
ROBOT_ORDER_ORDER
};
enum SimulatedPlayerType
{
PLAYER_TYPE_DEFENSIVE,
PLAYER_TYPE_OBJECTIVES,
PLAYER_TYPE_KILLS,
PLAYER_TYPE_AVERAGE
};
struct RobotOrder
{
RobotOrderType m_OrderType;
D3DXVECTOR3 m_Position;
char m_Priority;
char m_EnemySquadTarget;
char m_EnemyRobotTarget;
double m_TimeDuration;
};
struct SimulatedPlayer
{
bool m_IsSpawned;
int m_GlobalIndex;
SimulatedPlayerType m_PlayerType;
RobotOrder m_OrderStack;
float m_SkillLevel;
float m_fMovementSpeed;
int m_numNodesToLookAhead;
D3DXQUATERNION m_LastOrientationQuat;
D3DXMATRIX m_Orientation;
D3DXVECTOR3 m_TerrainNormal;
RobotStatusType m_RobotStatus;
};
#define NUM_SOLDIERS_PER_SQUAD 16
#define MAX_ORDERS_PER_SQUAD 5
#define MAX_SQUADS_PER_WORLD 1+(MAX_HUMANS_PER_WORLD/NUM_SOLDIERS_PER_SQUAD)
enum SquadOrderType
{
SQUAD_ORDER_STOP_ALL,
SQUAD_ORDER_IDLE,
SQUAD_ORDER_MOVE,
SQUAD_ORDER_ATTACK,
SQUAD_ORDER_DEFEND,
SQUAD_ORDER_PATROL,
SQUAD_ORDER_WAIT_DELAY
};
enum SquadStatusType
{
SQUAD_STATUS_NONE,
SQUAD_ORDER_ORDER
};
struct SquadOrder
{
SquadOrderType m_OrderType;
D3DXVECTOR3 m_Position;
char m_Priority;
char m_EnemySquadTarget;
char m_EnemyRobotTarget;
double m_TimeDuration;
};
struct Squad
{
SquadOrder m_OrderStack[MAX_ORDERS_PER_SQUAD];
char m_CurrentOrder;
int m_SoldierIndices[NUM_SOLDIERS_PER_SQUAD];
char m_Team;
SquadStatusType m_Status;
};
#endif
Red lines are 'threat' vectors, much more on this later...blue represents squad based objectives, and green lines indicate the soldiers resolved movement vector.
*EDIT - Note how flat the beach looks here, compared the the above screenshots.



Some showing Vehicle/Robot order completion.

- Dan
| |
| Tuesday, November 10, 2009 |
 A taste of things to come in Warbots BETA 2.0... |
Posted - 11/10/2009 3:44:13 AM | Edited Nov.11.2009 - Added a quick aside on Artificial Intelligence: flocking, evasion, targeting, objective/order evaluation, etc. A much bigger AI update will be posted soon...just click the 'Comments' link at the end of the post...then scroll down view early code and debug screenshots. Now on with the regularly scheduled journal update....
Hey guys, I guess I'm reverting to my old ways of one journal update a month :-o I've got a lot of stuff to show & tell lol. If you're on some kind of metered internet access you might want to bail out right about now. [ btw. almost @ 700,000 journal views, thanks a lot guys! ]
Overview
It has been about 3 months since the release of Warbots BETA 1.0 - I'm putting the finishing touches on the Beach Assault map [ I guess this is update part 2 ], and all the new features that will be included in the next public BETA release. I wanted to have it done by the end of last month, so I'm a little behind - but still very happy with how things are progressing.
Here is the list of things I've been working on since the last journal update
- Human Squad AI logic
- Procedural GPU fire rendering
- Robot AI logic
- Attacking robots [blue team ] spawn on landing craft / defensive spawn on respawn pads [ red team ].
- Updated water effect and added 3D 'shore' sea-foam effect to blend water/terrain.
- 'Flipped a switch' and got instantly improved terrain, 4-5 layers with full color/normal/spec including detail normal-mapping. More on this later in the post.
- Dense swaying/animated instanced grass.
- Team switching functionality
- Red spawn points on beach
- Red defense turrets on top of defensive pillboxes
- Human squad rank system
- True per-pixel motion blur
- Optimization of rendering and game logic, yielding net 20-40% FPS increase.
- 1000s of tiny fixes / changes...
I've got most of the low-hanging fruit in the optimization area, and fixed 100s of bugs that were in the previous BETA release already. I've got a full list but I'll spare you.
I will have some HD videos soon + 1920x1080 4xFSAA screenshots - followed by the release of public BETA v2.0 in the coming weeks, so stay tuned!
Now on to the screenshots / individual items I've been slaving over ;-)
Dense animated grass / spawns,turrets,installations / new terrain / etc.
I've made a lot of visual improvements to everything, here is a splattering of screenshots some of the new stuff -
All this stuff comes at a 20-40% net speed increase since I did a lot of optimizations on the game engine....








Detailed terrain rendering/shading ... and how I suck at life.
So this is probably one of the most embarrassing moments of my gamedev life over the last 10 years...apparently as far back as the first BETA release of Warbots all complex terrain shading has been DISABLED, the calculations were being done but not factored into the final output color in the terrain pixel-shader correctly. The ambient occlusion, nDotL self shadowing, and the other minor/ambient terrain elements were being included correctly, just not the normal/specular lighting components ;-o
So one extra multiplication unlocked a world of terrain seksyness...with NO performance decrease since I was already doing the calculations just not outputting them correctly. Ugh. Not my finest hour, but still I'll take it!
Incidentally I was playing around with the recently released Unreal3 Dev Kit[UDK] on one machine/monitor and comparing their terrain to mine when I realized something was wrong with my rendering. I notice they use about 4-5 layers on the terrain in Unreal3, and no specular maps for each layer. I on the other hand use colored specular maps per-layer[ in addition to normal/color maps per layer ], and include an extra layer than they do if my eye is correct. I also include detail normal mapping [ extra tiling / sampling of the per layer normal map ].
The improvements are visible in all the above screenshots, but I'll include a close-up of a rocky/muddy ditch....
For reference the object in the very left side of the screen is a tree trunk base...so there is a lot of detail here ;-) I'll be posting more screenshots of the 'new' terrain as the BETA #2 release nears.

Team selection / Construction Cave finalized
I finalized the robot construction menu ...

True per-pixel motion blur
Based off the GPUGEMS3 article...I actually 'invented' it but then saw the method has already been published. Eh...it works pretty well, but I doubt I'll enable it by default

Human AI Logic / Ranks / Squad AI / etc.
I've made some great advances in terms of squad based AI, and pathfinding...the soldiers will be used to capture command points so their AI is very important. The player can exit their Warbot to capture command points / bunkers - but it's easier to let the AI soldiers do it. There can be up to 1000 soldiers/humans per map.
Since it's kind of hard to show AI via screenshots - I've got some screens of the soldiers [lit/un-textured]. I'm starting to integrate the new animations, they are all in the game I'm just building the soldier state machine to support all types of animations and good stuff.



Misc. screenshots AND INDSIDAR INFOMATION :-o
A new game I'm working on, called 'Reference Texture' :-p Actually this is output of a mode in my game engine where I'll only load a 16x16 texture in the place of all regular textures. This keeps total app memory usage < 256MB. I can see this being helpful to test on low end machines.
Plus I think it looks pretty trippy :-o

Night rendering...artillery coming in, with the spotlights in the background...

Sunset ... more screenshots of the sunsets / beach / etc coming soon

Pause of some action...

First person mode, I ordered the robot to drive through the crowd ;-) This screenshot has the OLD terrain rendering method, for comparison.
Vehicle pwnage...

Until next time. And as usual I could use any feedback on this stuff...
- Dan
| |
| Saturday, October 17, 2009 |
 Screen Space Global Illumination |
Posted - 10/17/2009 2:27:11 AM | I was browsing the forums and saw this thread about screen space global illumination (SSGI), it was written by ArKano22 ... he put it out there for anybody to implement/use so I spent a few minutes dropping it into my game.
I think it looks pretty good, it could use a blur pass maybe. Currently I don't think it's a good enough tradeoff for what it might potentially add to the graphics [ at this point ], so I'll probably only be including it in my enigne as some hidden away togglable feature. And I'll keep tweaking / playing around with it to see how good I can get it looking.
My post copied from the thread -
Quote:
Here are some screenshots of your "Gauss SSGI" dropped into my game [ this map/level is for training so it's pretty simple ] ...I'm impressed with the results, especially considering it doesn't use the normal from the surface, there is some halo effects, etc. But overall, I think it looks good.
I will keep tweaking it, and report back, these screens are just a few mins of work dropping it into my pipeline to see how it'd look. This obviously isn't the best example of the color bleeding since it's a pretty dull colored terrain scene...
Ignore framerates I have many things going on the background, as well as in-game, it has full Havok physics, and is doing every aspect of the game [ I just only output the SSGI element to the screen, I can reuse the depth value I generate for my DOF effect ] . It runs at 60+ 800x600 when I disable the color bleeding sampling [ since its hardly visible it seems on this dull colored terrain scene ].
Screens w/color bleeding enabled



Here is a screen w/color bleeding disabled ( so this would just be SSAO, ambient occlusion ) -

Raw output of the depth, aka :
return float4(readDepth(vScreenPosition).xxx,1.0);

|
Obviously this is what everybody is trying to achieve, the SSAO from Crysis -

I'm pretty happy with ArKano22's implementation, the glsl / hlsl code is posted the in the thread I linked to at the beginning of the entry. Why not give it a try and post your findings there as well :-D
- Dan
| |
 Warbots Online - Beach Assault Map (Part 1) |
Posted - 10/12/2009 9:56:59 PM | Hey guys...omg two updates in a 4 day timespan. I'm trying to change my evil ways of one dev-journal update a month ;-)
I've been putting time into the most complex gameplay mode (and map) in the game, the "Beach Assault". One team is sent in on landing crafts (LCVPs) with a goal of destroying the enemy artillery batteries and securing a beach head. Once all four artillery batteries/bunkers are captured then the attacking team wins. If they can't make it before the timer runs out then the defending team wins. There are 1000s of CPU soldiers, and 64 human players per-online server. Players control their 'warbots', but they can get out of their vehicle at anytime and play on foot in a first person shooting mode.
I'll detail the specifics of the spawning system and other details on the next part - I expect this should be a 2-3 part series of journal updates over the next couple of days, given the amount of work still required until the map/gameplay mode is finished.
Here are some screenshots of the work I've done in the last few days...if you want to see screens of the first person shooting mode, or read about the other stuff I've recently done just scroll down to the previous entry. The biggest thing I've done was to add an extra layer to the map, so now instead of it being only brown, there is grass away from the beach, that combined with some new tree artwork really improved the quality of the map IMO.
There are lot of layers - obscacles [ hedgehogs, barbed wire ], grass, trees, bushes. Rocks still need to be added into this map. Still I'm very happy with the results.

Here is a view from one of the artillery installations that have to be captured by the attacking team.

This screenshot shows an arial view of the map...you can see there are 32 landing crafts each holding 1 player's vehicle, and 16 CPU controlled soldiers. 
A view from closer down right near the seawall where the grass/sand meet.

Behind the artillery looking towards the beach.

A small infantry / soldier battle taking place on the beach, I've got two obstacle types in the game, the headhogs [ the X cross tank trap things ], and also some barbed wire setup.
This screenshot also shows how well the dynamic imposter system works on the humans in the game. I've probably coded 3-4 dynamic imposter sysetms over the years, none have been this stable. I based my last system, and this current one off this article on gamasutra [Dynamic 2D Imposters ].
In the screenshot there are only actually 4-5 humans who are 3D geometry, the rest are faked with dynamic screenspace quads. This is a truely dynamic imposter system. It's setting the viewport for each soldier in the world and rendering a dynamic version of each soldier every n frames or whenever the view angle to that soldier changes past some delta.

To increase the realism of some aspects of the scenes [ in particlar interiors of buildings / capture points ] I've been playing around with some SSAO:
LOL, just kidding this isn't ssao, just regular offline ambient occlusion on the artillery model xD It works to great effect on the sandbags...


And finally here is a side-by-side before 'n' after of a tree model. [ The texture used is the same ] ...

Lots more work to be done...heres a small list of the things I'll be adding to this map in the next few days ...
Quote:
- 3D layer of dynamic sea-foam to merge water/terrain better
- Finish splashes / wake on the water from the landing crafts
- Model interior of the capture point / artillery bunker
- Model the interior of the pillboxes so people can shoot out of them
- Search lights by the artillery installments
- Work on the static beach artillery firing system
- Add rocks to the terrain
|
'til next time [ part deux :-o ]...
- Dan
| |
 Massive Warbots Online Update! |
Posted - 10/9/2009 7:26:18 AM | Hey guys,
As usual I've been working insane hours on this game. There are so many new things I've added into the game I'll let the screenshots do the talking [with a brief description below ]. If anyone has questions I'd be glad to answer them...
Note: I just took this screenshot a few minutes ago, some of the others are a few days to a week old

GPU based procedural cloud rendering system
I've repleaced my static scrolling skybox with a fully dynamic / procedural cloud rendering system. You can adjust about 15 aspects of the cloud system to achieve any apperence in real-time [ video coming soon ]. You can get all kinds of really cool looking effects ... time lapse, thunder storms, clear skies, dramatic sunsets, etc. The lighting on the clouds are not technically mathmatically correct, I just do some hacks in the pixel shader based on the 'height' of the noise at the point. There were a lot of cool threads I read while working on this, including the infamous 'sky rendering' thread.



Beach Asssault map progress
I've been working on the most complex of the new map / gameplay modes...adding artillary to the defending team, adding the command points, working on the landing craft logic and animation system...there are a million details to still work out...but it is going to be GLORIOUS :-o




First person / remote robot command
I've redone the hand models and touched up the weapon model for when you jump out of your vehicle.
I've also recorded voices so your robot will communicate with you, it's pretty sweet :-D
Videos soon.... 
New set of human animations & rendering with true hardware instancing
I replaced my shader based instancing with true HW instancing. I also implemented a new animation system I coded...as well as integrating a whole new set of animations. There were only 4 animations before, now there is a brand new set of 14 animations for the human models. This is all in addition to the robust dynamic imposter rendering system I added in the last journal update.


Heat Blur / Screenspace distortion effect
This effect is applied on fire, muzzle flashes, engine exhausts, explosions, and a ton of other places throughout the game.
This is what the scrolling screenspace texture looks like, red offsets on X, green offsets on Y. I scroll two in oppositite directions in the post-process shader and average them. The strength of the blur is modulated by various mask textures that are rendered to one of the channels in my misc texture [ depth of field, god rays, etc ]

Here is a example of the effect unmodulated, it sort of looks like an underwater effect.

Radial Motion Blur Post-Process
Implementation of a standard radial motion blur post processing effect. I'm thinking of modulating it based on the distance from the viewer.

Uber-Buggy / UberBot
A newly skinned version of this vehicle ... created by gamedev's own DogmaDZ
Unfortunatly I don't have the money to get the hovercraft, tank, or 6 wheeled buggy upgraded/retextured just yet ;-/


A million other things
So many other things from night sights on the weapon, to early work on squad based AI...there are so many things I've been working on. I'm gonna throw a few misc. screenshots here at the end of the post...stay tuned!!
- Dan



| |
| Monday, September 21, 2009 |
 First person mode, new gameplay, and much more... |
Posted - 9/21/2009 11:21:31 AM | Hey guys, I'm very happy with some of the stuff I've come up with in the last week or so. As usual I'd appreciate any feedback / etc.
I've added the option for players to exit their warbots and play the game on foot with a machine gun...the catch is that the players have a communication device that they can use to give remote orders back to their vehicle. Scenario 1) A group of about 50 baddies is standing in your way, you can now jump out of your vehicle, start putting bullets into the crowd and order your robot to smash through them & surround them at the same time. Ragdoll physics, and destruction ensue. It's really awesome to see, I'm itching to put some videos of this out there :-D :-D
Until then - you'll have to survive on gratuitous amounts of barely compressed un-thumbnailed resized 1680x1050 screenshots 8-) Another thing I'm very proud of is achiving 40-70 FPS in my game @ the highest settings. You can barely see the FPS readings in the bottom left of each screenshot.

If you have a 56k connection still...you might want to close the webpage now...
Okey for the rest of you who are still here .. this is a list of the major things I've added into the game since the last journal update -
- First person gameplay / control mode.
- Robust soldier imposter rendering system.
- Replaced the soldier's dorky lasers with machine guns [ weapons go flying out of their hands when people get ragdoll'd ]
- Added 'Proving Grounds' map
- Dense grass rendering
- Fixed physics 'hopping' issues that people were experiencing.
- 'Curved' road rendering, by using a alpha/(min/max) hack.
- Fixed mirrored mini-map...blah blah blah...
- I'll post the huuuge list of things at the bottom of the entry.
The Proving Grounds
This is the level I've created to help test various aspects of the game...from physics, to rendering, to tweaking the weapon recoil on the gun range. This is also the 'Training level' in the game where players can learn the controls without getting pwned.
I modeled it after the U.S government's tank testing facility in Yuma.

The real facility again...

First Person view & gameplay
The players can now dismount from their vehicle and do work seperatly. Some of the orders the players can give their vehicles include - move to location, come pick me up, attack x, defend x, follow me...things like that. *Insert night rider hasselhoff joke here plz*
This is probably one of the coolest things I've ever done lol. I'm really excited about the gameplay potential/etc...especially since there are up to 1000 soldiers per world [ down from 6000 in the last BETA release ], and 64 vehicles/human-players in each multiplayer server.
I will divulge more details, and post many videos in the coming days :-D Then I'll be including this stuff in the next free public BETA release. If you haven't downloaded the last one, get it from the Warbots homepage!
I animated the 1st person view models so he removes his hand from the SMG's foregrip before pulling out the com device.
Without further...on to the good stuff...screenshots of the com device in a few different lighting situations [ it is animated, videos soon ]




*PS I'll be reworking some aspects of the hand/com device models so they look a little better... programmers art :->
Human Imposter System
Yup, just a standard imposter system...really helps improve the frame-rates by rendering distant soldiers as billboards :-D If anybody has any questions about this stuff I'd be glad to answer them.
These images just show the imposter texture overlayed on the scene, and the imposter triangles visualized.



First Person Gun Model Design / Features
This is a screenshot from Milkshape3D showing how I setup the first person gun model.

It is fully animated in the game, and the controls are as tight as any first person game I've played. [ I've been playing Crysis for a hour or two every few days so that's probably what I'm most influenced by lol ].
This is a list of a few of the features I can remember off the top of my head that I've coded into the game for this first person mode to work...
Quote:
-Unique/smooth, programmatically generated gun sway effects for walk/run/crouch
-Recoil
-Muzzle flash
-Delayed rotation when looking around
-Iron sights
-Character controller [ Havok physics ]
-Seperating the head/body to allow correct self shadows in the 1st person view
-Gun rotates towards ground when running
-Crouching / Jumping
-Correct tracer bullet origins
-Shell casings
-New gun sounds for 1st person mode
-Footstep sounds
-Aiming / Breathing
On..
and ...
On
|
Aaaand now for the promised splattering of recent screenshots... :-D
Iron sights...


More screens of the proving grounds test level... [ will be included in the next BETA release ]






A couple screens from the Beach Assault map...


As promised here is the list of items completed since the last PUBLIC beta release...#2 is coming soon!!
Quote:COMPLETED (*in no particular order)
--------------------------------------
- Multiplayer is mostly functional.
- Fixed side-by-side/missing .dll errors causing the game not start on some systems.
- Physics 'hopping' issues fixed [ adjusted handling of the min physics framerate ]
- User's settings saved @ QUIT of game. [ Not on apply of options, to prevent bad settings from being saved ].
- 'Beach Assault' map added.
- New texture LOD/Caching system, reduced memory usage by 50%. [ on LOWEST SETTINGS - main menu now only requires 256MB memory, in-game requires 512MB memory ]
- 'R' key resets the player's vehicle orientation.
- Complete rewrite of water rendering system.
- Vehicle orientation is reset @ respawn.
- 'Siege Escort' map added.
- Nuclear explosion added for finale of Siege escort map.
- Node path generation algorithm [ cave scene, siege machine ].
- Fixed crash in Havok [ now check for degenerate triangles in static scene meshes ]
- Smoke emitters reset @ map change [ no more hovering smoke ].
- Make sun not look like a 'glowing ball'.
- vehicle and weapon selection/construction screen added.
- Fix mini-map mirrored.
- Multiplayer global lobby artwork.
- Added rendering support for 'solid' road types, such as asphault.
- Adjusted specularity and aspects of lighting equation.
- New soldier model created.
- Terrain now casts shadows.
- Siege machine, pillbox, battlement models created.
- Environment objects cast self shadows.
- DirectX Debug Runtimes -> fixed GPU VB stride mismatch, heap corruption, and unsupported mipmap D3D errors [ speed increase ]
- 'Proving Grounds' map added.
- Multiplayer collision detection vehicle->vehicle.
- Added collision detection (projectiles->aircraft).
- Added collision detection (projectiles->buildings).
- Added collision detection (projectiles->respawn bunkers).
- Replaced humans' dorky lasers, with machine guns.
- Created new XACT RPC for human sound effects [ death voice, human gun, etc. ], sound less repetative now, with accurate volume falloff.
- Fixed rockets not colliding/hitting robots.
- Humans drop their weapon when turned into a ragdoll.
|
- Dan
| |
| Friday, September 11, 2009 |
 Huge 'Warbots Online' Update / Lots of new stuff.. |
Posted - 9/11/2009 8:26:33 AM | Hey guys,
I wish I had more time to type up updates...instead they turn into once-a-month-dumps of 100s of hours of work. The sad part is this is going to be a massive update, and it's only part of the work I've done since the last one [ with the first BETA release ]. By the way if you have not downloaded the BETA please doooo it ;-) See the entry from last month for details, or go here http://www.warbotsonline.com/ for the link to HD videos, and the 1st BETA download.
Well where to start - I suppose what I'll do is just type up a description of each major addition to the game and include screenshots... :-D I've also been making a lot of progress in terms of the games multiplayer stuff and fixing all the feedback/reports I've received from people who have tested the BETA. That is progressing well...this is just a sh*t load of work :-o
You guys are my main source of feedback for the project at this stage, so as usual I'd appreciate any comments or feedback on the project...
Warbots Vehicle/Robot Construction
This is where the players will construct their vehicles/robots and then take them out to the battlefield. I was inspired by that one batman movie, tim burton did ;-) [ ok apparently Joel Schumacher directed the movie I was thinking of ] I'll include a reference screenshot of the scene I'm talking about. The scene includes god rays, ~12 dynamic lights, full normal/specular/color mapping, I used my GPU particle system from the nuclear explosion I've been working on to create some smoke, I'm also am running some other effects I can't even think of right now in addition to the standard materials/shaders/HDR pipeline that is used throughout the game.
I will post a large screen-by-screen progression image showing the progress of the cave over the 2-3 days I created it @ the end of this post.




The scene has an automatic camera that moves through the level, but it is controllable through some slider bars. I will post of a video of it soon :-D
Beach Assault gameplay
This is one of the new gameplay modes / maps in the game. All this is still a WIP...one team assaults the beach, the other team defends, etc. More information soon, you can imagine how it plays out though ;-)





Siege Escort gameplay
This is another of the new gameplay modes...it's sort of a push mode - one team tries to get the nuclear device from one side of the map to the other team's base where it detonates in a massive nuclear explosion [twisted].
The large device just crawls through a convinently placed ravine that leads to the enemies base, having people from your team around the machine moves it forward, if the enemies prevent the attack team from getting near the device they slow it's progression.
Either way there is a bigass nuclear explosion at the end of it lol. I wrote a GPU particle system supporting up to 1 million particles, in practice even 65,000 is overkill for a nuclear explosion. I simulate 4-5 main areas of the explosion...the nuke in Crysis has been studied many times by me ;-) I've spend countless hours tweaking the effect and I'm still not happy with how it looks - so no screenshots yet :-]
And yesh - the device is big enough so players can drive under / through it's treads & do battle all around / on it while it's moving xD
I'm just going to show some early stuff, and I'm not even showing the actual map, this map is just a test created for the shadowing system I just wrote today.


New water shader / Full terrain shadowing
I've written a new water shader for the 'Beach Assault' map that's going to be in the game...this required a new water shader. I also set it up so there is full shadowing on all objects now including self shadowing of buildings, and terrain. It's visible in the above screenshots.


New soldier model
This model was created by Tom the same artist who did the pillboxes, trees, siege machine, buildings, and a lot of other work for me :-D
As you can see the model has a very low target triangle count [ < 400 ], this is so I can have 1000s of them on screen using my combination of various forms of instancing.
The ragdolls look a lot better with this new model, I've not really had time to play around this stuff was just put in the game a few hours ago.






More vehicle construction screenshots...
Here is the batcave from the Tim Burton 'Batman Forever' [ edit: Joel Schumacher did it, not Tim Burton :-o ] I really liked the lighting, I was watching the movie and thinking damn that would make a cool vehicle construction area. I also wanted to write some new shaders and effects.




Progression of the vehicle construction cave...
*This shows the progress of the cave model I created, as well as the shaders and effects ;-) About 60 hours spent on this scene, the effects, and the in-game code/etc.

Alrighty, until next time guys! I'm dead tired and want to sleep/relax. I'll have a lot more updates soon, I have more new stuff to show :-)
- Dan
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