-->
Recent Projects:
Current Project:
Exceptional Journals (in no order): [Eliwood] [Steve Healy] [Ravuya] [Mark the Artist] [Scet] [Ysaneya] [Mayan Obsidian]
My Personal Website
  The greener side of Cyberspawn. | 
Posted - 5/10/2009 10:31:15 PM | Over the course of Cyberspawn's development, I've been slowly trying to create more and more models in order to both improve my proficiency in the 3D arts, as well as fuel the natural demand for content that any game requires. I present: a potted plant.
 
A notable improvement is that I've now figured out how to use 'texture baking', which will go a long way in improving future models. Simply said, texture baking is the technique of applying numerous lighting and material effects to an object within a 3D editor -- Blender, in this case -- and 'baking' those effects onto a texture, which can then be applied to the object in real-time inside of the game. The shot on the left shows the baked model with only ambient occlusion calculated. This effect alone adds a great deal of subtle realism in the lighting.
The other significant feature implemented is a secondary lightmap, termed the 'actor lightmap' for the time being. This lightmap is generated across the non-solid areas of the level, and functions as a way to apply shading to actors that move around the level in and out of the path of lights. The player's weapon overlay also is affected by this, and can be seen (subtly) in the second screenshot.
It's easy to get caught up in small things like these, but I've learned that it goes a really long way in making a game look and feel better in the end. Probably the biggest lesson I've learned in computer graphics (and indeed game development in general) is the huge difference the accumulation of those subtle additions make.
| |
| Holy hitboxes! | |
Posted - 5/7/2009 10:42:11 PM | So, once again I am back doing my co-op term at Sony Creative Software, a subsidiary of Sony way way off in the forgotten Canadian city of Waterloo. Tomorrow will be the last day of my first week, and quite a busy week it has been! The product we are developing is called Media Go, a media management application somewhat comparable to the famed iTunes. It's to be shipped with Sony Ericsson phones world wide in the very near future.
The specifics of my current task are of course NDA'd, but I can at least say that it's an interesting mix of application and UI programming. I'm not really a UI developer at heart, so while it's a bit of a strained relationship between me and my code, I'm managing. Working on the massive codebase they have never fails to motivate me to work on my own game projects. 
And on that note...
Cyberspawn Update
The most recent items have been improving collisions and getting the inventory/item groundwork underway.
Collisions with the world work wonderfully, but collisions with entities was only sort of working. I had to manually define the sizes of the collision bounding boxes within each entity's definition file, and rotating the entities would bork up their bounding boxes. It was only a matter of adding some code into the 3DS model loading code to have it determine the minimum bounding box for the model.
Since I had decided on keeping collision logic simple, I wanted to stay with axis-aligned bounding boxes. This meant that when an entity was rotated (ie. rotating a desk 45 degrees in the map editor) it needed to have its bounding box recalculated to reflect its new (larger) size. This is accomplished by using rotating the four points of the bounding box (either top or bottom; doesn't matter since rotations are on the Y axis), and then finding the bounding box that contained those four rotated points. It can be kind of nasty though, since 45 degree rotations on long models (like desks) feel larger than they should. Short of rejeffing the physics code to support more complicated collisions, I don't have any other nice options.
  
The other major addition was the player's ability to highlight a nearby item or object by looking at it. The effect of this draws a simple little stippled bounding box effect (reminiscent of Deus Ex 1 and 2) and displays the item's name beneath the crosshair. Next, of course, is the inventory framework behind it that lets the player legitimately pick up that item. 
| |
"Good night, Monster Land."
"Good night, brave warrior."
|
| S | M | T | W | T | F | S | | | | | | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | | 8 | 9 | | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | | | | | | |
OPTIONS
Track this Journal
ARCHIVES
August, 2009
July, 2009
June, 2009
May, 2009
April, 2009
March, 2009
February, 2009
January, 2009
December, 2008
November, 2008
October, 2008
September, 2008
October, 2007
September, 2007
August, 2007
July, 2007
June, 2007
May, 2007
April, 2007
March, 2007
February, 2007
January, 2007
December, 2006
November, 2006
October, 2006
September, 2006
August, 2006
July, 2006
June, 2006
May, 2006
April, 2006
March, 2006
February, 2006
January, 2006
December, 2005
October, 2005
September, 2005
July, 2005
June, 2005
|
