This doesn't look good....




It looks FREAKIN' AWESOME!!!!!!

;)


BTW: Are you using the original box art as inspiration for the Mantas? They look familiar....

Phew - had me worried there for a minute ;) It's a bit saturated in the last shot (although it is full sunlight) - needs some contrast scaling to handle that I think.

Yep - that's absolutely what I'm aiming for (updated somewhat):

Very nice looking work mate. Keep the screenies flowing!

Aww that old manual/box art always makes me smile :)

I sometimes forget how awsome this game was/is :)

the screens are looking great there :) jsut cant wait to see this running..

you is a tallented man!

Cheers people :)

Devil: persistence is probably greater than talent in my equation.
The shader stuff is one of the major things I was hoping to learn with Carrier - they allow you to program graphics like it is in the books - lighting equations and everything, rather than wading through the fixed pipe setup & API. Glad I left them until later - they've evolved so much during development.

I wholeheartedly endorse leaving pretty things to the end of the project! At least as much as is practical ;) Far better to get gameplay done right and done first.

What you've got there is looking very nice now, though I'm a bit hard pressed to see the difference between the last two images. Might just be my eyesight though :)

Andy

oh my god, that is a thing of beauty!

Love tha manta design too!

lol yeah nineYear - it was a bit of a space filler to get 4 pics ;)
The difference is that surfaces pointing upwards are lighter and those pointing downwards are darker. With sneaky use of ray traces I can change the effect to e.g. add some blue reflectance when near the sea, etc.

Quote:Original post by Aph3x
lol yeah nineYear - it was a bit of a space filler to get 4 pics ;)
The difference is that surfaces pointing upwards are lighter and those pointing downwards are darker. With sneaky use of ray traces I can change the effect to e.g. add some blue reflectance when near the sea, etc.

I've seen something that achieved the same effect a few yaers ago on an xbox game. During an offline pre-processing phase one of the tools loaded up a track (it was a racing game) and then moved an orthographic camera across the entire world looking down (you can imagine how works already I bet!) saving out a giant image. Then the image had some filters applied and was blurred etc and resized down to a memory friendly resolution that depended on the track dimensions.

As the vehicles raced around the track their shader took this texture and coloured the poly's depending on their normal. It meant that you got cooler transfer from the red and white runble strips onto them to the point where it looked far more effective than you'd have imagined for a simple technique :)

Sounds like you're going a bit _further_ still.

Andy

EDIT: fixed my stupid brain dropping entire words from sentences :/

[quote]Original post by Aph3x
Cheers people :)

Devil: persistence is probably greater than talent in my equation.
quote]

Wish I had a bit of both! ;)

heh - I remember that exact article on Gamasutra, especially the red/white rumbly bit you mentioned :) MotoGP or something wasn't it?
Yeah it's a more vague version of that, just to give an approximation of radiosity and light reflection off the environment. You can sum the surrounding light contributions into a spherical texture at certain points of the environment and maybe lerp between them as required.
It's rather surplus to requirements really, but I've waited this long to mess around with the gfx, so I'm bloody well going to mess around with em! Get the game done first though, of course ;)

[ed] In fact, here it is :)

As I've said before that's an approach I've really come to prefer :)

Too often people get caught up in the pretty details or optimising a scenegraph or something when there's nothing to actually play. I've fallen for it many times on my own stuff ;)

The added advantage of getting the gameplay done, or mostly done if that's the case, is that you're making something good into something that looks awesome AND it's already good! That's when you really feel like you're seeing a lot of improvement because you're adding the polish to something that you're satisfied is worth polishing. Rather than polishing a "turd" of game as sometimes happens which can be quite soul destroying 0.o

Would like to see more of all this really as I've been following it since you were posting on your own pages :D but understand that you're a lil' busier now with kiddies about!

Quote:Original post by Aph3x
It's rather surplus to requirements really, but I've waited this long to mess around with the gfx, so I'm bloody well going to mess around with em! Get the game done first though, of course ;)

Definitely - I have to constantly re-prioritise my todo list into what's essential and what would be nice to have later. As for optimisation, I've only ever run a profiler once, and that was just out of curiosity ;)

I'm hoping to release a build soon(ish) to the 'old timers' that have followed the project since the old days. Get in touch again if you fit that bill - you know who you are :)

I've been following this for quite a while, and spoken to you via email once before in which you were very helpful with advice. What price range are you looking at for this?

Price range eh? :)
Umm, I'm not even sure what this thing will end up as yet.
I was talking to the CC nameholders a while back, but that's tapered off somewhat. So it may not even end up as Carrier Command X (which will be a sad day for me, but maybe can't be helped.)

Aw, it'll kick arse no matter what it's called! :)

Grunes - mail meh!