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...[grin]
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
