Welcome to another installment of “The Zone” level design blog. Today I’ll be detailing what has been going on since the last blog post, which includes some new and imported assets as well as some significant changes to the level design in the Editor. I implemented the new SSDO that Josh posted recently, and redid the lighting based off of a few tips he suggested. The main sunlight is a white-orange, and a very dark blue-gray ambient light is used to lighten the shadows and balance the lighting.
Not convinced this a a great way of arming the Apache. But what we will do I think is provide some quick defaults, option A and option B.
Only the client sees the weapons appear on the ground ready for selection. The crewman loading the weapons clicks the weapon which is then sent to the highlighted pylon. Internally the helicopter entity receives a message to load pylon x with missile y.
To do: Tooltips for the pods to say what they are and I think highlighting the selected pylon might
Looking at the pieces we have and project roadmap. Our game, like football (soccer for American readers), is a game of two halves. Side A and Side B. One campaign is the thinking man's approach; counter insurgency. The other game is the more familiar tank spanker; survival in a high-tech hostile environment against well armed self-sufficient mechanised infantry with air-defence units.
Compounds are anchor points of the campaigns, in groups they form the villages, strategic points you're tas
Story.
Okay guys you now that Aggror and I are working on a horror game. We have shown you some pic's and some gameplay, but now we want to talk a bit about the story.
The story style is inspired by the work of the horror writer HP Lovecraft. However we will be not be using any kind of creatures and places from the Chtulhu mythos inside our game. We have come up with our own creatures and places that are needed for our storyline. Yet we try to stay close to the unknown and obscure worlds t
Lots of things are happening around here right now!
First up, we've got some free professionally made animations for you to use with our futuristic soldier character. You can download the files here.
Michael Betke of Pure3D has been cranking out AAA-quality 3D models ready to use in Leadwerks Engine. The following sets are available:
Birch Trees 1.x (€22,00)
Pine Trees 1.x (€22,00)
Ground Plants 1.x (€19,00)
Each set features new unreleased content. Buy a couple today
Most of the IHADSS modes are complete except for a couple of elements in hover and bobup, and the flight-path indicator in TRANS mode.
Also added for Dave's benefit a small map which I'll use later as a background underlay for a tactical situation display (TSD) and easy nav mode.
RichP has supplied an authentic start-up sequence complete with appropriate caution and warning signalling that fits our bird nicely. Once we're done with the arming set-up I'll get back on the cockpit sequencin
Welcome to the first Pure3d blog here on Leadwerks.
I decided to do one so everyone can keep track of our projects done with Leadwerks.
First of all we released the third vegetation game model pack. This time there are 15 different pine models available. Like our previous released packs (Birches and Ground Plants) they are game-ready for Leadwerks and offer source files in 3ds max format too.
The latest .pdf can be viewed here: http://pure3d.de/english-version/pure3d-gameart-division/pd
Version 2.32 will feature some internal improvements that ensures your games run their best when conditions get demanding. I've totally rewritten the vegetation rendering routines with a highly specialized quad tree algorithm. There's a lot more to it than that, and I could write ten pages about the technique, but the bottom line is its fast and dynamic. Rendering with many vegetation layers is much faster, and since the visibility determination routine is so optimized, the engine can perform
This entry is not about the life of pioneer George Stephenson. The pylons seem capable of configuring themselves, got some elevation in there for aim assist if/when we add that.
I removed the LUA based weapon loading, it wasn't working out the way I hoped it might. There's a level of disconnect between LUA and the game-engine which added to the complexity of something that is already complex, when it didn't need to be.
Can finally get started on the arming now. Got a little sidetracked w
Last night we added rotor blade coning which resulted in realising the helo was just a little slightly off axis, now corrected. The Apache has been attacked by an angle grinder on more than a few occasions, might be showing signs of wear.
Some LUA issues came up which erroded confidence in relying on it for so much. I've ditched arming through scripting. It's prone to misuse.
The pylons are now ready to take the 3D models of the assigned loadouts leaving the final stage of th
Still working on the loadout system, as it happens I totally forgot to do the pylon classes. While I'm working on polymorphic classes to deal with that (lot of cases to think about). During lunch I played with some more dust effects, this time for rotor downwash. This uses the roaddust pixel shader so it picks up the colour of the terrain it's currently over.
With no wind vector applied, brown-outs, where the crew can't see outside are occurring. Not sure why the canopy isn't blending
I was thinking over some official forum posts and one gentleman indicated that they were partly colour-blind. Accessibility issues are something I think about whenever I'm writing software or web site design work so I kicked myself when I didn't apply that to the interface. I added some GUI elements that link current selection to the tooltip, this should avoid ambiguity in the menu system.
So that's all working as it should, just have to fix up the weapon selection system which wi
In the last update I was working on laying out everything in the map, especially the roadways and block placeholders for the main buildings. In today's update, I'm going to go over what I've been working on since then, which is the most logical step after roads...rails!
But, before we dive in, here is an overview image for Blog #3:
One of the biggest steps since the last blog update was to get a modular rail system set up. Based off of that photo shoot I did 2 weeks ago, I created
Writing this up for reference later.
Thinking about players, names, callsigns, current rank, medals, changing characters. The 3D base metaphor avoids a lot of GUI work. Using 3D lockers (since I have one to hand) is perfect. As it turns out, as easy as setting user keys on Locker entities. Simple.
Source
If you prefer the classic start menu like I do, there are several solutions available to get the classic start menu in Windows 7. My favorite is Classic Shell.
Classic Start Menu is a clone of the original start menu, which you can find in all versions of Windows from 95 to Vista. It has a variety of advanced features:
Drag and drop to let you organize your applications
Options to show Favorites, expand Control Panel, etc
Shows recently used documents. The number of documents t
On the whole, I'm starting to warm to using text for user options, the nineties style. Dave showed me some icon screenshots from ArmA and remembered why I didn't like them. Is that a steering wheel? Desk fan?
Below is an in-game shot showing the menu and data displays for helicopters. Not unlike something you might have seen in older games using pre-rendered art. All interactive objects around the base will have these. If you don't want the floaty status text, CTRL L (for labels) is your fri
480 stream processors on a single card.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/gadgetreviews/?p=13422
http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=23088
Thanks to CarlB of FoxConn for tipping me off on this.
I had a couple of hours with Just Cause 2 which I hesitate to recommend, it a really fun game but you're stuck playing an unlikeable character. Cheesy dialogue abounds and that's no bad thing in games, I scripted plenty of cheese for Longbow Combat Helo. Think about the lines of dialogue from old games you might remember.
The Playstation 3 was needed by the children for Final Fanstasy n so Rico, Scorpio (whatever the slab of MDF you play is called) was parked for the evening.
So back to
Check off the list, working external canopy doors, flip up/down, will indicate available crew position as well as letting you chat to your mounted team-mate while you're on foot. You could even arm the pilots chopper for him.
Internal doors and wipers next followed by external lighting system. Hopefully we'll have the cold start-up sequence in a few days, we need that so we can get on with more vital systems.
(I just noticed the text on the rail is reversed)
Source
Pure3D has launched their realtime division for producing high-quality real-time assets ready to use in Leadwerks Engine. The first vegetation model set Groundplants 1.x is now available. It features 20 digital vegetation and foliage models. More file formats and engines will follow. This pack is available at a special introductory price of only €19. You can browse the contents of the pack in this pdf file.
No work will be done tomorrow. Just Cause 2 PS3 is released. The acting sucks, the actual game doesn't seem all that hot from the demo either, but the stunt playground aspect is brilliant.
Source
I got my hands on the GDC showcase scene by Michael Betke, and it's much more beautiful than I thought. I used this scene to rewrite and test the vegetation rendering code. Collision isn't working yet, but it's built into the routine. The results speak for themselves.
Fortunately, Pure3D is soon offering a set of game-ready vegetation models, so you can create gorgeous landscapes like this.
