So I was able to get prefabs working with the component design. It's really easy too! A prefab is just an xml file that describes the different components and their attributes that make a game object.
For example, in the editor I added an empty game object to my scene, then attached a spotlight component to it. This provides spotlight functionality. It creates an LE spotlight and exposes some attributes to control the spotlight. I then right click the game object and choose Save As Prefab.
Some of you may have noticed via my status updates last week that I was in the process of my 2-year PC upgrade cycle, and that I was working on building an Intel Core i7 based system. The good news is that the upgrade went well despite having to reinstall Windows (nothing was lost), and the system was stable and powerful within 24 hours of the parts arriving. The bad news? Saturday, during a heavy CPU load, a capacitor on the motherboard exploded, sparking a small fire on the board. Yes, I’m ser
The Goal: To be able to open a world of game functionality to non programmers, and to allow programmers to create this functionality. To give drop and drag with configurable functionality without restricting possibilities in any way.
The Design: This approach uses the component design along with an attribute design. The attributes represent the data a component wants to expose. A component is a smaller behavior piece that is attached to a game object. Components expose events. Events drive e
I updated my work-map today with a more recent one and still in the process of fixing up missing objects. I think I have half of a city missing. The cockpit is now in it's own world space resting at the origin and no longer effected by floating point error, but I did leave in some rotation 'noise' to give the cockpit a vibration effect.
I pushed the tree LOD out a bit more which you might see in the following screens. If you have an uber PC you'll be able to render some really sweet scenes.
Compounds, the Herat map contains approx 500 of them. Each one consisted of a number of walls and out buildings. Turns out, these sub objects chewed through a bit of processing time. In effect there were 7500 objects getting worked through. That's a lot and it was reflected in the performance in LE 2.31 on a fully dressed map.
By collapsing the compound models into a single object for the lower LODs we saw a large increase in fps in LE 2.31. Although LE 2.32 shows not much difference (it's a
My Dennis Norden bit. Out-takes from today. Most programmers we have a few wilco tango foxtrot moments from time to time. Here's a few from today. Starting with "How not to render lights to a buffer."
The canopy glass makes for an interesting effect. Next, an interesting effect you REALLY don't want to see....ARRRRGHHHH....
This is me getting a transform wrong. You can almost see the join between the high detail cockpit and the Apache exterior model. Mind the gap? I did fix this by c
We're not trying to re-create Armed Assault, or even build some form of Helicopter MMO. Our plan is to take the old school 2D interfaces of military bases and create 3D analogues. Mission assignment and planning is done in the command tent. This is still exploritory, we have a number of office furniture elements planned, some of which we have tried in the editor to get a feel.
There's more furniture to come. A mil-spec laptop/terminal, interactive map on a board (that's a copy of your person
Seem to be having performance issues with the new nVidia drivers 257.21
I noticed the reported OpenGL version has done up from 3.2.0 to 3.3.0
Repeated launching over an hour will sap the frame rate to around 1, yes one. No apparent memory leakage. But other games are fine. Also the editor will remain unaffected unless importing the Apache model where it will sometimes exhibit a black skin.
So there's some combination of factors I need to understand, the current Apache model with it's re
Just wanted to report this to the blogosphere. I'm not a Wow player (I have an account but I don't play very often) but my wife friends across several raiding guilds play from time to time.
They've all been subjected to hacks. And I think the leak is at Blizzard.
Over the past few weeks, everbody we know, including friends of friends have had their accounts hacked. Including mine, which was inactive, but had an "authenticator" (a hardware device that generates a new 6 digit number
As of next year I will be studying Game development in Amsterdam This is going to be awesome!
At the moment I am taking an extra course math. Although it is really tough, I really enjoy it! (in contrary to most of my surrounding living organisms.)
Today we looked at a neat little program called SMAK which is a neat little program for generating normal maps for low poly models by using high poly models. It also can bake ambient occlusion shadows onto your diffuse textures.
This is also a feature of 3DMAX so Dave tried a little experiment.
Before, no baked AO
After, with baked AO
You might want to click on those images to see the full sized renders. Certainly the cockpit area could benefit, and the buildings we have with ground
Periodically I'll create a debug build to see if any OpenGL errors popup and sure enough one did. Tthe MFD buffer mip-maps are created after rendering the contents with a call to buffer.GetColorBuffer().GenMipMaps()
Not much had changed except some additional meshes, animations, all the specular maps, actually quite a lot of material changes to the interior and exterior this past week. But the debug ran fine after building and running it on the laptop. My desktop wasn't having any of it.
The 3 active IR-LED head-tracker clip was never made of study stuff, constantly falling apart as soon as you put it down on the desk. Now it's finally disintegrated, I might have to resort to super-gluing the tattered remains.
Microsoft Kinect apparently shoots out hundreds of IR beams in a grid pattern and uses that to build a set of data points from which the software can pull out a skeleton, track body motion. It's a motion capture studio in a box. Brilliant, for indie game producti
Humankind never had a chance.
They came from the skies,
like they did before,
but this time they were not our gods
- they were our fate,
or so it seemed.
We called them the Anushar, since that was the only thing we knew about them: the name of their leader.
A few of us survived, perhaps because we were weak,
and didn't appear to be a threat to them.
This is where my story begins...
Just testing the storyline for the new model I'm getting soon
I'm so excited about it and hope tha
Hello again, programmers, artists, and game designers! Today's blog update will be a smaller one, with a much larger update on the way soon. Today I'm going to talk briefly about one way to utilize vertex color when texturing an asset, in this case a building, and then share some images of the Zone beta milestone from the end of May.
Those of you that downloaded the R5 version of Leadwerks 3.32 are already familiar with my derelict garage model. For this model, I initially used a single main
The interactive and playable version of our GDC 2010 Technology Demonstration is available now.
This version differs a bit from the video version because of it's interactive nature. A video doesn't need to be optimized and game-play doesn't matter too.
So this version is made more compact and fun to walk around. There are no area restrictions like invisible barriers so everything can be explored.
Furthermore all four game-asset packs can be test-drived before buying too. The "Holodeck" sa
I have many projects going on, some have been going on for years, some were finished in very short time. When I got all pieces together, then projects are finished in very short time, and when some essential piece is missing, it will keep the project open until... well, until the piece is found.
I was inspired to write this blog, because today I saw many pieces come together. Not just one for one project, but multiple for multiple projects. Actually this wave started already yesterday, and t
Another "gravy" feature which I wouldn't have spent time on had David (part man, part 3DSMax) hadn't made it so easy. He detached the existing low res wipers from the exterior model and created a single 100 frame animation cycle of both wipers complete with slight wobble. The two blades operate at different speed ratios too.
The cockpit wiper control was set to send it's setting as a key to both the exterior and interior cockpit model. Allowing for dual speed wiper control and a park mode
Hi guys,
I have made some small progress on my gui system the last few days. Nothing fancy, but believe me there where a lot of changes under the hood and
now I can show you a first skinned screenshot:
As you see the base skinning part is done. Well it will develope further with later gadgets, but the base part is done. You can have multiple skins running in one application, so you can have your main gui in your own game style and another like an ingame pc with a WinXP skin.
On
First, I want to apologize for the server issues we have experienced this week. With the amount of activity we have coming through the site, it is inexcusable to have any downtime.
The server is reverted to the state it was about four days ago. If you have any important information from the last week you want to save, replace the domain name of the url you want to access with "69.163.255.164". For example, here is the link to the blogs on the other server:
http://69.163.255.164/werkspace
Our Apache received more love today, the cockpit panel textures suffered a little from DDS compression acne. But by increasing the bits-per-pixel to 24 and using DXT1, we get better quality results using a texture half the size as a larger one using 8bpp compressed. And smaller texture memory footprint too. This only works for some textures.
Additionally specular maps were added to the cockpit, now it reacts to light in a much more dynamic way and the scratched glass blast shield and canopy
