Caffeine, Assets and Rambling
Entry posted by Einlander ·
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Got off work a few hours ago and decided that tonight would be a good time to have some insomnia. Fueled by caffeine I decided that i should model more assets for people to use. Last time the theme was health items. Avid players of Left 4 Dead 1/2 will notice I modeled my own imaginings of the Left 4 Dead health items and threw in a first aid box 
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[modeled and rendered in
Anim8or]
This time I set the theme as barriers and barricades. I spent a few hours modeling a few items. At the beginning I fought the good fight of low polygon models, but near the end I lost that fight. After loading up Valves Hammer Editor and comparing the poly-count of their models versus mine, I found that their models are easily double the polygon count of any of my models. I will do some more barricades and barriers over the next few days, and on the weekend I will try to do all the textures and upload the pack.
[MOTIVATIONS]
Some may wonder why I'm doing this anyway. To that i have 2 answers. Firstly, I have no idea what I actually want to do with the Leadwerks Engine. I have a vague idea of what I want to do but then I end up with the issue of not having the proper art assets to populate the level. Second, this is exactly what I would want someone to do for me if I was a complete noob and game making. With enough items a person can essentially play house or lets pretend in the engine. From there they can tell a story with what they created without having to creat absolutly everything. Bonus answer, it makes Leadwerks look good. When people ask if Leadwerks have assets, you can point to the download section and tell them to down load certain packs and they tell their friends to look at what they made and bring more people to the community.
[RANDOM MUSINGS AND INSIGHT]
Too Long; Don't Read. Seriously TL;DR
An interesting thing that I learned while looking at the Valve models was that most objects that are not not super low poly have a simplified low-poly version of of the model for physics. This is different than what i do. Normally just make a convex shell, mesh physics, or what i did in the last pack: take the model, put it inside a primitive csg that closest fit it's shape.
I started thinking about why this would be. It didn't take very long for me to figure out why this was. The main thing that I realized was that the Source Engine is mainly used for shooters taking place in real life or future settings. We have Counter Strike: 1.6, Source,Go, Team Fortress: 1&2, Half Life: All Episodes, Left 4 Dead 1&2 , Sin Episodes:Emergence and Titanfall. All of them are shooters at the core, regardless of the goals in the game. A few notable exceptions are Portal, and Vindictus. Those are not exactly twitch based games. When you have so many shooter games out for a single engine, and many of them played competitively, every shot counts. And when every shot counts, every collision counts. There are an astonishing many models that have open spaces that you can see through. Since you can see through them you would expect you can shoot through the open areas, and you can leading to the simplified models for collision.
A mesh based physics in Leadwerks would work, but it uses the models mesh as the base and some meshes when you use them as a physics base will noticeably slow down your game. So, unless you do some physics file slight of hand (create a physics file from a low poly mesh, and apply the file to the higher poly version), the method Valve uses is not an easy approach. Thank god for prefabs. If some kind soul (read: someone else, that's not me), does this once, others wouldn't have to. Who knows. Leadwerks 3.1 is still young. Maybe in the future there will be lua/c++ based add-ons that can help automate this process for you.
TL;DR: Be careful when you make physics files or objects for your game. Someone might want to shoot through obvious holes in your model, if they cant, rage quits may ensue.
If you read through all this rambling, give yourself a pat on the back, you deserve it! Next post I don't thing I will have as much to say. 
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