Flexman

I just thought this was crazy funny. Chinook crew showing off what they do best Source

I had a little test with the occlusion culling setting last night. If you have TWO cameras, one in which the entity is visible, and one where it isn't, objects will flicker, flash on and off every alternate frame until you move both cameras to see them. Most annoying. But other than that I didn't see any performance difference with and without.

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 personal map - will use the same buffer). And eventually we hope to have various AI pilots sitting in on briefings that you might want to converse with Wing Commander style. Romeo 1 from the intro mission will be hanging around. Along with WO J Petersan and others from time to time. I don't have much time to decorate, just placing these objects around my test-map to check how they look and function but it should give you an idea. With a couple of AI guys and a co-op friend there should be enough room to keep it looking busy. It's possible we might make AI crewman choices ala Gunship 2000 available in this manner if it works. We need some flooring I think. Hexmesh or some other plastic matting. Using a projected texture for mission briefings on the OHP. Interacting with a screen set 5 meters away is problematic, once at the projector you'll get to interface which will allow you to view available missions and annotated map, with a "close up" option (position a 3rd person cam up close to the screen). Like with other parts of the game, such as arming, the player interfacing with the projector will have their data shown to everyone else. Allowing you to give briefings. If there's time we might add a laser pointer for mouse control. We're using a 1024x1024 buffer for the projector which is a material assigned to a special spot_light entity parented to the OHP model. Objects/avatars walking in front of the projector have the image mapped over them in a realistic manner. So you too can act like a right tit in front of the C/O making shadow puppets with your head. Additional objects in the command tent will operate on a private level, mission planning and editing will work on a laptop type screen and a wall map will be copy of your pop-up map. There may also be a Sierra Hotel score board, I think that's required by tradition. So this the the start of the important ground office in Combat-Helo. We tend to have about three different project elements on the go at any one time, rather like making a series like Star Trek, planning, filming and pre-production. Finally a recent ETADS screen-shot, taking a peek at a sign through the trees some distance away (it's way off to the left out of sight so don't bother trying to spot it). Some folks will be well pleased with the corners. This coming week I'll be working on the event system (delayed due to PC technical problems, see earlier blog posts) and more of the TADS elements. Source

I can see how cool it would be to have. I can't imagine anything more creepy than being in a room and having an area of darkness moving towards me. Can't help but think it would need another post-processing buffer as lighting is blended one way (additive) and what you're wanting is subtractive. Like the Photoshop Burn tool. I'd try the material option tonight if it wasn't so late. To try it only takes creating one material and then you control the size, area through the light setting. Might not work anyway due to way lights are rendered. I remember using "Holograms" in Star Wars Galaxies to help decorate houses, they were the only items that reduced lighting levels in a room and created a mood. Had to hide them inside other objects. Then the devs changed the blend mode in a patch and ruined it all. They couldn't even get that right.

Triggers in general Volume (mentioned) Timed, absolute and delta Collision Other Trigger conditions Picking up, dropping objects (FPS weapons) Ladders (control axis swapping and clamping) Portals (enter and exit, level change and trans-location) Gravity control Fog of War Checkpoints (speaking of which, this was an interesting essay on penalties in games, ignoring Prince of Persia there are some valid points )

The idea was to have an OHP (overhead projector) project mission objectives and scores onto a screen. The project model has a spot light parented to it, then the spot light is assigned a material used as an off-screen buffer that your program can draw to, like any GUI. Then you're characters can walk in front of the GUI/mission briefing and make shadow plays. Only issue is the spot-light GMF model which shows up as a a ball. This can be replaced with an alternative GMF that doesn't show. Updated to show varient of spot_light with a single triangle GMF replacing spot_light.GMF more pics available in my blog. Just seems like another cool thing you can easily do with Leadwerks.

You could try assigning a material to the light that has a multiplicative blend mode?

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 recent material updates and animated wipers and the new nVidia drivers. I wouldn't mind so much except it's keeping me of adding new content right now. I also spawned an LE 2.32 build to test, which on a small map runs 50% faster, on the full sized Afghan theater it actually runs slower. I'm at the point where I'd like to take a shotgun to my PC. The laptop has almost double the performance of my desktop PC which makes no sense, same build, engine and 257.21 drivers. *sigh* Source

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 every minute). I presume when my account (that was inactive as it wasn't used) was hacked, they didn't take anything as I guess they didn't want to pay money to reactivate it. But they did attach one of these authenticators to it. And I'm not the only one. Once again, this morning a friend had his entire account hacked and cleaned out the family guild bank. In the years I've know people who play there's been a slow increase of attempts and successful account hijackings, but just in the last few months that rate is off the scale. I've never know so many, so fast. And there's no commonality in the people I questioned, everyone I've talked to knows someone who has been effected recently. On this scale I can only conclude that Activision Blizzard has someone working in the organisation leaking account details or a client list has been compromised in some way. You only have to check out YouTube about GM hacks to see how bad things are. So I'd recommend deactivating your wow accounts or use an authenticator until they decide to do something about this. Source

It's not just particles, Corona behaviour changed too, as well as the GLOW shader. All Corona light FX and cockpit lighting effects are really dim (can hardly see them), plus the Sun seems to hang in 3D space in 2.32 even though it is supposed to be in the background world with the skydome. In 2.32 you can 'walk' under and around it now Combined with the LOD popup of buildings over our map and no apparent way to adjust the LOD ranges I don't think we'll be switching to 2.32 anytime soon even if it is nearly 50% faster.

In the LOG, what is Max Batch Size and why would it shrink from 1024 to 64 between LE 2.31 and 2.32? Leadwerks Engine 2.31 Initializing Renderer... OpenGL Version: 3.2.0 GLSL Version: 1.50 NVIDIA via Cg compiler Render device: GeForce 9800 GTX+/PCI/SSE2 Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation DrawBuffers2 supported: 1 32 texture units supported. GPU instancing supported: 1 Max batch size: 1024 Shader model 4.0 supported: 1 Conditional render supported: 0 Leadwerks Engine 2.32 Initializing Renderer... OpenGL Version: 3.2.0 GLSL Version: 1.50 NVIDIA via Cg compiler Render device: GeForce 9800 GTX+/PCI/SSE2 Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation DrawBuffers2 supported: 1 32 texture units supported. GPU instancing supported: 1 Max batch size: 64 Shader model 4.0 supported: 1 Conditional render supported: 0

Yes thanks for pointing us towards this program. I bought a copy of SMAK to show support, I like the easy to use nature, it's still beta and would benefit from more format support. We played around with baking AO into models today, I liked the results but they need to be used with care when you have real-time lighting and shadows. We could do some crazy things with the normal map generator. Especially as we have multiple LODs for our ground vehicles.

Jeepers, I'm sorry about the format, this is an import from blogspot. It goes crazy sometimes. But it's all down to someone here mentioning SMAK, I had to check it out, bought the beta (since it's on offer) and had a play. We didn't use it for the above test but it was enough to get an idea of where we could make some improvements. And if you don't have MAX it's a bargin for what you get.

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 proximity shading for compounds and city blocks. Best of all, no fps impact. There's still work to do to improve normal maps. We started an audit of game textures and will extend this to include QA for each texture layer, ensuring it's as good as we can make it and optimise memory usage into the bargain. There are subtle things, such as the DXT5 compression that results in acne. Using a different DDS format and reducing the resolution can result in a better image and smaller memory footprint. See pic below. We made some material changes to the cockpit, specular, glow maps. I'm not sure the grips should be backlit but it makes them easier to read in the dark. Source

I didn't want to read that. 6 dynamic textures need updating. I've not looked in detail at what is involved in generating them by hand. Blending and offsetting texels.

Well it's a marvellous technical achievement, I don't fully understand the depth of what you've done but it all sounds great. Well done sir.

I read it too although it's not something I've come across, I've never tried to do what you're doing. But I'll give it a go tonight and see what happens.

I had no idea it would be PC compatible out of the box. That makes it all the more likely that it can be used to create home-brew mocap. The sorts of gestures I make at my PC are not very nice.

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. EF2000, EECH Enemy Engaged Comanche Hokum and others, not working right? Please update your drivers. So what did I fail to do on my desktop that I did recently on the laptop (due to installing a Windows 7 upgrade). Yup, update my drivers. And lo, all is now well and good. The moral is, always heed ones own advice. Check your drivers. Still a little curious as to what was wrong with mipmaps in those drivers. I wonder how well auto-generation of mipmaps are supported across cards and is there a safer way to test it? Source

When will these commands to change the default ranges be available?

Having to paint grass on larger maps really soaks up load time and shouldn't be necessary. Maybe a system to procedurally generate ground detail/clutter would be a nice to have feature. Or even some data on how the vegetation system stores data so we can maybe attack this ourselves.

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 production I like the idea of using it for creating motion capture files. Source

So it wasn't BP's fault after all? Can't have been a nice experience for you either Josh. My empathic gene kicked in and felt pretty awkward. But at least it wasn't down through malicious action. Just good old fashioned human bollocking up That I can relate to. For the asset store maybe, instead of real-money you could adopt "werk units".

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 (turn off and wipers return to stop position at end of the next cycle). The ETADS display had it's round inner bevel reduced and is much more square, you can make that out as the bright green screen in the above image. Also the cockpit instrument normal maps were edited to remove raised lettering and other markings that were out of place. My project planner has me working on the generic event system (GEST) for the next four days. This is a new dependency for completing the start-up procedure and mob animation. Source

NaughtyAlien you certainly have my support and blessing. The trick is in how you process and set-up those things, the language is of no consequence, the principles are the same, if you're cleaver enough to understand the those you should have enough technical know-how to work them into whatever language you like. And I'm sure someone else would anyway. That's a non-issue. If anything that would work better as the translation process requires closer understanding of the topic. I could use it myself as I'm close to implementing a generic animation and event system which I want to use to push little infantry guys around from waypoint to waypoint. So this is a hot topic for me. I've been looking at OpenSteer for inspiration and ideas. The original LE format of PDF and Videos were quite attractive. Blogs can work too, those are easier as you have a bit more control over updating. Brilliant NA, go for it.