Pixel Perfect
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Posts posted by Pixel Perfect
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Thanks again guys.
how much effort would you say is needed to rig a model for facial expressions, like the one you have shown? (one that doesn't have optimal topology for facial animations)
Hi paramecij. Not seen you around much in a while!
Not a great deal to be honest. I simply added 11 bones on the example posted, all extended from the head bone and then added the vertex weighting and animated the 10 phonemes. Because I had never really had to create bones before it took me a little while due to trial and error but I think I could probably do another now in a about 2 - 3 hours. (An experienced rigger and animator would do it far faster). It's far simpler than rigging a whole skeleton! You are limited by a lack of vertices for models not designed with this in mind, but I found it's still quite effective. You could of course opt to improve the geometry in those areas before rigging it, but that's beyond my skills at the moment really.
Also the spell effect is really nicely done, and the whole spell casting has a good look 'n feel to it, which is I think harder to achieve in a first person view. But i'm curious where you got those hands from, looking nice from what I could see in that dark..
It took a bit of work to get the look n feel right but I'm certainly happy with it now. I like the first person view but need to find a better aiming system than the cross hairs, makes me think of first person shooters when I see them. Doesn't really fit in with the medieval look and feel of the game. But that's not that important right now, it'll come in time.
The hands were from a FPSC pack, I can't recall the pack number off the top of my head.
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Very nice indeed
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The most commonly used mechanism for maintaining apparent detail whilst reducing the actual polys is applying a normal map from a high poly version to a low poly version of the same model. Its amazing what a difference this makes if it's done well
I would agree with Chris's suggestion of up to 10K max for main characters and considerably less for the rest.
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The Leadwerks Terrain has the feature to allow holes to be placed in it to allow you to pass into Cave/Underground systems etc. I'm not aware of any functions being exposed to allow manipulation of these in code but I could be mistaken.
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I agree. The majority of top games still simply combine standard terrain with models for cliffs, overhangs etc. Its easy to do and looks great so no need to make it more complicated.
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Thanks guys.
A little more I've been working on lately, some late night spell casting practice:
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The Island demo was what everyone associated Leadwerks with I think, it was nice, showed off the graphics capability perfectly!
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A really simple example of lip synced speech using an 'off the shelf' model which was not designed with speech in mind. I rigged it with a simple set of facial bones and weighted it accordingly. The lip movement is only using about 18 vertices so is pretty limited in the degree of shaping you can achieve but even so it's sufficient to give the illusion of speech in your game.
Using this technique I could pretty much animate any model to talk. Obviously models designed with facial animation in mind are capable of much higher quality.
Voices courtesy of Steve from Arteria3D
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No, LE2 will continue to be supported, at least for the meantime. Many of us are not moving to LE3, or at least not initially so you'll have some company
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Note: Even if you find them the Island maps won't run against the latest versions without considerable alteration as I found out a while back when enabling one to run. Amongst other things the sbx file format changed!
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Your class structure WILL change and invalidate all your serialized data.
This is a very real and serious drawback with serialization as a save mechanism!
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I don't think any game is included!
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Looking pretty cool ParaToxic. I like the look n feel. I noticed that if I selected a res less that 800x600 the program instantly crashes out but otherwise works nicely. Antialiasing is a must though given the way you've implemented it!
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I tried using an animated door but ran into culling problems where the door would disappear whilst seemingly in view. It turned out to be a bounding box issue. If you use animated doors you'll need to take this into account. Here is the advice I was given by Josh:
The pivot itself doesn't matter, it's the bounding box. I recommend against making mechanical objects (like a door) a skinned mesh because it is more expensive to render, and there is no reason to use skinning. But in any case, if an animated mesh has animations that cause vertices to move far away, so that the object's bounding box is totally redefined, you should add a couple of vertices in the model to make sure the original bounding box encompasses the object's vertices when animated.I settled for a simple rotation, as suggested by Mack above, in the end.
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You are asking for an undefined feature with no potential user in mind, and just expecting wonderful unspecified things to come from that. That's not design, it's a lack of design. It would be premature to try to implement anything like that right now.
It's just as easy to find reasons for doing something as it is for not doing something ... it's just a mindset thing! This has been spoken about many times before in these forums, so it's not like its come out of the blue. No-one is saying it has to be there at the initial release. It would just be nice to have a plugin architecture on the road map at some point.
The world is full of creative people, how about giving them a chance to surprise you
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I thought the whole idea of plugin architecture was to allow people who specialize in areas to provide that specialist functionality. With the best will in the world Josh you can't be all things to all men. Besides, plugins are up to the end user to implement at their own discretion. There will be good and poor quality plugins for sure, but I fail to see that the use of a poor plugin reflects more negatively on your engine than someone choosing say to use really poor textures and level design for instance, which is already totally out of your control.
I'm an advocate of opening up systems not locking them down, as I've stated before, and I believe it would make your product more attractive.
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I've always believed the success or failure of VR was going to be down the the comfort factor but have had no first hand experience of AR/VR systems. Interesting observations Flexman.
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lol ... ok. Nice takedown though
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Also because I killed him first time I met him instead of running away I got his hammer as a reward.
could you even lift it !!!
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I simply added LuaJit to the build so I could make calls to pop and push values off and onto the stack and effectively move data between Lua and my framework. As Josh doesn't expose any of those functions I had no choice but do that.
Using a binding library like tolua++ or LuaBind will give you a real access to your C++ classes if that's what you really need.
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C++ was designed to be a multi-paradigm language and contains the entire C language as a subset (with a few exceptions). It was originally named C with classes before being renamed C++.
You can argue forever (as many people love to do) about the pros and cons of any language, however, C++ has stood the test of time and remains the industry standard for gaming to this day, so for any youngster wanting to enter the gaming industry it's an invaluable entry on your skill list.
Simple use of C++ to code a Leadwerks based engine is not beyond most people and is relatively easy. In depth knowledge of C++ is a different matter but is generally not required by anyone other than professional programmers.
However, people should not get hung up on programming languages and what or what not to use. Most fairly decent programming languages are capable of doing the job. What is much more important is being creative and inventive in your design and solutions to problems and developing good troubleshooting skills. These will get you far further towards achieving your gaming goals than the choice of any one language.
It's the person using the tools that matters far more than the tools themselves, which is true of most things in life. The only exception for the beginner is ensuring you have a good IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that provides comprehensive debug capability and good error reporting.
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Cool, we'll wait for that and continue to keep testing it
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Input validation is often trickier than people think. You could continue to discard leading zeros except where the answer is expected to be 0. I'm not sure how your equations (questions) are constructed and if it's easy to apply a flag to them.
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Not played it yet but friends have been raving about it. Game play seems really good with pretty decent graphics!
The Kingdom Of Soul
in Showcase
Posted
Thanks Chris. Yes, the cross-hairs are from the FPS side of the engine and have no place in this game, just served as a temporary targeting indicator till I think of some more suitable mechanism for this game. The engine's designed to offer dual support for both FPS and RPG/Adventure games.
The actual spell effects on the targets have yet to be designed and will of course depend on the spell type in use at the time, as will the visual 'in flight' effects and colors. There is just a simple animated 'star burst' on impact at the moment to serve as visual feedback of the collision taking place, otherwise the spells time out after a configurable distance!
There is a lot to do yet, I haven't even demoed any of the AI side I've been working on with the EKI One AI engine, which is coming along nicely, but will do at some point. I estimate I still have about 6 months work left to do to get all of my planned functionality into the engine and tested.