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Flexman

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Blog Comments posted by Flexman

    Chris Vossen

    Posted

    We love particles. They are often used to cover up a multitude of sins in XBOX titles as you say. Exploding pixels everywhere distracts the eye, they are the jewellery of games, pixel-bling.

     

    Those old ATARI games had to fit game logic in the few microseconds between raster lines. The hardware dictated the look (read Racing the Beam from MIT Press for more).

    Josh

    Posted

    I accomplished ... er... something to do with calculating exhaust gas temperature for turboshafts based on an 1983 NASA paper (not as eggheady as it sounds) sad.png

     

    Everyone else is having more fun than me. It's not fair.

     

    Will the LUA debug work for scripts called during normal program execution? e.g. C# LE3D program loads a model with a LUA script

    Flexman

    Posted

    Not in this case Mac. There's enough going on in the flight-model. Mast separation and structural damage is difficult to achieve, indeed visual representation of damage modelling was quite difficult, we have some 4 stage GREAT textures showing progressive damage but decals are not viable for this. Helicopter mesh detail requires non-instanced meshes and I WISH that I had built the helicopter not as a complete vehicle but as an assembly of common parts that could be instanced however LOD issues would have caused problems with that. Especially as some parts need animation (skinning).

     

    So that whole subject was a bag of worms that only with the recent Leadwerks 2.5 update would have been possible but too late to do anything about. So a feature best left for "the future".

     

    The damaged skin textures (covered in small bullet holes and scratches) do need to be used somehow and I'm hoping I can add those in later with some shader to blend them onto the aircraft. It needs to be progressive, that is, the greater the damage, the more of the damage texture has to show.

     

    Does that make any sense at all?

    Flexman

    Posted

    I not only anticipate but plan many updates after launch. It's not a simple game which you can fire and forget, maybe push a couple of updates and forget about it. Although I really DO (oh boy) miss making those kinds of games.

     

    There are aircraft systems we didn't have time to add, the biggest being the Hellfire missile system, a major component of the platform. Many games in this genre often have updates and it's quite frustrating hunting them down. There's new maps we can offer with this but just turning on content for users in the database.

     

    We take this kind of thing for granted today, I think it will improve the end-user experience.

    tournamentdan

    Posted

    The situation in the case of EA and Bell here is different because the designs are military and therefore funded by the US government.

     

    The Military Toy Replica Act (2006-2007), would have precluded contractors from seeking licensing for designs and designations contracted and paid for by the US government. The bill never got out of committee.

     

    When it comes to trademarks and copyright of design and likeness, a request for copyright registration numbers as well as trademark registration numbers would require them to document their claim. Without such paperwork they have no claim.

     

    The EFF has interceded on this issue (circa 2005) and successfully tangled with Lockheed. However the prudent approach is to approach is to invite manufacturers to advise you on the basis of any copyright claim.

     

    That's the benefit of the legal advice I got on this topic.

     

    In short, do you need to license, the answer is a definite "maybe". :/ stay away from trademarks and you should be fine.

    Josh

    Posted

    Ah yes, those commands you added to allow easy modification of Texture matricies ;)

     

    I really liked (and made good use of) the material animation parameters you could add for OGRE3D materials. Waterfalls, wormholes, engine effects were pretty much fire and forget after making the material with those.

    Josh

    Posted

    Handy if you're making simple editors or programmer art.

     

    From a practical POV, of more interest is taking something already mapped and built by an artist or 3rd party store, then applying autmated animation effects, UV scrolling. I'm sure CSG might be handy and no reason not to have more toys.

     

    Just my 0.002 euros.

    Josh

    Posted

    lol thanks. Sorry that you have to dress down the models. ;-p

     

    Well I hope you don't take it as a slight. It is a testament to your quality and should you be persuaded to publish a whole collection no one will be more pleased than I.

     

     

    I like what YouGroove suggests, a coherent character system that's uniform and integrated would get people up and away moving custom characters around. Clothing packs sell quite well for other systems that are infuriatingly locked away by license restrictions from indie game developers.

     

    That's one of the better, if not best Unity add-ons, the character builder system they just started. Mix and match skins, buy an animation and plug it in. Leadwerks has the TController, it would be awesome to have that combined with a TCharacter to deal with all the animation matching for clothing, walking and other animation.

     

    Pick a skeleton, pick your animation to fit it, add the clothing/body mesh, bake as necessary, add to scene.

    Josh

    Posted

    I used to actively do model rail-roading as you american chaps call it few years back, good thing to do with the lad. It was very expensive in terms of materials. Recently Steam had a special on the Railworks 2012 simulation which was great fun if a little buggy at first. The total cost of all the DLC available comes to something like 900+ UKP. As a simulation product it's done quite well, selling over 40,000 units according to the BBC. I guess deep down some of us still want to be train drivers.

     

    Consistency is the problem with buying lots of off-the shelf components. You buy Hornby products and your layout looks like a Hornby layout. It will lack that hand-crafted look but still looks quite good...as a toy.

     

    When started our project the intent was to buy in as many assets as we could to reduce the workload. How naive I was (I'm a programmer, not a 3D artist). The reality was that the quality was so variable even the ones we did buy and kept required some level of remodelling or at least re-texturing. Sometimes the amount of work would have been the same as building from scratch.

     

    We bought a lot of veg from Pure3D and the vegetation packs were too good. Nothing else we had matched the quality. We needed to re-work the trees, dress them down to fit but unable to do that we switched to using our own "Elwynn Forest" (World of Warcraft) like trees which fitted our more simple, less natural looking feel. And quite often in a particular game title some smoke-and-mirrors are used to fool the player. Bushes the size of a house for example. Ground clutter that fills screen real-estate to give an overall impression rather than adhering to an artists attention to realism.

     

    If you bought most of your stuff from Dexsoft or Pure3D you need to good pick-list to choose from. Of course if it's just hobby programming it doesn't matter at all. Unity is happy to sell you loads of rubbish that doesn't quite fit in a multitude of script languages.

     

    One of the attractions of the Leadwerks engine is the restrictive nature of the assets you can use. DDS and GMF may seem like an awkward addition to the conversion process but it means you don't have JPGs, BMPs and GIFs littering your project and streamlines internal handling.

     

    I recall someone from one of the now "free" SDKs giving a keynote speech, "You can make any game you want, so long as it's our game." And sure enough, most games made with that SDK look and play the same (to me).

     

    If think once a store has a critical mass of content that comes from the same source, or at least built to the same specs and style, and offers multiple styles then it has potential to really take off.

     

    Look at Ricks board game WIP, his characters come mostly from the same source and looks all the better for it. That's what's needed IMO.

    Josh

    Posted

    So what you're saying Richard, Leadwerks developers are a load of cheap bas**** cough? :D

     

    With features like this...

    http://www.develop-online.net/features/1366/MOBILE-GUIDE-Why-iOS-remains-first-choice

     

    The larger studios are rushing to get in on the iOS act, Android might be seen as easier to succeed on for the smaller fish. Which might be why there's so much meh quality apps (to quote my daughter).

     

    Most of the revenue being made in these markets is still going to the top 100 studios. That's a very small percentage considering the number of players. And then something like Minecraft comes along. I love this business.

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