[Baked AO, ambient occlusion]

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.

[Mipmaps caution light. Check your drivers, sir!]

There are about three different ways of generating mipmaps on the GPU, and they all have their own individual driver issues. This is one the reasons I opted to support DDS textures exclusively, with their pre-calculated mipmaps. I recommend calculating your mipmaps on the CPU because I think the GPU-based methods are unreliable.

 

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.

[TrackIR Pro-Clip, shreded]

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.

[Downtime]

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".

[Can you tell what it is yet?]

If you look carefully at the full size image just behind the cockpit, you can see the z-buffer error, the interior partition which is welded to the cockpit interior has shadows that bleed-through the skin of the model. Won't be noticeable when it's painted but it's fairly typical and by no means the worst example.

[Can you tell what it is yet?]

Blades will be like the Apache when completed, boned, 10 animation frames with the entity LUA script blending frames according to rotorspeed. It doesn't take collective into account but it's enough.

 

LUA also lets us have animated doors, on the apache both the pilot and co-pilot canopy hatches smoothly swing up. That's about as much LUA as I'll allow, I don't really trust it beyond simple stuff.

 

These things in dry environments create their own duststorms, a CH47 crewman sent me some photos he took out of the back of one over Afghanistan of another Chinook on the ground delivering supplies. The cloud of dust it kicked up would cover a small town. Quite impressive.

[Leadwerks Blog Post 06: Incoming Renders]

You make everything else look bad I mean bravo, inspirational

 

I'm still not clear how this blend shader is supposed to work. It's blending another texture with bumpmap onto stage0 and stage1 using the models vertext colours as a blend factor?

 

And does that not affect the colour or intensity of the model? Or can you still still set the colour of a model?

 

I'm so confused now.

[Building a city, Herat]

AI cars yes. We have a bunch of civilian vehicles that will follow paths set to the roads.

 

The city is going to be straight forward, it's mostly a grid with not many bends. My plan is to hand place nodes and have a fixed number of AI vehicles cycle between two locations via a route. Rural roads don't have much traffic. I need to keep it simple and because of the sensor capability (x10 zoom) and the need to keep traffic consistent between clients I can't easily generate dynamic traffic. Just needs to be enough to give the impression of road traffic.

 

 

People I'm not so sure about. Not yet found a humanoid character that checks all the boxes.

[Multi-player address book]

I like to pad out columns with lots of numbers to take in the width of worst case, hence "8000"

 

That would be a bad day to play.

 

And you're right, I totally forgot the bloody join button, cheers.

[The Rumors of My Death Were Greatly Exaggerated]

That's pretty cool. I like the uneven floor and ripped tiles. Great touches, small details.

[GEOWEPS - Gratuitous end-of-week post of screen-shots]

The airbase is new and will evolve over a few weeks. Some of the buildings come from a Dexsoft Industrial pack with some textures replaced to match the environment. So yeah they are a wip. Well spotted though. I tend not to see the detail in screenshots anymore, that's a danger when you're too close.

[Upgrade 2.32 - let the fun begin]

I can't get the r2 update to download either. I'm using the one that the alternative Updater pulled down.

 

The day-night cycle was one I quickly made. Here's the setup I ripped. It's a pivot, a directional light (not compatible with existing directional lights so it's vital to delete/free any directional lights in the scene after loading). And a Corona to represent the visible sun.

 

Here's a mish mash from what I used.

 

Field sunlight:TDirectionalLight;
Field sunpivot:TPivot;
Field suncorona:TCorona;
...
...
	SetWorld(Self.world) ;
	Self.sunpivot = CreatePivot() ;
	Self.sunlight = CreateDirectionalLight() ;
	Self.sunlight.SetPosition(Vec3(0, 0, 0))
	Self.sunlight.SetParent(Self.sunpivot, 0) ;
	SetWorld(Self.framewerk.background.world) ;
	suncorona = CreateCorona(Self.sunpivot) ;
	suncorona.SetPosition(Vec3(0, 0, -10)) ;
	suncorona.Paint(LoadMaterial("abstract::Flare1.mat")) ;
	SetCoronaRadius(suncorona, 10, 20) ;
	SetWorld(Self.world) ;
	Self.sunlight.SetShadowMode(SHADOW_DYNAMIC) ;
...
...
' EXCERPT OF ENVIRONMENTAL FUNCTION TO SET TIMEOFDAY
' WORK OUT YOU NEW RGB COLOURS BASED ON TIME/SEASON/LOOKUP/WHATEVER '

	' SET COLOUR WITH NEW COLOURS USING WHATEVER MEANS '
	Self.scene.sunlight.SetColor(newSunColor) ;
	SetWorld(scene.framewerk.background.world);
	If scene.framewerk.renderer.skybox
		scene.framewerk.renderer.skybox.SetColor(newSkyColor);
	Else
		scene.framewerk.renderer.backgroundcolor = newSkyColor.Times(Vec4(0.7, 0.6, 1.8)) ;
	End If
	SetWorld scene.framewerk.Main.world
	scene.framewerk.renderer.fogcolor = newFogColor.Times(Vec4(1.0, 1.2, 1.4, 0.8)) ;
	scene.sunpivot.SetRotation(Vec3(270 + (CurrentTime * 15), 120, 10))

 

And you can improve it by hiding lights as they pass by the horizon, increasing blue ambient at night. I don't know what Josh did for his.

 

The corona above doesn't work too well in 2.32.

[Environment, weather, day cycles, iPhones, everything.]

Pity it's all brown, the sky colours are quite good between 9am and 3pm, if I can get the colour look-up reasonably ok then I'd be happier with the result.

 

Talking about interface, I just want to share something.

 

One colour blind gamer told me they found using games which use colour highlighting in menus difficult to see. So the simple menu design came out of that, using lines to point to active menu portions where needed and connect the dots to draw the eye to tool-tips. Which if you have a 4 foot wide screen can be quite some distance away; some of our potential customers have three to five screens.

 

Some graphic element or motion (animation) is usually enough to accommodate gamers with mild forms of visual impairment. You see this employed in many console games. I didn't think much about wobbly text in Wii games until recently. It improves accessibility as well as appearing to add production value. Simple things become inclusive.

[Building bridges and instrument lights]

The bridge is modelled on one that isn't exactly an oil painting.

 

http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/static.panoramio.com/photos/original/11421583.jpg

[(E)mbedded (W)eb (S)erver (I)nterface 1.0.0]

Well thanks for documenting and a teasing look at what an embedded web server could do. It certainly got me excited about how such things might be used to export non-critical information from combat simulations.

 

At the very least I would find this just useful for debugging a campaign system which has 200 units dotted around a 40km2 area and would need to inspect a few stats from each. Eliminates the need to use debug builds or write special code for inspection.

 

I'm with PixelPerfect, looking forward to seeing what else you do with Leadwerks.

[Everything in its place]

I used to used to use Trillian which is like Digsby.

 

Some of the more interesting apps I have on my XP desktop:

 

• XML Notepad 2007
  
• Notepad ++ (its just fast and flexible)
  
• FileZilla FTP Client, free and feature rich
  
• UMLet for quick diagrams
  
• 7-Zip handles 7z, rar etc.
  

 

Otherwise my Programs menu is close to yours.

I haven't used MS Office in years. OpenOffice has been good to me.

 

I wish is was not so difficult to locate funding here in the UK. It's like pulling teeth, the avenues are not obvious, even European grants are available. The UK now offers tax breaks to game developers.

 

Regards

[Embedded Web Server Tech Demo]

I think this is awesome. Well done. This can be really useful.

[Avionics and cockpit update]

Oh goodness Dave. That's an interesting thought. If that's the case inserting "sleep for 10ms" into the main loop to help keep things cool might help. During long development sessions my room gets pretty warm.

 

Star Trek Online had a fair few users with overheating problems. You can scan their forums for things like "STO killed my PC" or simply "overheating".

 

Cheers Dave

[Dave experiments with pit lighting]

Only an artist would spot that. With all the BLOOM you won't see a thing, nope, not a thing

 

Those panels (except the forward one) don't exist in the real helicopter. They are just a conceit to add some means to quickly adjust game options. May or may not work. I think it's too fiddly and probably better to have a popup menu.

 

It was really hard to optimise the cockpit. When you are positioned in the rear seat you have all the front seat displays switches and buttons just out of sight but not culled. So all the parts that are not visible from the other seat are grouped under a single parent. And when you change seats it hides the other parent and thus all the children. Made a difference in performance. Not a big difference which was a supprise, Leadwerks chews through polys like a Velociraptor.

 

If you have a head tracker device you can scoot down under the seat and see the odd easter egg. One plate reads "The good, the bad and the ugly". Nothing offensive.

[Dave experiments with pit lighting]

Yes exactly. I'd post of shot of what the diplsyas look like with bloom but it's way ott. It's like having an eye condition.

 

Can justify it for night vision otherwise I'll leave it as a user option. We're experimenting with having a popup panel for all the effects....

 

[Dave experiments with pit lighting]

BLOOOM! Bloom is an actual effect of using night vision, you get a lot of bleeding from high-intensity light sources with that equipment. Even some clipping.

 

Personally it's among the first things I turn off in any game. The pit lights with bloom do indeed look more like the photo reference.

 

I'm just pleased that it was a quick task to create the night lights.

 

texture0="abstract::apache_pit_instr_02_skin.dds"
texture1="abstract::apache_pit_instr_02_normal.dds"
texture2="abstract::apache_pit_instr_02_glow_skin.dds"
...
...
shader="abstract::mesh_diffuse.vert","abstract::mesh_diffuse_bumpmap_specular_glow.frag"

 

The "glow_skin.dds" files are black with just contain the areas to light-up (all the back-lit text labels and lines).

 

It's about a five to ten mimute job to add the effect if you have a Photoshop file with the original artwork.

[Road blocks to getting started]

Yes, the art pipeline is the monkey on the back for any engine.

 

The first thing I did was go through lots of old forum posts about materials, shaders, animations, anything on exporting and I cut and pasted snippets into a single document. Complete with screenshots. It took a little compiling but worked as a guidebook and helped learning.

 

And I found that just using one format, GMF for models and DDS for textures makes organising assets far less messy, no JPGs or BMPs, TGAs.

 

As for MAX exporting, we have some pretty complicated models. We're having issues using the non-official one, highly detail cockpits and helicopters exported with it kill frame-rates. So we're stuck with using the official one till we know why.

 

Ultimate Unwrap was pretty good for casual exporting but Dexsoft models would often have shading issues with it. Exports from different exporters are consistently different

[Photo Safari]

That's really fascinating. I never gave thought as to how you get textures from plants. So how do you do it with your fabulous trees? They must be difficult to get onto the carpet?

["The Zone" Blog 04: A Bridge Too Far (Or as far as you need it, actually)]

All looking first rate, moody and atmospheric.

 

The last screen-shot with all the trees, if there was some kind of far-shadow shader or something to darken the terrain under the trees, that would improve middle distance scenes in the engine a lot I think.

 

I can almost imagine what it sounds like to wander around this zone, wind, creaking doors.

 

*edit* The screenshot script doesn't work for me either, the terrain seems to come out white.

[CEGUI Layout Editor]

Tools certainly do matter. And using C# for your editor seems like a good move. I had no idea about the DesignSurfaceExt, that's pretty neat.

 

MaxIDE, or any IDE tool I've used is fine for very simple interfaces but as soon as you need to create anything really useful it becomes more convoluted than a Hideo Kojima storyline. Talk about messy.

 

I've always avoided CEGUI just because of the editor and the difficulty of creating new themes. It's always been easier and faster to roll my own interface than try and make something with that one.

 

I should think using the kind of designer you're working on would be familiar to everyone using it. So good luck to you it sounds like a great idea.