/Old Search - 'Railway'

I've been really busy this last week putting my other projects on the back seat, which really isn't the best idea as my other projects are in first. I don't really want to put shots up of the game on here yet mainly because without lighting you can see anything, and screenshots in unlit are awful.

Anyway, I'm determined to finish off my railway that I started so long ago now, tonight I finished off the stairs. The bump maps fine except along the edges of the steps, so I may look over that again and just edit it in photoshop. I always say this, but I really hate texturing!!!

The return of Flash Gordon (Ahhhh Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh)

I've got my lightning working in GoW now, and although this image doesn't really give it justice, when the lightning strikes and you hear the thunder with the lighting bloom, it really does give a spine tingling feeling. I'll probably have a go at making some lightning in the particle editor once I've read more into beam emitters in the book.

I had to change it from one light to 4 though because I needed shadows so the inside didn't light up. The four lights are at a 25 degree angle on 90 degree iterations. This also gives a nice effect as you can see in the image above, where there is still some nice shadow depth underneath the roof. When I get closer to the end, I'll add a lot of point lights in the game to represent the indirect bounces of the lightning, as of right now the lightning enters the doorway of the building but inside it stays dark, this wouldn't happen. I think I'll use the lighting as the primary source of lightning and mood for the level.

It Lives!!

Before I start, I want to say this is miles  from being finished, so don't be getting ideas. I think I'll be working on the map until around January/February time, after then it's all scripting, effects, extra 3D assets etc. This is the area just after you start, the place you start is in the railway station which I still need to texture and bring in. I'm going to wait to bring in my assets though because I had a problem of not being able to delete anything in my map and every time I saved it crashed, which left me the only option of starting again, which I'm glad I did.

Anyway, in the final scene, this will be darker although I'm going to make sure the player can still see. It will be raining and thundering. This will also be the area of your first encounter against some COG bots.

Initial Planning

Every time I tried to draw out the level I'm designing it just went to shit. I'm so bad at drawing it's unbelieveable, and it puts me of wanting to work on it. So instead I decided to create a quick sketch in 3D and use that as a template for my level. So today I've just been drafting out the start of my level, it starts on the railway and you work your way into the government building. here you kill a few people, find an NPC who's nearly dead who tells you a bit about yourself and what's going on. You work your way to the back and find a hole in the wall. I'll probably add a cinematic when the player gets to this room of the camera going out the hole in the wall and giving a look over the city all burning and what not.

Here are a few of the images.

I see a sea

I've been working on this for about 5 hours now and I'm pretty impressed with the result I've got considering I did it all myself. It's still not finished, I want to try and add some foam to the edge, some sparkles, change the suns location and fade it out...A LOT. After that I think it'll be done. I won't be using this in project Artus, firstly it's far too much of a resource whore, secondly, GoW would throw a super benny if it caught me trying to bring this into it. It's such a badly designed engine and it crashes even when doing simple materials. I will use this for my other level I'm creating in UDK though, I think it will look really good. Probably a desert island.

Edit: I tried uploading a video, but every piece of software I downloaded was a bag of wank. Fraps seemed to record only a tiny screen and  CamStudio made it looks like the sea from Monkey Island.

It's pretty deep out here

Finally, after months of being in awe of the Depth commands, I've finally managed to work out how to use both of them.

First there is the PixelDepth which works out how close the player is to a texture, and then you can interpolate between two textures, well pretty much anything actually from the result.

The second, and this took me a lot longer to figure out, was the DestDepth command. With this I'm able to work out the position of one object in relation to the object behind it. With this I'm going to try and create a sea material. It'll be pretty basic compared to others out there, but it's something I've wanted to do for a while now.

Anchor Away?

I left my airships for quite a while, partially because I was busy with other stuff, partially because I don't wanna do too much on my FMP now and get burnt out and partially because I just got Dragons Age, Modern Warfare 2 and TF2 pulled me back in.

But anyway, I got the model down to 2,125 polygons, which was about 3-400 better then my original model and I could probably get it lower, but I was considering having one of the airships crash land and blow up, or already have crash landed and you can go explore the crash site. Either way, I don't wanna make it too low poly now and shoot myself in the foot later. The texture size is 512x512 but luckily there isn't much detail in the material to matter. I may put some logos and other things on the final model when I bring it into GoW which will probably be next week.

I'm not sure if the emissives to much atm, that can be changed when I've got all my assets in there I suppose.

Mutate me!

I made my first mutator today! Ok, it was from a tutorial but it was still exciting to see the possibilities that are open to you. I created a Mutator+1 which did 50% damage in each hit, had a little go with bots and had a right laugh. Tomorrow I'll go through a few more tutorials and see what else I can do. This could sway me even more towards UDK, especially if those books about UnrealScript come out this year!! I really need to decide for tomorrow though what I'm going to be doing :(

Menu Screen

Too tired to give a full description, it's basically just a menu screen for in game. Simples!

Technical Room

I've created myself a test lab to play around in. I've created an army garage with the little amount of resources I had available to me (1 or 2 packages compared to the close to 100 I would of usually had). I can use this room for kismet, scripting, lighting, animating, cascade and matinee so it was well worth the effort.

My first tests were to try out the new lightmass asset in UDK. It basically is a global illumination renderer for the UT engine and I'm very pleased with the results. This was with just 1 light from outside. The shadows are good but could be sharper. But mind you, this was 'draft' quality and with the lightmaps set to 8 when I could have brought them down to 2. I'll have another play around later.

God rays

In UT3 and GoW, god rays were achieved by using static meshes or emitters. While these looked pretty cool through things like trees, they required hand placing and the object creating the god ray had to be static. Jerc, on the UDK forums is currently creating a new type of god ray using post processing effects which he kindly agreed to give to the community when he's finished.

I won't be able to put these into GoW, but if I make the game in UDK then I will be able to use them in my game. Even if I don't use UDK, it would be nice to reverse engineer the effect to see how it was made

God Rays so far:

(Tree) Stumped

I've hit a crossroad in my project and I'm unsure which path to take. The new Unreal Developer Kit has just been released for free, the same one developers used to pay a very large amount of money for. It has all the new features including global illumination, light emmisive materials, new content browser etc. Learning this new 'engine' would really benefit my job opportunities but the UDK doesn't open GoW content or maps.

So down one road I have the new engine meaning my level can look pretty amazing with all the new features. I can still open the UT3 content but there is only a handful of meshes etc that would fit with my theme. Also down this path is learning to use the new UDK just in time for applying to jobs which could boost me to my first interview.

The other path leads me to sticking with GoW. I have to put up with a very buggy engine, crashing all the time and no access to the new effects and assets. But I do have access to all the GoW content including characters, meshes, voices, etc.

My game would probably suit a 3rd person view like the gears of war engine, were the player is unable to jump or 'bunny hop' around the level. I also planned on making my game very interactive, and actually building a whole level. This included features that would be in the game like searching cupboards, interacting with npc's, firefights, story, cinematic sequences etc, all that would be gone in place of a much better looking level.

But going into the industry as a level designer, maybe that's what would suit me better? Surely the interaction, story etc would all be left to other people and I would be making the level pretty?

I'm swaying towards the new UDK engine and I really need to make up my mind by the end of the week so I can plan out my level again. This would be going against my original proposal document but no ideas in games design stay the same from start to finish.