Since this recording was made, rubble models have been restored so the ground level debris is looking as it should.
Just a few more FX states to add (fire and flammables where indicated) and then pretty much 98% of game entities (other than trees which we can't do anything about) should be destroyable to some degree.
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| With visual settings turned up a notch |
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| Night fishing |
yep... thats coming along nicely
ReplyDeleteim seeing beta written allll over
ReplyDeleteNow I'm completely sure you will succeed in everything what you have in the plans.Smoke and debris will be better than in the AAA.
ReplyDeleteOnly i can not understand why full operation FLIR and TEDAS you leave at the end;)
Amazing job, I'm impressed.
Hi, you could add some vertex animation during biulding collapsing - some kind of wave - so one corner of building would collapse little bit faster.
ReplyDeleteThis should be fairly cheap.
Think about vegetation vertex wind shader - only working on buildings and in Y axis.
Also rotating building slightly around it's base would add nice effect, especially on smaller buildings (which don't collapse "symmetrically").
Using a vertex sway shader is a good idea but it would mean decoupling the object from the object instancing system as instances can't use different materials. I'm not sure that we've found a workable method of doing that yet.
ReplyDeleteIt'd also require objects to have their vertices painted which is a fairly unpleasant task with their being several hundred structural objects.
Cheers
I can set the vert colours no problem when instantiating the structure drop fx. But I don't relish adding more materials and spending time on it now. Sagelike words of advice from an old timer in the games biz says it's important to know "when it's good enough". Can polish it up later. Since that video was recorded rubble was added, changes to the particles and colours as well as some structural rotation was added. So it's good enough for now.
ReplyDeleteI love the vertex displacement idea for the towers. Certainly one to tinker when I get a breather. It would be very cheap to do. If I could assign someone else to do it I would.
Lots more items to check off the list. Thanks for the comments and suggestions. It's all welcome.
It's really a poor usage of an important asset. There are so many aesthetic areas that could make use of vertex colours. Especially multi-texturing which would provide much needed variation on large buildings.
ReplyDeleteCheers
Funnily enough in my lunch hour I'm reading "Racing The Beam" which is a humanistic study of the Atari VCS and how technology limitations influence the creative process.
ReplyDeleteI think we qualify as a case study :)
Highly recommend this book if you're into computing history or want some insights into just how hard it was to make even simple games.
The title is quite literal, you were racing to squeeze in machine code operations before the TVs electron beam reach a position. No render buffers or bitmaps to store a display and only 2 sprites. So the challenge is, how to you make a game like PacMan?
Amiga programmers were spoiled rotten with the Copper but the techniques were similar.