Grey - Game Project

Here’s the post mortem document.

• Post Mortem

Today we’ve been patching up problems we didn’t have time to fix yesterday and it is coming together quite nicely. The Milestone 3 presentation is tomorrow and we certainly want the game to look it’s best. We might also get to do another presentation next week, there will be people from some of Sweden’s largest game companies present so that’s also a great boost to our motivation.

I have updated the demo installer with our latest fix’s and the trailer have also been modified some:

• Grey Trailer
• Grey Installer

Yet another late night, isn’t deadlines just lovely! Laters

We’ve just finished the third and final milestone for the project. The demo is an early beta and does not involve all of the material or game play we had envisioned earlier in the project.

• Power Point
• Grey Trailer
• Guardian Animation
• Worker Animation
• Grey Installer

We’re all dead tierd from working around the clock for the last couple of days to pull things together for the MS3 deadline. It’s just past 7:30 AM and now I’m going home for some shut-eyes time, Laters.

I finished texturing the worker a while ago. Here it is:

Some more progress on our biggest enemy, I’ve just finished the animations, they come in the following order:

walkcycle
right turn
left turn
shoot
death

klick here –> Guardian Animated

This past week we have been working hard at implementing a bunch of game features and testing different animation blendings. Since we don’t have an experienced animator in our group David has been (and still is) struggling with making proper animations. We’ve had to do some snaking around problems caused by certain animation blendings, though this will not affect the game play to any greater degree.

The last couple of weeks we’ve had a lot of contact with Emil (our music composer) and steadily we have been working out what music we want to use. I have uploaded to the gscept ftp some of the samples we’ve decided to use, here are some links:

- Title Screen Demo
- Ingame Demo
- Battle Demo

These are by no means the final versions but rather working samples, they should give you a good idea of what the musical mood will be.

That is it for me, the coming week we’ll probably post some screen shots and stuff.

Laters

The first enemy has been normalmapped and textured now, here it is.

Last week David and I was working on a issue with skeleton animation blending, the problem was that when we ran two animations on the same skeleton the joint movements of each animation was not in full effect.

After some reading in the Pro OGRE 3D Programming book and the Ogre3D forum we figured out that Ogre’s default skeleton animation blending mode was set to ANIMBLEND_AVERAGE, meaning if you have two animations active it divides each weight with the amount of animations active (1.0/2). What we wanted for our skeleton animation blending was ANIMBLEND_CUMULATIVE which would let all the active animations perform their joint movements and skeleton animations in full without weight reduction.

Accessing libraries in yake (like Ogre) is not much of a problem when you figure out how to go about it, so setting the skeleton animation blending to ANIMBLEND_CUMULATIVE worked really well. Here is a little snippet of changing the blendmode of a skeleton.

typedef yake::graphics::ogre3d::OgreEntity OgreEnt;
	
void setAnimationBlendMode( yake::graphics::IEntity* ent, Ogre::SkeletonAnimationBlendMode mode )
{
	Ogre::Entity* ogreEnt = ((OgreEnt*)ent)->getEntity_();
	
	Ogre::SkeletonInstance* skel = ogreEnt->getSkeleton();
	skel->setBlendMode( mode );
}

Also last week I started to look into Ogre Compositing but I pretty much ran into a wall, I’ll have to take a good look at it this week and see if we can work around the problem. What is Ogre Compositing? you might ask youself, Ogre Compositing is used for making post-frame-effects, meaning we render the games frame onto a texture where we then run different material programs and shaders to enhance the image.

We want to use this post-effect functionality to make colour corrections to the game, a few weeks back David was messing around with a screenshot making some colour corrections in photoshop, the difference was amazing compared to the original.

If/when I get this Ogre Compositing working I’ll post a with/without screenshot to show the difference:)

Cheers.

After a few failed attempts, I took another swing at getting the normal map shader up and running. With some help from a few of the “code people” it finally worked. Here’s a picture of the main character standing in front of a light. Sorry for the pose…

…and here’s a closeup with more detail

Hey!

It’s been a while since we(coders) last wrote frequent posts, we’ve not written much mainly because of other intensive courses and just not having any fun stuff to write about. The CG-artists have been giving a lot of good frequent updates which has been really nice.

Since Milestone 2 we’ve been in the implementation phase, so far during this phase we have with great caution written most of the class-structure and framework for the game. We’re now focusing on inserting the CG-artists content into the game. As always we are paying dearly for the crime of not doing even more tests during the prototype phase, but of course you can never do enough tests.

Last week David posted some screenshots of a scene without any dynamic lighting, this week he started to experiment with it and it is looking really good, here’s a screenshot:

Currently I’m working on physics and loading .xode collision-meshes. I am also doing some work with animation blending, but it’s a bit on ice for the moment until Fredrik can rebuild some of the yake source for me.

Back to coding, Laters!