Beyond Virtual updates
Posted: Sun Oct 09, 2005 10:39 pm
Hello everyone,
I haven't been around much lately due to the sheer amount of work that has come onto my plate recently.
GDGi have gone from 2 employees & contractors to 9 fulltime employees & quite a few contractors in the past 3 months which is quite a bit from the sheer organizing & daily workload factor...
I'm amazed at the talent of our team - the work that they are doing is just amazing, considering how quickly they are able to turn-around work for the many projects we have on the go...
Anyways, I figured since I haven't posted any updates lately that I'd pop in during the (canadian) long weekend and post a screenshot or two from a test sandbox that I've been throwing together with some assets that the team have put together.
This is far from a final screenshot - it's not for any particular project in fact, it's just a world that i've been throwing together while we test the editor and other features in the game...
Some recent updates on the BV-side of things:
- we've integrated the world editor into the gameshell - they are one and the same now. You can jump from the edit mode to the game, adjust objects, jump back into game mode etc without leaving the game...
- lights can be added to any object in the 3d modeling package & loaded into the world - OR you can place lights into the world that can be moved around in real-time...compared to the RF editing paradigm that i've been in for the past few years this is just mind-blowing to me, and considering that it's all being run 'in' the gameshell, with all of the rendering effects shown in realtime, it's speeds up the editing process an amazing amount
Anyways, here are a few test screenshots from the editor - note that the objects in this world do not have any fancy material settings applied - no normal maps, no specular maps - and all of the lighting is done in realtime - no lightmapping (although lightmaps will be an option) and more particularly, no stencil shadows or shadow volumes...those are still in the 'programmer' code tree, and should be functional shortly.
another note - the objects that are showing as 'multi-colored' are u/v mapped but the artists haven't finished texturing the models - once they update the models, they will be automatically updated in the editor - no 'actor rebuilding' or anything fancy like that - these are all raw 'obj' models (in this case) and since we're loading the native model formats for a wide range of formats, there is no 'exporting' or 'converting' required...
The framerate is low because it's running in debug mode, but you can see the number of triangles in the world in the topdown shot, so far it's about 90,000 poly's...
So far this world has taken maybe 2 or 3 hours of work, tops - most of which has been just testing & tweaking things while working with the programmers on any issues or features to be added to the world...
Once you have a prefab library of objects, you can throw them into a world very fast...
I haven't been around much lately due to the sheer amount of work that has come onto my plate recently.
GDGi have gone from 2 employees & contractors to 9 fulltime employees & quite a few contractors in the past 3 months which is quite a bit from the sheer organizing & daily workload factor...
I'm amazed at the talent of our team - the work that they are doing is just amazing, considering how quickly they are able to turn-around work for the many projects we have on the go...
Anyways, I figured since I haven't posted any updates lately that I'd pop in during the (canadian) long weekend and post a screenshot or two from a test sandbox that I've been throwing together with some assets that the team have put together.
This is far from a final screenshot - it's not for any particular project in fact, it's just a world that i've been throwing together while we test the editor and other features in the game...
Some recent updates on the BV-side of things:
- we've integrated the world editor into the gameshell - they are one and the same now. You can jump from the edit mode to the game, adjust objects, jump back into game mode etc without leaving the game...
- lights can be added to any object in the 3d modeling package & loaded into the world - OR you can place lights into the world that can be moved around in real-time...compared to the RF editing paradigm that i've been in for the past few years this is just mind-blowing to me, and considering that it's all being run 'in' the gameshell, with all of the rendering effects shown in realtime, it's speeds up the editing process an amazing amount
Anyways, here are a few test screenshots from the editor - note that the objects in this world do not have any fancy material settings applied - no normal maps, no specular maps - and all of the lighting is done in realtime - no lightmapping (although lightmaps will be an option) and more particularly, no stencil shadows or shadow volumes...those are still in the 'programmer' code tree, and should be functional shortly.
another note - the objects that are showing as 'multi-colored' are u/v mapped but the artists haven't finished texturing the models - once they update the models, they will be automatically updated in the editor - no 'actor rebuilding' or anything fancy like that - these are all raw 'obj' models (in this case) and since we're loading the native model formats for a wide range of formats, there is no 'exporting' or 'converting' required...
The framerate is low because it's running in debug mode, but you can see the number of triangles in the world in the topdown shot, so far it's about 90,000 poly's...
So far this world has taken maybe 2 or 3 hours of work, tops - most of which has been just testing & tweaking things while working with the programmers on any issues or features to be added to the world...
Once you have a prefab library of objects, you can throw them into a world very fast...