Reality Factory

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...

oh, another thing to point out - the whole 'gui' that is shown in the screenshots is a new feature - you can define your entire GUI for your game via a simple INI file - the entire menu structure, all gui objects etc are defined by a simple 'style' definition sheet and is completely skinnable.

everything from the editor to the game menu's on down can be customized very easily using the gui style system...

Looks like things are going good for you and your team. I hope that beyond virtual is everything you ever wanted and keep up the good work.
O and that looks really good. i mean really good. Based on those i predict graphics on par with halo 2. keep it up for you give the indie dev peoples hope.

Well unless I am wrong looking at the second screenshot and the depth of the field of view it's covering a lot of ground visually at almost 90,000 poly's and still running at an acceptable framerate.

I'll bet out of debug mode and on the ground with proper LOD and optimization of the level. Everything polywise could be buffed up even more.

Plus like he said no normal maps etc. With those included I'll bet this engine when finished will blow Halo 2 out of the water. Provided one has the art assets to do so.

Just curious Gekido but what kind of level optimizations are there for BV? Such as I am sure LOD is included but I'm mainly curious about the entire level itself.
Does it use area or portal style optimizations? I am sure you know what I mean.

It's definitely looking very nice. Keep up the great work.

I'll bet out of debug mode and on the ground with proper LOD and optimization of the level. Everything polywise could be buffed up even more.

Yes indeed, this is hardly a 'finished' game - there hasn't been any optimization done at all - this is just me dropping some prefab models into an environment to test lighting & help debug the editor more than anything serious.

Plus like he said no normal maps etc. With those included I'll bet this engine when finished will blow Halo 2 out of the water. Provided one has the art assets to do so.

Basically we tasked one of the artists to come up with some basic objects that we could use for a sandbox to play around with - to give a bit of perspective - the entire steer madness city has less raw poly's than this simple 3 block environment that i've thrown together.

Plus this is all realtime lighting - there is shadow mapping available if desired, which speeds up render performance significantly.

Just curious Gekido but what kind of level optimizations are there for BV? Such as I am sure LOD is included but I'm mainly curious about the entire level itself.

each object can have any number of LOD levels, it's not like RF where there is a fixed number of levels, if you define 10 LOD levels the engine will swap the models accordingly. This will help alot for RTS type games where you have a massive environment potentially visible at once and then zoom in to see a specific character's detail etc.

Animation & skeletons can also be adapted via LOD, along with mesh & texture detail.

Does it use area or portal style optimizations? I am sure you know what I mean.

The main environment uses a quadtree type of system at it's most basic level currently - in addition there are portals available that can be used to divide areas into exterior / interior regions if you wish. For the most part we haven't really run into situations where we need these yet, but they are available - once we start getting some final game art into a world, we'll expand this i'm sure.

The characters that we have been developing have currently 3 LOD levels - the highest range about 10,000 poly's, down to a low-end of between 500-1000...

We are working on between 3-5 projects at once currently in various phases of development using BV, all with very different visual styles & feature requirements - this has been very useful at keeping us focused on making the engine very flexible - it's not specifically a 'fps' engine, or an 'rts' engine, but all of these possibilities are very feasible.

For example, if you want a large massive world, you likely won't be using normal mapping for every piece of the world - it's just too much to be done in real-time, but if you want a small detailed world like a Doom3 type of interior environment, then you could apply the full normal mapping / specular etc to the world.

Like any game project, it's all about figuring out what the game requires & balancing it with performance.

Up until recently we've been focused on low-level architecture development, ensuring that the technology framework is where we want & need it to be for our future goals - for the next month or so this is shifting to graphical rendering 'goodies', so you'll see quite a bit more flash coming down the pipe soon.

The biggest thing to note with these screenshots is that everything you see in these screens (all models) were done in a period of maybe 2 days of work by one artist - and the world itself was created in a few hours of placement...

If you extrapolate that into a team of artists working on a project dedicated for a period of a year or so, you can begin to see what kind of quality of content & detail is possible...

Well it's better I think to focus on the base architecture of the engine before all the oody goodies. Otherwise you run into serious bug problems.

very impressive....

droooool...

We will be releasing some 'official' screenshots in the next week, but here are a few other shots of the test environment that i've been developing.

The lighting in these shots isn't perfect, but they do show off some of the potential that BV has...

note, again there is no normal or specular mapping in these screens.





nothing fancy, but these shots do show off a few things:

1) depth of field - the camera aperture & focal depth is adjustable on the fly if desired, objects in the distance appear as blurry, or opposite...

2) field of view - you can adjust the field of view on the fly, so you can create warped vision or super wide angle views of scenes of you wish (sorta like a fish-eye lens effect).

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the lighting in these scenes combines the realtime lighting that i showed previously with a new lightmapping system - but this isn't lightmapping like you see in RF - there are a couple of major differences:

1) anti-aliasing - with anti-aliasing enabled, you can create very fine shadows with no jaggedy edges, even when set to low-detail...the edges are smoothed, as you can see in these screens, and the overall effect is very nice, smooth shadows

2) the lightmap generation is all behind the scenes - you can turn on lightmapping, pause, adjust objects, and basically continue to work on your world while the lightmaps are being generated. unlike RF editing, you aren't trapped into a 'wait for level compile' to see what the world will look like - on top of the fact that you are already in a 'what you see is what you get' type of editing environment.

basically the lightmaps are generated for each object (including casting shadows onto other objects, recieving shadows etc) and once the object's lightmaps are generated, the editor updates the models - so shadows & lightmaps will appear as they are finished, without needing to exit or reload the application - you can fly around your world, keep editing etc - and the world becomes properly shadow mapped as they are generated.

it's very nice - and speeds up the workflow considerably.

you can set objects to cast shadows but not receive them as well (the tree's in the screen are an example of this), and we're working on some additional flags & features for this as well.

anyways, as i mentioned, we'll be posting some new official screens shortly, but things are progressing fairly well here in bv land.

wow

...wow ...

Now did you say that you would be selling BV, and if so is there a price range cause i wanna buy it, and i gotta know how much to save.

... Wow nice work

Make sure you congradulate your team, cause man there doing a superb job



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Only one thing, is that tree growing out of the sidewalk? lol (i know its just a beta shot)
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lol yeah the tree is just placed in the sidewalk for now - we'll be making proper base thingies for them

these are just me screwing around shots right now - nothing remotely close to final polished screens...

have to remember that this is the same scene as the previous screens, just with the new lightmapping (and all of the objects are textured now)...didn't have to re-import a single object, or change anything - the artists update the files (ie saved them from the 3d modeling package), the next time i run the game/editor, the objects are updated, no recompiling of actors or anything....

the art workflow is so much faster with this...