Screenshots

Well, here I go again!

Until last week were working hard to finish our project on time. And we did it. Now we have a stable release of Motocalipsis with all stuff done. Now this release runs at 30fps on our desktop machines and we plan to optimize GPU stuff and AI algorithms after the Presentation on October 9th.

We think that now it's time to show what we did and for that reason on this post you can see 10 screenshots. Hope you like the final result. You just have to clic the images to enarge it.

Screenshots

Our first approach (lightmaps) was not convincing enough so we start thinkin in alternative solution like Deferred Lighting. We had several problems because some of our shaders uses special render passes and had to fix that shaders before we get this awsome result.

Pathfinding is a big problem when you manage lots of characters and the colission avoidance between them becomes a real headache when a colision push one character out of the navmesh. We try several plugins until we found one that fits our needs. And now the characters know how to cross a bridge  together without falling off.

And the following pictures show different particle effects, model and lights in order to show how our level looks like.

KISS

Keep it simple, stupid

After several weeks of work with the character animation we found that our framerate fall under 10fps and this is not a good option. So...we look on the profiler trying to find what stuff is causing our new headache.

And we found tree causes for this issue:

• Animation Blending
• Terrain resolution
• LODs (work in progress)

Mecanim Animation

When you want to blend the character animation with mecanim, you need to make the animations separated by "concepts" this means that when there are several animations finished, it's easier to make a simple animation and blend it with the others. If you are using Maya Animation layers you can ensure that this animations will blend perfectly.

On the next video you can see the animations on the ugliest way you can see them: splited. The hair, the wheels, the hands...all it's in different frames and this allow us to blend it later with mecanim. Don't worry, later I'll show the end result and it's quite better.

Animatics delivery

Today we have to deliver a little animatic of one of our game animations. We have chosen the initial scene. As it is an animatic we have used the same model several times to represent the different buildings or characters and have put an AC/DC theme because we don't have our definitive songs.

You can see our final result on the next video.

Hope you like it.

Main menu: second iteration.

Two days ago the animation milestone took place and now we have a lot of animations on our library that we have not already included  on the game yet. We have the intention of including them on the April 22th gameplay Milestone. However, the game core has required a lot of time and we want to solve the game UI before in order to close tasks. For the moment, the main menu game looks like this.

In this video you can see the 3D stuff of the main menu There will be other 3D items and some flash for managing load screens, several popups, buttons and other stuff. Hope you like it.

Characters and Rigs

This weekend I started playing with the tools for creating a 3D character. This is weird, I'm a programmer, but I like to be involved in art process sometimes.

In order to make this character I followed the next procedure.

Tales of Nirmia

This little project was made a few months ago. The greatest part of it was that it was completely developed in C++ using DirectX and we made this game as our first game as a team.

By making this video we started to fight with different API, algorithms and problems that later we need on Motocalipsis Project.
We implemented a dinamic version of A* algorithm. In this way we avoided collisions between characters and NPCs. We wrote the code for a text display that shows the text lines in a progressive way and we wrpte clear code with encapsulation and inheritance in order to avoid the code duplicities and improve the integration and maintenance of the game. As DirectX was a requiremen for this project we needed to implement a graphics layer to allow us to port the game to Open GL, SDL or something similar in the future.

One bad think on this project was that designers didn't work on it and is for that reason that all sprites are riped from other games.

Hope you like it.