Plan for John Kabus (BobTheCBuilder)

IGC2005

Heading Home

Well it's already Wednesday evening and I'm on my way home from IGC. Where does the time go? It seems like I just arrived.

This year's IGC was amazing - somehow I had even more fun than last year, and this year I made sure to spend as much time with everyone as possible. Leaving is bitter sweet, though I'm happy to head home I'm saying good by to a lot of really close friends for another year. Danny said it best; "it was very much like a mini-family reunion." In a way part of my life stays in Eugene while I return home.


Torque Lighting Kit at IGC

This has been an amazing year for Synapse Gaming and the Torque Lighting Kit. At last year's IGC TLK was considered a cool set of tools and technology, but one that only the big players in the community were using. By contrast at this year's IGC nearly 80% of the games shown were using TLK, and the rest were 2D or non-TGE games. :)

Not surprisingly this year featured far more games and a lot more interesting games than last year. Though credit for that innovation goes to the outstanding teams creating these titles, innovation is easier to achieve when you don't have to focus on your technology or "beautifying" Torque, so in someways I feel I've contributed to the success.

IGC is always a good time to announce new tools, technology, and demos, and this IGC certainly lived up to that image, at this year's IGC Synapse Gaming announced the private TLK for TSE beta program, TLK for TGE's latest features, and a new tech demo titled TLK - Night Cycles that combines a powerful day/night system with a tightly woven time/event system designed to run any MMO, RPG, or RTS game.


TLK Demo by Christophe Canon

The main demo on display at IGC was the TLK demo created by Christophe Canon, who also developed the vision and managed the art for it. The demo features an amazingly detailed cartoonish world that many at IGC compared to Zelda or WOW, which is flattering, though personally I think Christophe is in a league of his own (awesome work Christophe!). :)

The demo ran in both TLK for TGE and TSE, and showed how easy migration is between the platforms. All of the art assets are the same, the only changes were the addition of normal maps to the TSE materials (what's a TSE demo without bump mapping? :).






TLK for TGE Monster Island Demo

One of the major collaborative opportunities that opened up this year was to create custom TLK demos featuring some of the coolest TLK based games. Monster Island was a perfect fit for this sort of cross promotion. Monster Island shows what a weekend team new to Torque can do in very short time when using the right tools, such as TLK.

The demo shows off the latest features including dynamic range lighting, detail maps, mounted lights, and multiple shadows per-object.




TLK for TSE iNterstices Demo

INterstices is a game by Kevin Johnson and crew that was only just announced this week. It's an interactive multiplayer puzzle game that combines elements of Myst with a platformer/shooter.

TLK for TSE combines the latest awesome TLK features with per-pixel lighting that ties seamlessly into TSE's material system, just create your standard materials and TLK does the rest!




TLK for TGE - Night Cycles Illumina Demo

I'm sure everyone is familiar with the Illumina team's awesome work especially after the their last really cool dev shot. Though the Night Cycles demo is a tech-demo, the code is already adopted by Illumina and being used heavily. :)

The demo shows off some of the features like unlimited orbiting bodies each contributing to the scene's lighting, full day/night transitions, powerful time/event system, toggle-able static and dynamic lights.






Demo Reel from Friday's Kickoff Address

Friday night at the IGC kickoff address I presented a demo reel of the TLK demos and talked a little bit about the latest features. For those that missed IGC or would like to see the video again it's available below:

IGC Kickoff Address TLK Video


Game Lighting Session

For those that missed the Game Lighting session I hosted with Tim Aste, you can download it here (thanks to Chris Cowherd for hosting the videos!).

The session shows one of the ways to view lighting and to layer lighting in order to achieve the most professional (and in many cases a better than professional) look and feel in your game. The session focuses on how critical lighting is in convincing the player that your world is real (even if it's surreal), and how easy it is to achieve amazing results.

Remember lighting can make or break the artwork in your game - the best lighting can make even developer art palatable, were as bad lighting can ruin the most outstanding artwork, knowing how to compliment your artwork is critical to your success.

This session will likely become a TDN article so that everyone can benefit from the session and so I can expand on the content, unfortunately we only had an hour to cover a lot of information.

As an example of the material covered here are the before and after shots from the session:

Before:



After:





The shots are from the second half of the session, which showed how to take your artists' work and use lighting and ambiance to compliment it.

In the first half Tim discussed preparing and planning for lighting, how to adjust textures and what to consider when creating artwork. If you ask nicely, maybe he'll work on a TDN article too. :)


Winding Down

As you can see a lot of stuff happened at IGC this year, if this isn't enough to draw you to next year's show consider that you get to sit down and talk face to face with many of the best minds in our community, that alone is priceless. If you do show up next year make sure to bring a demo of your work (even if it's only for private viewing - there was a lot of that this year), and be prepared to have a blast!

-John