Prev/Next Blog
by date

BRAVE - Awwwright! - London 2

Name:	Andy Hawkins
Date Posted:	Apr 13, 2008
Rating:	5.0 out of 5
Public:	YES
Comments:	YES
RSS Feed:	or Subscribe with .
Profile Page:	View profile page for Andy Hawkins

Blog post

Very, very, VERY happy now. I started spending some money and time on content and started getting some VERY pleasing results. This is an update of my world building of London for BRAVE - due in 2 weeks EEK!!!

So kudos to RRGT (Really Really Good Things Studio) for the amount of effort Alan and Kyle put into helping me. I was uncertain of the speed and performance of their District Pack so Alan sent me a sample city block "on loan" to trial it. He even went ahead and added another LOD so that buildings go to simple blocks at a distance, which was really important for me to make sure I could cram heaps of buildings into the scene.

I generated these pics below and on my crappy lappy the frame rate rarely dips below 60 fps.

The guys also stayed up til 3:45am to deliver files for me even though they were restructuring their website - how cool are they? Kyle painstakingly typed the same info over and over again in email after email of me asking "so do I get the source files too?" and he's like "well, yes, yes you do" - he didn't flinch and go "jesus Hawkins, read your frickin emails properly the first time", even though I asked the same question twice - so these guys deserve lots of praise.

Finally they saved me heaps of time. Considering how long it would take for me to model all these objects, not to mention downtime tracking bugs and problems, these packs have saved me heaps of time - thanks guys!!! Content packs save you time - remember that!

So finally I'm adding several ship classes, there are ally planes, landers, mutants, harvesters and motherships. Once I get the code from the previous alpha in to TGEA I will start creating missions, adding content and polish and polish and polish.

These screens are my shape replicators, London aerial map, RRGT sample city block, and my new British Aerospace Harrier AV-8B, leveraging FGE - Decane's Flight Game Engine all running in TGEA 1.0.3

EDIT: Added link to FGE

Recent Blog Posts

List:	05/15/08 - BRAVE Base Camp 05/04/08 - BRAVE Beta Release 04/27/08 - BRAVE - London 4 04/21/08 - BRAVE - London 3 04/13/08 - BRAVE - Awwwright! - London 2 04/09/08 - BRAVE Update - London 1 04/05/08 - BRAVE - Shaders, Terrain and Harrier progress 04/03/08 - B.R.A.V.E Alpha 2 in the works

Submit your own resources!

Edward (Apr 13, 2008 at 13:45 GMT)

Wow this looks very good, with a bit more texturing magic this is going to look awesome. Seems like your going to be back in the race :) though, i cant wait to see some of the space port items your were showcasing before.

Alan James (Apr 13, 2008 at 15:29 GMT)

Woo whoo! Looking good Andy!

I have to tell you though, man...we were laughing so hard after about the third email that were getting concerned that you might have a multiple personality or something and they weren't talking to each other. Just teasing you, we definitely know how punchy you can get as you push towards a deadline. I'm glad things are coming together for you and I wish you the best in the contest and beyond with BRAVE.

Oh, and check your email, I sent you a link to something else you might find useful. Good Luck!

Matt Huston (Apr 13, 2008 at 16:02 GMT) Resource Rating: 5

Looking good :D

Jay Barnson (Apr 13, 2008 at 17:40 GMT)

Very Purty!

This looks really exciting, Andy.

And yeah - content packs are a pain to locate and match whatever style your are going after (not to mention deal with various different requirements by licenses). But man, they sure can make a night & day difference, and can be VERY worth it!

John Kanalakis (Apr 13, 2008 at 17:59 GMT)

This looks really good Andy! And hats off to Alan and Kyle for showing such strong community support. I think the level of cooperation between game developers on this site is what makes GarageGames so special. This is very exciting.

John K.

Niko Loeffelholz (Apr 13, 2008 at 18:27 GMT)

This looks great.

Martin Schultz (Apr 13, 2008 at 18:35 GMT) Resource Rating: 5

Way cool, I see a Harrier chase game coming up there. Well done, Andy!

And thanks for making such a great advertisment for my FGE! :-)

Andy Hawkins (Apr 14, 2008 at 00:07 GMT)

@ Martin - way ahead of you. The multiplayer game will be Harrier racing!

Michael (silentMike) Hall (Apr 14, 2008 at 01:03 GMT)

Looking good and can't wait to see the next test of your game Andy. I'm already interested in the FGE because of the first one. Harrier racing you say? That sounds like fun!

Ian Roach (Apr 14, 2008 at 01:28 GMT)

Looks fantastic :) cant wait to see more

Koushik (Apr 14, 2008 at 01:45 GMT)

Great work Andy, nice screens!

btw, did anyone ever tell you that you look like Samwise Gamgee from the Lord of the Rings movies? :P

Andy Hawkins (Apr 14, 2008 at 02:17 GMT)

@Koushik - the fat hobbit? Great, thanks ;-)

Alan James (Apr 14, 2008 at 05:07 GMT)

You know, now that you mention it, I do notice a resemblance:

Andy Hawkins (Apr 14, 2008 at 05:50 GMT)

That's an abuse of your graphic skill Alan!!! Stop it - AT ONCE!

Stephen Zepp (Apr 14, 2008 at 06:14 GMT)

Looking awesome man--glad those shape replicators are working out for you :)

Once your deadline is met, I might suggest taking a look at porting over to TGEA 1.7--both performance wise and appearance wise, I think it would be worth the effort for you :)

Koushik (Apr 14, 2008 at 08:37 GMT)

@ Alan: lol

Mike Rowley (Apr 14, 2008 at 10:25 GMT)

Awesome pics Andy. Good luck in the competition.

Edward Smith (Apr 14, 2008 at 10:39 GMT)

Very good looking city there!

Andy Hawkins (Apr 14, 2008 at 16:32 GMT)

Unfortunately things aren't going so well now. I sat down tonight to do some world building and it's painfully slow. When I reload the mission it's takes about a minute to relight and I've only done 2 out of 15 cells - players wont wait that long.

I'm going to have to do some clever world building and stage the mission around smaller areas I think.

Stephen Zepp (Apr 14, 2008 at 20:55 GMT)

Keep in mind that lighting only occurs once, and doesn't have to occur at all for the player if you ship lighting files.

Also, you can set the lighting quality via prefs during production so you aren't doing a max quality relight every single object you change.

Andy Hawkins (Apr 14, 2008 at 23:20 GMT)

Thanks Stephen. Also I discovered the city blocks are actually quarter scale. So that means I can scale them up and cover 4 times the space!!! Back on track again!! But once this game is done I'm seriously working on a city building tool - the tools at hand right now aren't suited to large environments.

Alan James (Apr 14, 2008 at 23:43 GMT)

Hey Andy, glad things are back on track. When you're done with the contest, and not under the gun let me know. I've started to covert the downtown district to dts models designed more for TGEA poly soup. (Yeah I know, another update...)

I've got the citiblock converted to a single LOD dts (based on the second LOD in the original sequence) and it's showing some pretty strong performance. I know it won't do you any good right now (since BRAVE is currently 1.0.3) but when you port over to 1.7 it could offer a lot of advantages. Maybe we could collaborate on a Big City, snap to grid type of thing.

Again, good luck!

Rene Damm (Apr 15, 2008 at 00:55 GMT)

Love the progress. Great stuff!

Andy Hawkins (Apr 15, 2008 at 01:19 GMT)

@ Stephen - I'm not experiencing that. For example, I place a bunch of difs, then relight, have a fly around. Save a quit. Then when I run the game again, it relights. Maybe it's a setting thing?

@ Alan - polysoup? Yeah that would help - but I think realistically I should refine my processes and scope of the mission - I mean I'm not really going to have time to build inner London - so I should focus more on just making it look busy and like a city, with some landmarks, and focus on making a fun shooter. I really need more assistance in building city blocks like you have done because this makes world building easier. I noticed you had many types of buildings in a block, but when I tried to do this it crashed after having 3 types of buildings.

Alan James (Apr 15, 2008 at 01:46 GMT)

Like I said, *when you're done* with the contest you could take a look at porting over to TGEA 1.7 like Stephen mentioned. =) I know you're focused right now on getting together things for the contest, but BRAVE will go on after, I imagine, and then you can look at some things that can be used to make some substantially larger mission levels.

DIFs are cool and I love modeling with a CSG based editor ( I know I'm insane ), but the performance of the DTS objects combined with polysoup collision is hard to resist -- and I don't have to make collision meshes!

If you'd like, sketch out a couple building/street layouts that you would like and email them off to me, I'll try and knock out a couple more city block "modules" that will work with the existing ones. Maybe a couple lower level buildings or angled streets type of thing. Maybe I can save you a few hours since I'm reasonably proficient at the whole process and your focus now could be used in other areas.

- Alan

Andy Hawkins (Apr 15, 2008 at 02:42 GMT)

Alan, that would be awesome of you if you can. Perhaps journal how you did it too, so I can learn from it. I'll send of the specs tonite.

Stephen Zepp (Apr 16, 2008 at 19:09 GMT)

Quote:

I'm not experiencing that. For example, I place a bunch of difs, then relight, have a fly around. Save a quit. Then when I run the game again, it relights. Maybe it's a setting thing?

That definitely doesn't sound like it should. Are you in any other way modifying your .mis file, or deleting/ignoring the cached lighting somehow? Saved light caches should be in the directory your .mis file is, and end in .ml (and have a funky string of numbers). The numbers are a basic checksum to determine if the current .mis file matches any of the cached lighting files--if not, it will regenerate.

Andy Hawkins (Apr 16, 2008 at 23:25 GMT)

I'll double check. You're probably right. I'll do a relight then quit, then reload.

Right now TGEA 1.0.3 is driving me insane. I fly around a bit, shoot some bad guys and in about 1 minute it crashes. I run a debug session in Visual Studio and the problem doesn't reoccur, so I can locate the error. Here's my log. There's a few errors in this bug nothing that should crash it right?

clientCmdSetAmmoAmountHud: Unknown command.
clientCmdSetAmmoAmountHud: Unknown command.
clientCmdSetAmmoAmountHud: Unknown command.
clientCmdSetAmmoAmountHud: Unknown command.
clientCmdSetAmmoAmountHud: Unknown command.
terrain_water_demo/server/scripts/shapeBase.cs (35): Unable to find object: '' attempting to call function 'getState'
terrain_water_demo/server/scripts/shapeBase.cs (37): Unable to find object: '' attempting to call function 'schedule'
clientCmdOutOfMissionArea: Unknown command.
terrain_water_demo/server/scripts/shapeBase.cs (35): Unable to find object: '' attempting to call function 'getState'
terrain_water_demo/server/scripts/shapeBase.cs (37): Unable to find object: '' attempting to call function 'schedule'
game_BRAVE_Level1_->spawnPlayer called. Client: 1736, name: Jeff
game_BRAVE_Level1_->createPlayer called. Client: 1736, name: Jeff
out 
game_BRAVE_Level1_->onDeath called. Client: 1548, name: 11
clientCmdOutOfMissionArea: Unknown command.
clientCmdSetHUDScore: Unknown command.
game_BRAVE_Level1_->spawnPlayer called. Client: 1548, name: Test Guy
game_BRAVE_Level1_->createPlayer called. Client: 1548, name: Test Guy
out 
clientCmdSetAmmoAmountHud: Unknown command.
clientCmdchangeHudSelectedWeapon: Unknown command.
clientCmdSetAmmoAmountHud: Unknown command.
clientCmdchangeHudSelectedWeapon: Unknown command.
clientCmdSetHUDScore: Unknown command.
terrain_water_demo/server/scripts/shapeBase.cs (35): Unable to find object: '' attempting to call function 'getState'
terrain_water_demo/server/scripts/shapeBase.cs (37): Unable to find object: '' attempting to call function 'schedule'
clientCmdOutOfMissionArea: Unknown command.
terrain_water_demo/server/scripts/shapeBase.cs (35): Unable to find object: '' attempting to call function 'getState'
terrain_water_demo/server/scripts/shapeBase.cs (37): Unable to find object: '' attempting to call function 'schedule'
clientCmdSetAmmoAmountHud: Unknown command.
terrain_water_demo/server/scripts/item.cs (39): Unknown command hide.
  Object ammo_pulsar(1524) Item -> ShapeBase -> GameBase -> SceneObject -> NetObject -> SimObject
terrain_water_demo/server/scripts/shapeBase.cs (35): Unable to find object: '' attempting to call function 'getState'

Andy Hawkins (Apr 17, 2008 at 06:32 GMT)

Crashing seems to relate to DIF's - if I take the DIF's out it doesn't crash. Possibly to do with detail and min_pixel setting as it seems to crash on a LOD change. Anyone else had this problem?

Andy Hawkins (Apr 18, 2008 at 23:41 GMT)

it's a getRandom glitch - here's the fix.

(in engine\math\mathrandom.h)

...
#include "console/console.h"
...

inline S32 MRandomGenerator::randI(S32 i, S32 n)
{
   if (i>n)
   {
	   Con::printf("MRandomGenerator error '%d','%d'.  Check your inputs - aborting function", i,n);
	   return 0;
   }
   AssertFatal(i<=n, "MRandomGenerator::randi: inverted range.");
   return (S32)(i + (randI() % (n - i + 1)) );
}

You must be a member and be logged in to either append comments or rate this resource.