Scars of Bloom

It's all Josh Josh Engebretson's fault.

He forced me, forced me I tell you, to port to TGEA. I've betrayed everything I believe in. :(

Heh, just kidding. But it is his fault. Him and those damn videos of his mutant Torque-Ogre-Python hybrid. I witnessed it's might, it's beauty, and I knew envy. My heart seized with the desire to posses it, to make it my own. Forever.

Ok, I'm in a funny, dramatic mood. Actually, I'm always in that mood, I usually just hide it better.

Basically, I saw his videos and the technolust I struggle to subdue roared up like crazy. Shaders! Shiny! Physics! Gimme gimme gimme! People who read my posts regularly have probably picked up that I DON'T believe in automatically porting your project to a shinier platform simply because it comes out and looks all nifty. That if you are in the middle of a project in TGE, the best thing, the wisest thing, is to finish it in TGE then move on for your NEXT game. Get a game finished, then port. Thats the clever thing to do. Finish the race before starting a new one.

And dammit all, I've betrayed that. *Waves fist angrily at Josh*

Actually, it was more than just Josh's cool vids. I got into a discussion with guys at work about graphics and suchlike, began reminiscing about the days when I was writing my own engine...I used to really enjoy it. It was frustrating and time consuming, sure, but learning new techniques, playing with technology, there is something satisfying about that, in a "tinkering with your car engine" kind of way. I hadn't realized how much I missed that. RPGs are massively data driven. Which means 90% of what I write is data structures to store data, and functions to access and manipulate that data. It's not really cutting edge programming. I remember playing with neural networks, working out shaders from the DX API...and I missed that. :(

So the fire burned brightly, and I couldn't bring it back under control again. I spent an entire weekend when I could have been working on gameplay looking at more advanced engines. First, I looked at TGEA, I own a license after all. People complain on the forums, but this is a reality of all forums, everywhere. I needed to see for myself. I got the basic SDK compiling, played with the basic level, looked through the code...hmmm, seemed like there was a lot commented out. Editors broken. My levels didn't work so well. Some architecture changes meant resources I relied on now called functions that hadn't just changed, they were nonexistent. Ouch.

So then, and this is demonstrative of my craziness, I downloaded Ogre. Just wanted a look, I thought. Let me see the demos....oh look, it is a plugin system. Josh plugged it on top of Torque using Python, I wonder if I could too...I went off like that for a bit, I dunno, I may have been drooling. But after a while, sense returned. What was I thinking? I'd come so far, and now I was thinking, even if only half seriously, about trying to put in a different renderer? Nuts, just plain nuts.

So I settled down, got back to my TGE version. And went happily along there for a while...until Matt Fairfax intervened. Dammit Matt, you are with Josh on my List. He posts this uber sweet writeup of all these TGEA enhancements...high res terrain textures (*weeps at the thought*), fixes to the missing bits of TGEA, editors restored and upgraded, all on top of adding in mission editor improvements. The mission editor in TGE is a bit fiddly, after using CTor for a while going back to TGE feels like a downgrade.

So this incredibly tempting update is on the way...and the embers re-ignite. I can have shaders, bloom, high res terrains, enhanced time-saving editors, polysoup, AND satisfy my urge to play with cool tech again? I failed my saving throw versus will effects and was hooked.

So I ported. First I bought the AFX upgrade. Oh, did I mention that happened about that time too? I wouldn't have moved without AFX, technolust or not. It's too useful, too integral to my project. So I took the AFX base and began the process of porting.

And...well, it was a bit painful. Porting and merging always is. Took me about 2 days of wrangling to get the majority of it in though, not bad, considering. Like I said, 90% of what I do is data driven. And the 2 engines are 90% the same. So, except for the gfx parts, it was fairly easy. Except for the gfx parts.

I was left with a few major systems to fix, but by this point I was on a roll. I discovered the editors weren't as broken as I thought, using legacy terrain is pretty decent. And a lot of the commented out code is simple stuff, like the rendering of boxes in editor mode or whatever. As I went into a bit more depth I realized I could put them back in pretty easily. I've decided to wait for Matt's update there, since I don't want to replicate work and it isn't holding me back, but otherwise I'll do it myself later.

One thing I did have to do was port the dynamic skins resource. Like I said, I had about 3 major systems left to fix after the port, the dynamic skins resource being the largest, hardest one. TGEA handles textures in a wildly different manner from TGE. I would need to dig in...

But first I went on holiday! See, at the same time things had been crazy at work, weekends at the office and suchlike. So it was time to get out, get away. We went up to the scenic Drakensburg, man I needed it :

Beautiful scenery, sun, fresh air :




I claim this river in the name of Garethtopia! Damn, where'd I leave my flag?



Does this pizza make me look sexy? Yeah baby, yeah.




Ah, lets have lunch by the lake. So tranquil. Little did we realise we were about to be surrounded by a pack of baboons. A large alpha male would jump onto the chair next to me, bare it's yellow fangs, then snatch the bag of rolls. Bastards. Those were tasty rolls. We decided discretion was the better part of valor and fled. Hey, I've watched a baboon chase a leopard out of a tree it wanted to sit in. If it's good enough for leopards, it's good enough for me.



Right, so, refreshed, I got back into it. Diving into the innards of TGEA's graphics layer, I spent a weekend learning about Materials and their awesome voodoo. One thing I did find is that TGEA's graphics are nice, really nice. The layout of the gfx layer is pretty clean. The whole thing just seems more structured than TGE.

Anyway, I got the port going. Well, not quite a port. I don't blit textures onto a base, I use shaders to combine them dynamically. Checkit :



Looks pretty much the same as the old shots right? Heh, well it's pure shader blending, so it should be a hellova lot faster.

I also needed to implement material swapping to get this working, so now I can do things like this :






Why would a man have a glowey glass head? I think a better question is why wouldn't he? ;)

Some of you will already be aware, I wrote it all up into a nice resource, explaining the theory behind the implementation, how materials work, etc. You can find it here, GG has finally approved it :

garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=14264

So that is where we are right now. Scars of War has gone hi-tech. I suppose giving into technolust isn't always that bad. In fact I think I'm going to rename my game to Scars of Bloom. This can be the default bloom level :



Of course, the player will be able to change the intensity via a slider. Anything from "eye-searing" to "nuclear holocaust". ;)

-till next time, watch out for baboons!