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Plan for Peter Khojasteh

Name:	Peter Kojesta
Date Posted:	Oct 27, 2005
Rating:	4.0 out of 5
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Bless me father for I have sinned, It's been almost a year since my last .plan. There have been many changes for the Poacher team. There are lots of things I want to address with this .plan; Advancements, setbacks, health, and legal issues.

I should start with a word about legal issues and how they matter to business. The company is no longer trading/operating as Exileworks Inc due to a trademark dispute. As such, we purchased/filed the trademark on Exis, and this shall be our operating company name from now on. Exis Inc.

Now, regarding development; we've re-written the engine so much it hardly feels like torque anymore. The problem is that this was not necessarily a great idea. We've changed so much that some of the base functionality is lost to us. Many of you may recall that when we started poacher, it was TGE, we then moved on to TSE as an early adopter. This is the primary reason we invested so heavily in technology improvements (invested time & effort). TSE, in its current iteration, is much more robust than when we got it, so I say cheers to GG. Good work to everyone who's been breaking their back on it.

In other news, one of our key people, Justin Boswell, was forced to withdraw from the team due to health reasons. Justin is a valued friend to all of us, and we really hope he can recover in good fashion. As you may know, our team consists of only 4 people; so this is a big setback to the development of Poacher. The saving grace is that we are local to each other, and long time friends who refuse to call it quits.

That aside, we've decided to make certain changes in our development process in order to compensate for the current situation. These changes will become apparent in the coming months, but here is a taste:

Here is a new character model I've been working on, a warden. I decided to take advantage of TSE's shader system to really bring out the normals.

Next is a rig I've created for some facial animation work. It's made from bones, so it allows for more flexibility than a morph-target based system. I will have to simplify the rig if I want it to work in engine, unless someone happens to know how to make a multi-base node bone system work in torque. This is not really a problem though, as it simplifies my work plenty.

Lastly, a screenshot from Poacher as it is now, just a little fun.

- removed images

Recent Blog Posts

List:	04/08/08 - New 3d models 03/21/08 - New Models / Exis Exchange 2.0 (cool Images) 10/04/06 - Exis Freedom vs. Microsoft Oppression 07/21/06 - More artwork you say? Content pack 06/12/06 - Poacher update & New creature content packs 06/02/06 - Undead Legion Characters - 3d Content Pack 05/29/06 - Content Pack & The Exis Exchange 04/06/06 - Exis Content Packs (Image Intensive)

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Michael Cozzolino (Oct 27, 2005 at 02:50 GMT)

Wow awesome. I see you are a Tombstone fan. 1 of my fav's too :)

Jeff Gran (Oct 27, 2005 at 03:17 GMT)

Quote:
unless someone happens to know how to make a multi-base node bone system work in torque

what do you mean by that? You can pretty much put any kind of rig in torque. What problem are you running in to?

The character is looking good. How does he look in-game?

Skye Gellmann (Oct 27, 2005 at 06:58 GMT)

nice to see another game which glorifies senseless violence.. This time towards endangered species.

Your gameplay dynamic on your website sounds good though.
Edited on Oct 27, 2005 07:01 GMT

Chris (Oct 27, 2005 at 07:09 GMT)

Ya, those damn digital animals, man, better becareful before they all vanish! lol.

Vernon Finch (Oct 27, 2005 at 07:14 GMT)

That is just all kinds of awesomeness. I am a huge fan of facial animation, and was just thinking these last few days about how to get something [much simpler than that] working for myself.

I just loved the facial animation in Vampire: The Masquarade: Bloodlines. They used the Source engine, but as it was an RPG with close up camera shots of their faces during conversations you really got to see the work that had been put into it.

One thing I noticed about yours, is the eyes don't seem quite right to me. He has some kind of Zeus thing going on where his eyeballs aren't quite lined up correctly, but don't get me wrong, I think what you've done is great. In the Source engine they use a shader over the eyes to give it more of a reflective, wet look which really brings the eye to life and makes a huge difference.

Stefan Lundmark (Oct 27, 2005 at 07:48 GMT) Resource Rating: 5

Nice work. I think the shoes on that character could need some work though. They look too plastic.
Edited on Oct 27, 2005 07:48 GMT

Jeff "Reno" Raab (Oct 27, 2005 at 09:53 GMT)

Dang, poacher's looking as good as ever :)

oh, and regarding that facial animation thing, once i get some of these bigger projects out of the way, i'm gunna fall back to one of my older projects, a sort of all-in-one lipsyncing/facial expression system the lipsync side is done, but i need to work on the facial expression end before i'm happy with it.
old .plan seen here: http://www.garagegames.com/blogs/37620/7056

Hopefully i'll be able to get some of these projects dead and done(gah, rendering is tedious :P ), but once i get back to it, i'm gunna get that sucker done and out the door, hopefully giving Source's version of it a run for it's money as well. Nice work on the riggings thus far though :)

Anywho, cant wait to see even more of this :D
-Jeff "Reno" Raab

Darren Stuart (Oct 27, 2005 at 17:51 GMT)

thats some really nice models, have you loaded them into tse? whats the pixel count also?

Ajari Wilson (Oct 27, 2005 at 18:44 GMT)

This is a really good model. One minor nitpick though. The muscle over the knee doesn't usually overlap the knee and is never stretched to the bottom of the knee cap. I'm no doctor or anatomy art major but the way you have his leg now just doesn't look right to me. But it's nothing serious. The model is very good.

Quote:
nice to see another game which glorifies senseless violence.. This time towards endangered species.

Better animals than people right? But I don't have a problem with killing people in games either. Peter should post a disclamer on his game and site stating that "no actual animals were harmed during the making of this game". I can already hear the protests and boycotting from the PETA and soccer mom types who have panzy 15 year old sons that just got finished playing "That's so Raven" and secretly want to play Poacher so bad they have developed stomach ulcers. That's if this game were to ever go mainstream of course. No offence to the person I quoted of course. Just PETA types and over protective soccer moms. Oh and a lot of politicians too. Ok that's the end of my rant.
-Ajari-
Edited on Oct 27, 2005 18:46 GMT

Vashner (Oct 27, 2005 at 20:56 GMT)

Speaking of poaching. We have been finding some dead deer near family property. Where they had been shot and just the backstrap cut out then the bad guys haul ass. It's friggin sad. On a lighter note the model looks sweet.

Ajari Wilson (Oct 27, 2005 at 23:33 GMT)

Backstrap? What's that and why do they only take that part? Deer meat is pretty good so I can't imagine someone just wasting it like that after making all that effort to hunt and kill it.

Peter Kojesta (Oct 27, 2005 at 23:39 GMT)

@ Jeff: The bones are not all children of one top node, there are multiple hierarchies. On top of that, the keyframes are on the point helpers , not the bones directly.

@Darren: yea, I loaded it into TSE for testing, the polycount is under 5k.
Edited on Nov 11, 2005 01:01 GMT

Tom Spilman (Oct 28, 2005 at 02:33 GMT)

Wow... that character looks fantastic.

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