GameFest Media & More

Wow! What a crazy week huh? Lots of GG guys putting out blogs recently, so if you haven't had a chance to check out Brian Ramage's blog about TSE Milestone 4, Josh William's blog post about the newly revealed Torque X, or Nate Feyma's blog about the making of the new TGB demo TankBuster, then you are really missing out! So with all that said, what else could possibly be left to announce? Well we have some more exciting announcements coming into the Fall about new "mysterious" things, so keep your eye's peeled to the site, not to mention Constructor & TSE are getting pretty close to version 1.0.


So as most of you read in the news, GG had been making some serious headlines earlier in the week. We were up at Microsoft GameFest and Mark spoke in the keynote presentation for 15 minutes, we had several new demos out on the expo floor (and our best showing ever), and many of our guys were up there participating in events and speaking on several sessions, including Jeff Tunnell, Josh Williams, Clark Fagot, & John Quigley. From the peope I spoke too, the sessions presented were pretty awesome too, although maybe they were lying to my face since I was wearing one of our new "G" shirts (black with a chest-pocket sized logo). If you haven't had time to see the Keynote, you can find the videos of it here. I highly suggest watching it as it puts this whole Torque X business in perspective.



Aside from adventures in Seattle parking garages (thanks Davey Jackson for the photo), it was an awesome showing. Good times. Jeff banned me from driving after GDC this year when I was driving headfirst into oncoming traffic saying "It's ok I know what I'm doing". The fact is: I fit that van in a compact spot with the guy on the right being on the line without touching or scraping anything. Sure he might not of been able to get into his car, but that's not my fault is it? (Davey reparked the car properly as to not get our rental keyed).

Unfortunately, we didn't have enough time to prep some of our new demo material before heading out, so I've spent the day trying to amass various new screenshots and videos of new items that we were proudly showing off up in Seattle, including Torque Game Builder, Torque Shader Engine, and the new Torque X.





These demos were hard & sleepless work and many thanks to the people who lent a hand of varying sizes to get these done Joe Maruschak, Alex Swanson, Robert Blanchet Jr., Zach Zadell, Nate Feyma, Mark McCoy, Pat Wilson, John Quigley, Adam deGrandis, Clark Fagot, Josh Taylor, Ben Garney, Janelle Becker, Matt Langley, Justin 4KM^2, and Adam Larson. These wouldn't of happened without their contributions, and we wouldn't have had such an awesome floor presence. Thanks guys! Crunch always sucks, especially when you don't expect it. :)

So without further ado, some media!
Youtube.com playlist can be found here if the mirrors are slow:
http://youtube.com/view_play_list?p=0A972E3968D147CD

Marble Blast Ultra: Torque X & Managed Code(XNA)
The XNA development team sat down and really cranked this guy out. Three man weeks! This is pretty much identical to Marble Blast Ultra, however this build includes polysoup collision, curved surfaces (no more Quark!), and was build on managed code. Josh and those guys have already beat this into the ground, so I'll just put up the video!
Windows Media / QuickTime

TSE Milestone 4: Legions Lighting Demo
This demo I pulled out of thing air in about four days (no joke). It was definitely interesting taking advantage of high-poly and low poly stuff. For reference, the source model used to generate the normal maps on the low poly mesh was about 1.5 million triangles, the low poly was only 3200. Adam deGrandis
of Games Extract through a quick rig on the guy and Mark McCoy easily got some quick idle animations in to show-off the various shadowing techniques, and the result was pretty awesome!
Windows Media / QuickTime


TSE Milestone 4: Orc Self-Shadowing Demo
Joe and Mark pulled in our favorite SpaceOrc and did a quick pass on the materials and animations (no more dance!) to show off the new shadow and self-shadow stuff. The new shadowing code (as the other half of "lighting") in TSE MS4 is really wicked, and adds a lot to the presentation. Joe really tweaked the lights in this scene and it was all done through the SGLighting GUI. There are three lights illuminating this orc.
Windows Media / QuickTime

TankBuster: TGB vs Torque X
As Nate posted earlier today, the guys on the Torque X team easily switched over the new TGB TankBuster demo to Torque X. Below is a video of it's comparison, TGB vs Torque X.
Windows Media / QuickTime

Torque X: Space Scrollers 2 Games, 1 Codebase
About a month ago, when we were prototyping various demos to show off to Dave & Chris from Microsoft (around the same time our Torque X plans were revealed to the associates), Joe was helping the Torque X team prepare some quick demos to show off how far they've gotten in a short time. Late one afternoon, Joe comes up to me and asks if I had time to help tweak some background normal maps and scrollers on the original demo (which sports some very familiar WarSparrow art). I went to lend a hand and dug into Torque X & XNA for the first time and was pretty surprised at how cool (and easy) everything was, and ended up staying a little TOO late that night and before I knew it I had completely changed the look of the game without touching the code. One code-base, two games? Sweeeet.
Windows Media / QuickTime

Torque X: Relief Shader Demo
Zach Zadell whipped this guy up as a shader test but it was so cool we ended up using it as a floor demo. It's only 2 quads, one for the terrain texture and one for the cloud layer. The entire effect is achieved using a relief map shader on a scroller. It's nice. Real nice(TM). :)
Windows Media / QuickTime


Lastly, if you haven't seen, Sickhead Games got their Adventure Kit out today on GarageGames, and it's freaking sweet. We've been playing with this internally for awhile, and it's a huge hit. It's pretty much flying off the "virtual" shelves here, I highly suggest everyone at least check out the shots and videos. It's nice. Real nice(TM).

So that about wraps it up. I haven't slept much in the past two weeks, went up to Seattle, then down, then up to Portland and back the very next day. I'm gonna enjoy this weekend! Enjoy the media.