chainWorks Reaches Alpha & uPlayer Accounts
by Rob Sandbach · 08/31/2006 (12:31 pm) · 6 comments
Hi all,
uPlayer Account
Our new website has entered a brief beta phase. We have integrated user registration, which allows our customers to tie Urban Games products they have purchased to a "uPlayer" account. Once their product key has been tied to their account, uploading scores, replays and custom games to our webserver is streamlined, with no need for logging in within the game. Also we have implemented an activation system for beta builds that allows the client to check if a keycode is still valid every time a game is run, meaning once beta is over we can shut of builds. Just small stuff which lets us keep control of our builds. We are unsure how we will integrate this system with any final product releases.
chainWorks reaches Alpha
Urban games has just announced their first title chainWorks has reached an internal alpha stage. What does this mean? Well my first ever self made game is coming to a close after 12 months in development. Theres still quite some distance left yet, mainly optimising the images, tweaking the level boundaries and a few minor features to finalise. It is important to note that the artwork in the game is *not* coming to a close, just the coding side of things :) The screenies below are just to illustrate some of the stuff we've been working on.
Firstly we introduced some new, far leaner firework effects. The old fireworks (see www.urban-games.net/chainworks/Downloads/5.jpg ) used 1500 particles for each explosion, the new ones around 350 (which is still too large for a final build, but we're working on that). I also would like to implement a scaling system that delays the explosion of some fireworks in a chain to prevent a sudden hammering of the particle system when 10 fireworks all demand 350 particles at once.
There are a few gameplay bugs left to work out and we need to work on scaling, and optimization of memory usage. We're hoping to enter BETA in mid September, as well as taking a build to the community weekend for people to check out. I shall leave you with some images from our internal alpha 1.5 build.
More can be found here : http://www.urban-games.net/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=1
Thank you all for your time,
uPlayer Account
Our new website has entered a brief beta phase. We have integrated user registration, which allows our customers to tie Urban Games products they have purchased to a "uPlayer" account. Once their product key has been tied to their account, uploading scores, replays and custom games to our webserver is streamlined, with no need for logging in within the game. Also we have implemented an activation system for beta builds that allows the client to check if a keycode is still valid every time a game is run, meaning once beta is over we can shut of builds. Just small stuff which lets us keep control of our builds. We are unsure how we will integrate this system with any final product releases.
chainWorks reaches Alpha
Urban games has just announced their first title chainWorks has reached an internal alpha stage. What does this mean? Well my first ever self made game is coming to a close after 12 months in development. Theres still quite some distance left yet, mainly optimising the images, tweaking the level boundaries and a few minor features to finalise. It is important to note that the artwork in the game is *not* coming to a close, just the coding side of things :) The screenies below are just to illustrate some of the stuff we've been working on.
Firstly we introduced some new, far leaner firework effects. The old fireworks (see www.urban-games.net/chainworks/Downloads/5.jpg ) used 1500 particles for each explosion, the new ones around 350 (which is still too large for a final build, but we're working on that). I also would like to implement a scaling system that delays the explosion of some fireworks in a chain to prevent a sudden hammering of the particle system when 10 fireworks all demand 350 particles at once.
There are a few gameplay bugs left to work out and we need to work on scaling, and optimization of memory usage. We're hoping to enter BETA in mid September, as well as taking a build to the community weekend for people to check out. I shall leave you with some images from our internal alpha 1.5 build.
More can be found here : http://www.urban-games.net/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=1
Thank you all for your time,
#2
I still haven't got around to it but there's a major performance win by batching the particles. If you're not using animated particles then it'd be even easier to quickly implement.
If all your particles are rendering within the same layer (or are rendered consecutively) then you could potentially batch most if not all together.
It's something that's definatley worth your time to look at. A while ago, I tested this and got over a 60% performance increase. Obviously this'll vary but it'll definately be faster.
- Melv.
09/01/2006 (5:32 am)
Rob,I still haven't got around to it but there's a major performance win by batching the particles. If you're not using animated particles then it'd be even easier to quickly implement.
If all your particles are rendering within the same layer (or are rendered consecutively) then you could potentially batch most if not all together.
It's something that's definatley worth your time to look at. A while ago, I tested this and got over a 60% performance increase. Obviously this'll vary but it'll definately be faster.
- Melv.
#3
- Melv.
09/01/2006 (5:34 am)
Also, I should mention that there's a global particle scaler...$pref::T2D::particleEngineQuantityScale...which can be used to adjust the emission rates across all particles.
- Melv.
#4
- Melv.
09/01/2006 (5:35 am)
... and just to increase the spam; it looks freaking great!!!!!!!!!!!!!!- Melv.
#5
Thanks for the support :)
09/01/2006 (9:54 am)
haha, Yeah Melv, Alex Scarborough developed the batch rendering system for use in our game, and i did see some awesome performance increases, if thats the one your talking about :)Thanks for the support :)
Torque 3D Owner Rob Sandbach
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