Warscale 44 - You cant always win...
by Guimo · 07/13/2009 (12:59 am) · 1 comments
Hi everybody!!!
I usually post everytime I have something to show but in this case Im posting to comment about my failure. I guess a blog should be about what you did right and what your did wrong. On the end you learn more on your mistakes than your successes.
I havent posted anything for about three weeks. One of the reasons is that my real job got myself fully commited. I guess when numbers with more than 8 zeroes start popping out than things start getting more and more serious. So lately I was busy optimizing the performance of a server and I managed to get the full process run time from 80 hours to just 13. A nice result but ompletely tiresome.
I went to see the new Transformers movie and I can say... I wish I had studied in that university... The movie was fine, I had a great time and on the moments I wasnt drooling over Megan Fox or the girl at the campus my brain was wandering into videogames and suddenly I was thinking about my next franchise... Robot Zombie Pirates from the Outer Space. How cool it would be to be a pirate on a spaceship with a sworn enemy as this one:
And if the name feels cheesy... we still have the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles kicking around :)
Just a joke. But indeed I have a subgame in mind for Warscale called Warscale Scrolls. So if you are a coder with some free time and interested in helping me with this project, send me a mail guimo at spritekin dot com
Now going back to Warscale and my failures.
Before starting with my complaints, let me tell you Im working closely with Michael from SleepingPaint. If you dont know him, he will do a lot of great quality concept art which is great for someone as me, being completely deprived from any artistic skills. Here is his blog.
http://www.garagegames.com/community/blogs/view/16429
He is helping me a lot. Worth our time.
What was planned
Make 14 armor and weapons
I didnt manage to complete the 14 weapons but I least I did 8 and one of them is a magic item... sort of... at least under the logic it looks and behaves like a magic item but visually its still a dull gray axe. I need particles and sparks flying around the weapon.
If you have followed my blogs, I was trying some special effect by using billboards and animated textures. I managed to make some nice fire which was buggy but worked. So I decided to go for an ice effect. The idea was to have some kind of smoke slowly drifting up from the axe the same way any cold thing condenses the air humidity.
So I got this Magic particles app and made a nice animation and it was great. So the next task was to set my mesh. So I created a mesh mapped with an animated texture IFL which is formed by my 80 frames. I use Milkshape because I cant afford other fancy packages. Then I use the DTS exporter Plus to export the frames and thats where strange thing start to happen.
The problem is this. I export an animated sequence of 80 textures at 10 FPS. In fact I export 100 frames but then I manually blend 20 forming a cyclic animation of 80 frames (or at least the best I can do). Then, I setup the output FPS to 10 ad set the frames to 80. But when I export and test in TST the animation just plays frames 10 to 25 before looping with an obvious jump. After hours and hours (at least 2 days) of testing and trying to understand whats going on I learned that the engine always plays the IFL at 30FPS. The funny thing is that if you try to accomodate 80 frames originally intended at 10FPS in 30 FPS then you need to adjust your IFL file to count for 240 instead of 30 (making each frame to stay 3 frames).
Now, and this bugs me, for some strange reason, the IFL seems to skip a couple of frames from time to time Even when I know I dont have any problem in my animation sequence, it keeps throwing a strange hipcup at the end of each sequence. I really hate that. I have reduced the hipcup but I just cant get the appropiate combination which will allow me to play the animation correctly. Maybe its just my Photoshop skills are just inadequate to make a good animation. I dont know. If anybody can provide me with a nice loopable animated texture which I can use to test this I will be really grateful.
So, unable to solve that problem, I decided to go for another (and also painful) method. I decided to bite the bullet which in this case looks like a cannonball sized bullet and implement the particle system to work with the objectview. Note that I havent left the IFL technique... I think it will work great for creating walls of fire or similar effects.
So I started the tortuous path of adjusting the particle emitters to the model view which is not easy as the emitters are based on the gamebase and the objectview has no concept of that. Forunately the particlemitter is mostly a client side object and even when it has a lot of networking code, I hope most of it can be ignored...
aaaaaaaaannnnnnndddddddd... nothing else... I hope I can post shots soon.
Meanwhile... If you liked Fallout3... feast on this:
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=ru&sl=ru&tl=en&u=http://sdmobile.livejournal.com/18969.html&prev=hp&rurl=translate.google.com
Luck!
Guimo
I usually post everytime I have something to show but in this case Im posting to comment about my failure. I guess a blog should be about what you did right and what your did wrong. On the end you learn more on your mistakes than your successes.
I havent posted anything for about three weeks. One of the reasons is that my real job got myself fully commited. I guess when numbers with more than 8 zeroes start popping out than things start getting more and more serious. So lately I was busy optimizing the performance of a server and I managed to get the full process run time from 80 hours to just 13. A nice result but ompletely tiresome.
I went to see the new Transformers movie and I can say... I wish I had studied in that university... The movie was fine, I had a great time and on the moments I wasnt drooling over Megan Fox or the girl at the campus my brain was wandering into videogames and suddenly I was thinking about my next franchise... Robot Zombie Pirates from the Outer Space. How cool it would be to be a pirate on a spaceship with a sworn enemy as this one:
And if the name feels cheesy... we still have the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles kicking around :)
Just a joke. But indeed I have a subgame in mind for Warscale called Warscale Scrolls. So if you are a coder with some free time and interested in helping me with this project, send me a mail guimo at spritekin dot com
Now going back to Warscale and my failures.
Before starting with my complaints, let me tell you Im working closely with Michael from SleepingPaint. If you dont know him, he will do a lot of great quality concept art which is great for someone as me, being completely deprived from any artistic skills. Here is his blog.
http://www.garagegames.com/community/blogs/view/16429
He is helping me a lot. Worth our time.
What was planned
Make 14 armor and weapons
I didnt manage to complete the 14 weapons but I least I did 8 and one of them is a magic item... sort of... at least under the logic it looks and behaves like a magic item but visually its still a dull gray axe. I need particles and sparks flying around the weapon.
If you have followed my blogs, I was trying some special effect by using billboards and animated textures. I managed to make some nice fire which was buggy but worked. So I decided to go for an ice effect. The idea was to have some kind of smoke slowly drifting up from the axe the same way any cold thing condenses the air humidity.
So I got this Magic particles app and made a nice animation and it was great. So the next task was to set my mesh. So I created a mesh mapped with an animated texture IFL which is formed by my 80 frames. I use Milkshape because I cant afford other fancy packages. Then I use the DTS exporter Plus to export the frames and thats where strange thing start to happen.
The problem is this. I export an animated sequence of 80 textures at 10 FPS. In fact I export 100 frames but then I manually blend 20 forming a cyclic animation of 80 frames (or at least the best I can do). Then, I setup the output FPS to 10 ad set the frames to 80. But when I export and test in TST the animation just plays frames 10 to 25 before looping with an obvious jump. After hours and hours (at least 2 days) of testing and trying to understand whats going on I learned that the engine always plays the IFL at 30FPS. The funny thing is that if you try to accomodate 80 frames originally intended at 10FPS in 30 FPS then you need to adjust your IFL file to count for 240 instead of 30 (making each frame to stay 3 frames).
Now, and this bugs me, for some strange reason, the IFL seems to skip a couple of frames from time to time Even when I know I dont have any problem in my animation sequence, it keeps throwing a strange hipcup at the end of each sequence. I really hate that. I have reduced the hipcup but I just cant get the appropiate combination which will allow me to play the animation correctly. Maybe its just my Photoshop skills are just inadequate to make a good animation. I dont know. If anybody can provide me with a nice loopable animated texture which I can use to test this I will be really grateful.
So, unable to solve that problem, I decided to go for another (and also painful) method. I decided to bite the bullet which in this case looks like a cannonball sized bullet and implement the particle system to work with the objectview. Note that I havent left the IFL technique... I think it will work great for creating walls of fire or similar effects.
So I started the tortuous path of adjusting the particle emitters to the model view which is not easy as the emitters are based on the gamebase and the objectview has no concept of that. Forunately the particlemitter is mostly a client side object and even when it has a lot of networking code, I hope most of it can be ignored...
aaaaaaaaannnnnnndddddddd... nothing else... I hope I can post shots soon.
Meanwhile... If you liked Fallout3... feast on this:
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=ru&sl=ru&tl=en&u=http://sdmobile.livejournal.com/18969.html&prev=hp&rurl=translate.google.com
Luck!
Guimo
Associate OmegaDog
:) Fallout4 looks so realistic! ;) ROFL!