Blog for Jeff "Reno" Raab at GarageGames.com

The Third Reich's New Home

Jeff "Reno" Raab — 2006-03-31T04:43:03+00:00

Greetings all,
As some of you may have noticed, TTR's site has been down for a while, due to several reasons. However, we're proud to announce that our site is back and running again!
While there are still a few things to fix and recover, most of our site, as well as our forums, have been recovered, and we wish that you would come and be a part of it.

TTR's new home is located at www.ttrgame.com

For those of you that wish to be part of a community of some of the most stubborn, dedicated people on the internet, feel free to drop by the forums, located at forums.ttrgame.com

So come in and be part of the community.

What's happened to TTR?

Jeff "Reno" Raab — 2006-01-20T19:21:29+00:00

Heya all, This is Jeff Raab(aka Reno) from The Third Reich.
Now, firstly, some of you may have wondered of late what's happened to TTR. The site's down, and no one's showed up here to say anything.
Well, frst and foremost, TTR's still chugging away. We've just had some issues with the site of late that we're trying to sort out.

In the meantime, if you had been part of our community, or was lurking our forums, we have a temp forum set up in the meantime untill we can get our main site back and running. It can be found here: www.dustinb.com/ttr
I cant say we're used to having communities to work with, so apoligies that it's taken me this long to get around to telling all you nice people at GG ;)
I hope you guys'll visit our temp forums(an explination of what's happened to the site, and what's going on can be found on there as well.) and continue as part of our community when we get our main site back and running.

Once we get this mess sorted out, we've got quite a bit in the way of progress to show off, so I'll make sure that I drop it off here as well ;)

Cheers all,
-Jeff "Reno" Raab

Friday Oct 14 17:38

Jeff "Reno" Raab — 2005-10-14T17:38:32+00:00

IndieGrass, and what it does for your games.

Hey all!

We finally let loose one of the many projects i'm working on for The Third Reich, this one being dubbed "IndieGrass".

edit: tossed in our spiffy logo ;)

From out site(www.thethirdreich.com):
www.thethirdreich.com/about.php?pid=8267

Quote:

indieGrass is a project Reno has been working on all summer, combining the works of Sylvian Guerraz, many online resources, and a lot of hard work to integrate with the engine itself.

indieGrass basically takes the concept of interactive foliage to a whole new level. It allows the engine to coat areas with grass as far as the eye can see, while also allowing players to interact with it. Pushing it out of the way, trampling it down, or blowing it up entirely. And all this is done completely dynamically and on the fly.

indieGrass is generated at runtime. So no previous artwork is required, simplifying the process of creating massive fields of grass to simply adding an object in a map which generates the grass itself.
indieGrass simplifies the process of creating lots of dynamic, interactive grass, giving the in-game world a much more interactive, immersive, and realistic feel.

indieGrass is the ultimate solution for a develper's in-game grass needs. It's capable of coving very large areas, fully interactible, and can be destructable if the situation calls for it.

Vids of it in action:
http://www-evasion.imag.fr/Publications/2003/GPRFC03/prairie_mp1.mpg

http://www-evasion.imag.fr/Publications/2003/GPRFC03/prairie-recover_mp1.mpg

The grass is completely interactive with the enviornment around it, moving or getting crushed down according to objects colliding with it, or being shot/blown up grom ingame projectiles and explosives.

It's still in development, but it's inching closer every day.

Just figured you people would enjoy a random screen in your .plan, even with the videos ;)

Feel free to pose any questions you have about this, i'll be happy to answer them :)

-Jeff "Reno" Raab
-Lead Programmer, The Third Reich

Saturday Sep 24 8:20

Jeff "Reno" Raab — 2005-09-24T08:20:34+00:00

FFDRL inches closer....

Well, after a lovely run in with a few problems, we have manged to get our Fixed Function Dynamic Range Lighting implementation closer to completion.

here's a beutiful shot of it compared next to standard Torquq lighting.

Currently, this is still runnig through a fixed apature system, but you can see how it now shows a *far* wider range of colors, ranging for overbright, to underexposed, like the shadows on the terrain(credit for that peice of brilliance goes soley to Del ;) )
All that's left is to finish up and polish off the dynamic apature adjustment code itself, and our DRL code will be close to completion.

why am i calling it the DRL code?
it stands for "Dynamic Range Lighting"
While it simulates the general effect of HDR, as several have pointed out, it doesnt truely "over/under expose" the lighting, or use floating point surfaces, so we opted for a name that was generally the same as HDR, but at the same time, was true to what it was. So we're using Dynamic Range Lighting.

hope you enjoy your pretty picture. We're working on a few more snazzy things to drop on this yet, so you havent seen everything ;)

-Reno out.

Wednesday Sep 21 4:57

Jeff "Reno" Raab — 2005-09-21T04:57:17+00:00

things concerning HDR

Alrighty everyone, sit down around the campfire, for i bear important, and incredibly interesting news.
All of you know of a fanciful thing called High Dynamic Range lighting.
Well, the TTR team has developed HDR for Torque.

But, sad to say, not for TSE.
So for what you may ask?
TGE.

That's right, we've developed HDR for TGE. We're calling it Fixed Function High Dynamic Range out of sheer lazyness.
Some of you are probably asking, "whats your proof?"
well, i shall quote from my original posting on the TTR forums:

Quote:

Welp ladies and gents, the TTR coders have done it again.
We've broken every coding standard ever made.

This isnt strictly TTR related, so it should be in the clear to show, if not, i give full rights to EK to show up at my house and tazer me in the eye.

pretty no?

Allow me to explain what's going on here.
Basically, i'm sure all of you have heard of a pretty little thing called High Dynamic Range lighting, correct? Basically what that does is it allows the camera to simulate the adjustment of the visible range of light so that you can have an overall wider visible range. This introduces more vibrant, realisitic scenes.

Traditional HDR implementation requires at absolute minimum, pixel shaders 2.0, and about a gig of ram, usually more along the likes of ps3.0 and 2gb of ram.
However, there have been implementations that go as low as ps1.1(a helpful member of the GG community has acheived this)

So what have we got that's better? how about HDR that requires no shaders at all, and can run on any machine that can run the stock Torque Game Engine, as seen in the pic above.
We are rather accurately simulating how the eye perceives overbright, the effect that happens when you walk into a very bright area suddenly, like going outside from indoors.

This has been acheived without shaders, and actually runs faster that the psuedo HDR effect that the Torque Lighting Pack does, as well as being more accurate and vibrant.

Why should we care?
Because this will likely work its way onto TSE, saving us alot of power that would otherwise be attributed to the HDR shaders, giving us more elbow room, as well as other indie games having a massive edge over most professional studios.

Hope you enjoyed this little tech report.
me and Del have been working hard, and are still going.
-Reno out

After looking at this, some of you may begin to consider "That's just the Light Pack, but brightened"
Well, actually, its completely new code(and slightly faster, actually)
Not only is it new code, all the lighting in that scene is procedural(the lightmaps themselves are still static, but the ambient HDR lighting is completely calculated on the fly)
While it's still being polished, our dynamic apature code allows for the lighting to adjust to the apature of the camera dynamically, so dark areas are truly dark, and bright areas, as you can see, are truly bright. Our dynamic apature code will also include the support for the sudden transition of lighting, so walking outside from indoors acheives that overbright effect, which your camera will slowly adjust itself to, or vice versa.

We have the intent to show this off in full at IGC, so stay at the ready, because this stuff is danged cool.

Friday Feb 18 23:51

Jeff "Reno" Raab — 2005-02-18T23:51:49+00:00

As progress of the fxLipSync continues.....

Right.
Well i have some good news:

I finally got the base code for fxLipSync(and all influenced files) to compile properly.
This basically means that at this point, the code is mainly done(dis-regarding the mess of tweaks and debugs to go through) and testing can begin shortly.
Our modeler has started work on a face that we will use to demo what will be done to make the characters in game use the Lip Sync system.
As it nears completion ill take an indepth view on how this resource runs, and what is needed to make it work.
Also: im still planning on maintaining the $20-25 pricetag, just incase some of you didnt know.

Im also debating weither i should expand this into a full fledged facial animation thing, but that would come later(free upgrade from fxLipSync?)

anyways,
-Reno out

Thursday Feb 10 22:02

Jeff "Reno" Raab — 2005-02-10T22:02:25+00:00

Progression of the lip sync resource

Alright. this sortof dropped off for a while due to complications, but i managed to sit down last night and fix the last error preventing the base code from compiling.
All thats left now is to get it so Torque Script can send the audio and object thats "talking" and get back what facial expression to play.

The only problem is as of this time, i have no idea how to do that :)

when thats done, we just need our modeler to make a face with the visemes and do some tests and it should be clear :)

-Reno out

Tuesday Jan 25 2:43

Jeff "Reno" Raab — 2005-01-25T02:43:55+00:00

Lip-Sync, and general ramblings.

Righty then,
this is my first .plan, so ill just ramble on, pretending i know what im doing ;)

first off:
Lip-syncing.
I know quite a few of you have seemed interested on me working on this, so I've been tinkering on this for a while, and its mostly done, just have to whipe off the last few errors and get script calls set up and it'll be mostly done.
The question is, would any of you consider buying it?
I've been tinkering on this thing for quite some time, so I wanted to know if any of you would be willing to buy this as a resource. I kinda feel bad about having to charge money, but we are really poor over at The Third Reich, and need some money to get our hands on stuff to speed up the development process(including several things here. Tank pack anyone?)
Also, if you would buy it, what REASONABLE price would you be willing to pay for something liek this. i currently plan on having the code, and a head that will lip-sync to audio files to show the general setup.
Ill post something like pictures or whatnot when i get this running properly.

next,
i completely forgot what i was going to put after lip syncing, so ill just fade into teh shadows and hope no one notices ;)

-Reno out