Blog for Todd Pickens at GarageGames.com

FPS Environment Pack free Update, or...

Todd Pickens — 2008-09-01T18:15:51+00:00

...The Odyssey...sans Penelope

It's a long time in coming, but I recently submitted an updated build of my FPS Environment Pack to Derek at Garage Games.

It may not have taken me the ten years it took Ulysses to reach home after the fall of Troy, but it has been a bit of an Odyssey.

I started on this Free Update over a year ago, while a lot of folks waited patiently. Not unlike Ulysses, chance and circumstance turned my undertaking into an unexpected journey. But at long last it is done, and I hope that all of you who purchased the pack enjoy the result and put it to good use.

The update started as the addition of a summer time theme inspired by a Asher Brown Durand painting.

...Along the way it sort of snowballed into over a dozen different demo maps with Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter, and day and night settings. And a full TGEA port. Ultimately I cut that back to nine maps covering various takes on Spring, Summer, mid and late Autumn.

The TGEA port also got cut from this update, because TGEA went through some major changes which requires a good amount of rework to the content pack's port. That will be getting my attention soon.

What's In The Update?

The pack is now based on TGE 1.5.2. The original TGE Water upgrade by Manoel Neto that I started with, was replaced by Alex Scarborough's Modernization Kit.

I redesigned the interface and menu system to support a better end user experience.

A really cool animated Butterflies shape resource was donated by Tom Feni.

Andy "International Man of Leisure" Maloney supported me with a load of resource integration, fixes, tweaks, and tunes for the playable Demo.

Adam Larson, of "Legions Lead Coder" fame, recently developed an Object Fading resource that enabled me to have objects and particles fade out at specified distances.

Adam also developed a Particle Alignment resource that allowed me to do some really simple, but really cool particle emitter stuff in conjunction with Alex's shiny shader water.

All of that coupled with Jon Jorajuria's Kick @$$ audio, and his original Square Foliage Replicator, Shapebase Animation Triggered Sounds, and Embedded DTS Sound resource, make for a sand box that was hard to stop playing in.

I owe those guys a REALLY BIG Thank You for all of their assistance, support, and awesome resources. I could not have done it without you, and I am in your debt.

...Not that it needs saying, but YOU ROCK!

You can see the Video HERE.

The update should be available on GG site very soon. When it is, you will find it HERE.

Someone once said...

Todd Pickens — 2008-07-03T20:02:33+00:00

..."Often, the right thing to do and the hardest thing to do are the same thing".

I have exited the garage, Garage Games that is.

It was not an easy decision, but a necessary one for me.

My one year anniversary was June 4th of 08. In that time I had a chance to meet and work with some truly great people. Some of those folks have also moved on, others remain. All of whom I hope to work with again in some fashion.

Working at GG during its transitional period and start up of InstantAction was both challenging and rewarding. It was a reminder of why I enjoy game development, working with creative and passionate people, mentoring juniors and learning for my seniors.

It was also a reminder of the hazards of burying your head in a project and putting your work before your health, and not paying attention to the goings on around you. A lot of time slipped by, as time has a tendency to do when you're not paying attention.

Most of all a reminder of a piece of advice I have often given young developers I have worked with, "make sure you clearly understand exactly what your situation is, and what it is not".

What was my situation? Well, I made the decision to join GG primarily for one reason, family. There were other reason, but that was the Prime Mover.

I had loved ones in need of help, and the best opportunity for providing it was hanging up my indi contractor gloves and diving back into studio work. Ultimately I picked GG and made the road trip north to Oregon.

It was an interesting year. Life is what happens when your not paying attention, and it can sure throw you some curve balls. But that's all part of the ride.

Now... I'm taking some extended time off, enjoying the hell out of the beautiful summer here in Eugene, visiting family, getting my running back in form, and generally recharging my batteries for the year ahead and whatever it may bring.

I've begun to rebuild my old web site in the form of a blog, so that I can keep it up to date and post with greater ease. Its in the very early stages, and seems to be running a bit slow, so a provider switch may be in order. Check it out HERE if you are interested.

And of course, the obligatory Pic.

Fallen Empre: Legions, Only on InstantAction

Stay tuned, more to come.

I think I saw Bigfoot...

Todd Pickens — 2007-06-24T18:52:04+00:00

But it turned out to just be a really hairy Hippy

It has been a while since my last update.

And it has been a crazy, and event filled 4 months.

When I last posted, I was showing off the "soon to be released" free update and TGEA port of my FPS Environment Pack.

Since that last post, my development partner Jon Jorajuria has had some great success with his musical career (but I will leave that for him to share). The toe I broke 3 days after a race on Catalina Island has finally healed. I ported the RTS Environment Pack to a TLK enabled build of TGE, which means all of you who have had to deal with the lighting differences between the original non TLK build and use of it in a more recent version of TGE will soon have an out of the box solution, so to speak.

You can see a few more shots here if you are interested.

And last but certainly not least, I moved... twice... and accepted a position with Garage Games here in beautiful Eugene Oregon!!!

So I have been crazy busy to say the least. But things are settling down and my personal projects are coming back on track. I will soon have a solid idea of when I can release the free FPS Pack content and TGEA port, as well as the RTS update. My apology for the delay.

Everyone at Garage Games has been fantastic, and they made me feel at home right from the start. It is great to finally be able to put a face on everyone I have come to know through the forums.

There are lots of exciting things happening here and I am thrilled to be a part of it.

...more "soon".

There's a Surprise Inside!

Todd Pickens — 2007-03-31T19:13:51+00:00

Or... How is this post like a box of CrackerJacks?

So in my last post I said that the free update for my FPS Environment Pack was coming with "a few surprises". Now that most of those surprises are just about nailed down I thought I would give everyone a sneak peek.

Aside from the spring time version of the original environment...

The new demo environments will include shiny goodness of the Modernization Kit by Alex Scarborough.

I like to try to showcase community resources that I would want to make games with whenever I can, and the Modernization Kit, which is still in beta, is a very cool. There is more to it than just fancy water, but you can grab it and check out the details over on the MK thread.

Tom Feni has been very generous and donated some very cool animated butterflies to the update. They look great and really help add life to the setting.

And last but definitely not least. Thanks to Jon Jorajuria, Tim, Joe, and many others, I am really happy to be able include...

But it ain't done just yet. Its very close, but there is still a little work to do here and there before it's just right. I want to get the butterflies moving around the fields, there are some normal maps to polish, and user docs to update. And if the timing works out I may be able to add a few other goodies.

Thats all for now, I have to get back to work.

Flower Power

Todd Pickens — 2007-03-24T16:23:49+00:00

Just thought I would post a quick update since the free expansion is taking longer to finish up than planned.

As you can see in my previous post here, the art style has changed a bit. Originally I was developing the summer/spring setting with a much brighter and slightly over saturated look for the sake of pushing the contrast between it and the original demo environment included in the pack, see below, but realized that I was drifting too far from the original style.

So I tweaked it a bit, mostly by changing the lighting set up, and have arrived at this.

I have taken a few days off to rest and recover (broken toe among other things), but will be finishing this up very soon. Just a few things left to work.

Aside from the additional content for the summer setting (trees, flowers, ground textures, etc), A TGE 1.5 port of the pack will be included. There will be a few surprises as well, but I will save the details on that until everything is ready.

I hope every one enjoys it.

Road Work

Todd Pickens — 2007-02-08T22:13:39+00:00

Ando recently posted some great shots Here of some stuff he was working on.

The work was all stock TGE, (done very well!), but the thing that jumped out was the road he created. It turns out that he made it with a transparent model that is placed a fraction above the map terrain. As he pointed out, doing this on terrain that had hills (or any height variation) would be a real challenge.

This got me surfing the forums a bit, and I noticed that a LOT of people have had difficulty with making roads in TGE.

Depending on what you want to do, creating the road with a set of tiling DIFFs is one solution, and Ando's transparent model approach is another. But a thirds option seemed obvious to me so, so I mocked up a couple of quick test to help illustrate it. All three methods have some obvious limitations and weaknesses. The trick is just to pick the method that provides the best solution for your particular project.

The images below are stock TGE with a tileable road texture that is applied to the terrain just like any other terrain texture. I have the terrain square size set to 8, but this could be done with any acceptable terrain square size. Smaller square sizes will buy you a more detailed terrain mesh and resulting sharper looking textures.

Doing a full set of roads with left and right turns, stop signs painted on the ground, etc, would require a good bit more than the stock TGE editor limit of six 256x256 textures. But there are community resources available for expanding that limit. Look Here for more info on that.

Here are a couple more shots. For my test I created a north/south facing road texture, an east/west facing road texture, one rounded 90 turn road texture, and one intersection road texture.

Marathon Man...

Todd Pickens — 2007-01-31T21:38:37+00:00

...Minus 13.1

It has been way too long since my last post, and I have been a busy man.

I started the new year by training for and running in my first half marathon. The best I can describe it would be like being in a polite stampede.

I actually had a blast, and am training for another run coming up soon.

But the running is easy, you just put one foot in front of the other, then repeat until you cross the finish line. The real marathon I have been tackling is game development and content pack creation.

I am working on an very cool little TGB project/mad scientist experiment with my development partner, Jon Jorajuria, and can't wait to share it, but it's not yet ready for prime time, so more on that later. I have a lot of stuff to show in the coming weeks, so I'll keep this one short.

I have been working on updates to both the FPS Environment pack and the RTS Environment pack. See pics below.

The Road Ahead

My research and development on three new large scale content packs is almost complete, at least one of which is going to raze the bar for my future packs, and I hope provide a more diverse and higher quality product for everyone.

Most of the R&D has been about really analyzing Torque and figuring out how to take the visual complexity of TGE environments to another level. Its sort of like an old economics class assignment I did in high school many years ago. You get one sheet of note book paper, one paper clip, one rubber band and 3 inches of scotch tape. Now build the highest free standing tower possible. For the record, I won the tower building contest.

Game development, or in this case, environment development, is sort of the same thing. You have a limited set of resources, in this case, the engines features and capabilities (plus a lot of fantastic community created resources), and a goal, make an awesome environment.

Thats a little bit simplified. The "make it awesome" part is to inspire the user, but fundamentally it has to provide good quality content for them to work with.

I will be starting official development of those new packs and updates soon.

How is a Mini Pack like Bag of Holding?

Todd Pickens — 2006-11-01T16:50:42+00:00

...I just qualified myself as an old school D&D nerd there didn't I?

That's ok, my cloak of indifference will protect me.

This is sort of an unofficial announcement for the release of the first three in a series of Mini Packs. They should officially launch in a few days.

Well, in this case it's a set of art assets extracted from my FPS Environment Pack to create a smaller more affordable content pack designed to target specific needs.

The Mini Packs will make it easy for anyone who needs art for their project to pick and choose from select sets of similarly themed content, like the Graveyard, Barnyard, or the Barrels and Crates Mini Packs.

The art assets for each Mini Pack will come in .dts, .3ds, Maya and LightWave Friendly formats. All original source art will be included as well. I would love to get feedback from the community on what other file formats would make your project development easier.

I will be releasing several more Mini Packs through Garage Games very soon, but if you have seen elements of my FPS or RTS Environment Packs that you think would make a great mini pack, let me know. For that matter, any content pack suggestions are welcome.

Is it dead? ...Get an axe!

Todd Pickens — 2006-09-12T02:01:22+00:00

FPS Environment Pack - Post Mortem

Here is the link

I chose to make this content pack focused on 1st and 3rd person game development because the vast majority of the feedback following the release of my first content pack, the RTS Environment Pack, was from people using it in 1st or 3rd person game development.

I am really looking forward to working on some RTS content again sometime soon, and may have a big surprise in the works, but more on that another time.

My goals for the FPS Environment Pack were pretty clear, higher quality and resolution of textures, higher poly counts for the models, LOD for as many of the objects as time would allow, Animated shapes, Environmental sound to help immerse the player, and examples of embedded sounds in objects to ease environment development. Oh' also to develop with TLK

I hit most of those goals pretty successfully. But not without a few bumps along the way.

What Went Right?

The overall atmosphere comes across pretty successfully in the demo map. This is due in great part to the excellent sound work Jon Jorajuria provided.

I got extensive examples of object LOD in the pack, animated shapes, and objects with embedded sounds. As a bonus, Jon was also able to help me get the shader water resource implemented in the pack, which was an excellent addition to the environment and definitely helped the suspension of disbelief for the viewer.

What went wrong?

The subject matter for the content pack is another story altogether. But to keep a long story short, I basically failed to focus on a given environment and allowed a number of settings to collide...primarily because I REALLY wanted to do them all. The resulting content was a mix of western rural farm land, barns, split rail fences, wind mills, etc. A dock town, pilings, old wooden docks, stone seawalls, etc. And a touch of the "Sleepy Hollow" content pack I started working on.

The result of mixing these setting was a more diverse environment than I had originally planned, but also a less detailed environment. I could do another complete pack just to really flesh out what I have provided in this one.

I knew better than to develop this way, but did it any way. One of the advantages of being inde I suppose.

What did I learn?

1- Good sound work will breathe life into your game environment. Its value is often overlooked, and can't be overstated.
2- TGE can handle a HELL OF A LOT of objects in an environment. And far more effectively than I have provided an example of with this pack. I could have done additional levels of detail for each object, and sculpted the terrain to help reduce the amount of rendering that had to be done at any one time. But regardless of my some what reckless map development, TGE still kicked butt.
3- Garage Games and the GG community continues to humble me with the amazing support and positive feedback. It is truly a pleasure to work with everyone and provide content for the community.

Whats next? There is a lot in the works...stay tuned!

A bird in the hand is worth...

Todd Pickens — 2006-08-03T08:34:47+00:00

..Killing two birds with one stone? ...And other metaphors I could butcher to make my point.

It is late and I am in a self imposed crunch mode on my new Environment Content Pack, but I thought I would steal a moment for a quick .plan, it having been ages since my last post.

I once saw a documentary where this native guy was trying to find water out in the wild bush. To achieve this he stuck a chunk of salt through a knot hole in a hollow tree. The next thing you know this monkey comes along and tries to get the salt, so he sticks his hand in and grabs it, but with the chunk of salt in his had, the monkeys fist is now too big to withdraw from the hole. That monkey really wanted that salt and was not soon going to give up his prize.

Now that monkey had been holding on to that chunk of salt for a good while. Setting in the hot sun had taken its toll, and once he gave up, the first place he headed was for water. And the crafty native followed the monkey back to his watering hole and drank his fill.

That story comes to mind because I feel like the monkey with his hand stuck in a the hole and unwilling to give up that mother load chunk of salt.

Over the past several months, I have developed a mother load of environment content. It all sprang from this great white whale of an idea I had for an environment/game/demo project. However, juggling my various content pack ideas, contract work, side projects, and challenges of life, I couldn't seem to either get the time, or clarity to nail down one specific content pack project. So the monster just kept growing.

Now here I am pushing against my deadlines and feeling like that monkey with his hand stuck in a knot hole for not wanting to give up that chunk of salt. Probably not the best analogy, but it will do.

The end result is a compromise. This new content pack definitely ain't the great white whale I started chasing after completion of my first environment pack, but its a pretty big fish just the same.

The new environment is focused on Torque Game Engine, Torque Lighting Kit, and First Person Games. The "First Person Games" aka FPS development approach is worth noting, sine my first environment pack was specifically designed for RTS environment development, and so, has lower texture resolution and poly counts. The new content pack, by contrast, has much higher texture resolution, model complexity, and level of detail support.

I have also included a number of features, functionality, and examples that I thought would be useful to developers like , animated .dts shapes, extensive environment sounds, TLK support, and a few other special features I will keep under wraps until launch day.

Hopefully by adding these extra goodies and documenting the "how to" aspects, you guys will have working examples of various things, like the animated .dts shapes, and be able to utilize these features more easily in the games you create.

As with my first environment content pack, this new one will ship with playable builds and environments created to demonstrate the use of the pack assets.

The two older screen shots below are of assets that were staged in a test map composed of elements from my first content pack and the new one...In other words, shots of a work in progress, but you get the idea. I'll submit and image of the day very soon and do a proper .plan once development of the content pack is wrapped up.

What I don't have yet, is a name for the environment, I have been banging my head against the wall on that one. The best I could describe it would be something like Sleepy Hallow meets the old west...sort of.

Take a look at the pics and see if you can come up with a good one. I am open to suggestions.