Blog for Gareth Fouche at GarageGames.com

Korrinport Reloaded

Gareth Fouche — 2008-08-19T22:22:51+00:00

Some pics of the newly revamped Korrinport Dock District. Many kudos go to the Dexsoft guys, their house models are great.

SoW - More concept art

Gareth Fouche — 2008-07-18T08:12:07+00:00

Been in a sketching mood lately, so...

It may not be Oblivion...

Gareth Fouche — 2008-07-09T22:25:24+00:00

But I think it's purty :D

Click for larger version.

Click for larger version.

Click for larger version.

Click for larger version.

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That there is Ghevist. From the lore :

Quote:
They summoned the tribes together in the place called Ghevist, the Meeting Grounds; there, to demonstrate their intent, they slaughtered the leaders of the tribes and their families. From then on, they told the gathered tribes, the lands would be known as Imarathar, the Chosen Land, for they had chosen it as their home, their sovereignty. All who dwelt within its borders did so only by their will, all would bow their heads before them, all who could speak would vow their loyalty to the Imarathi.

Now before anyone gets excited and thinks that the fact that I'm showing this is Significant with a capital S, let me slam on the brakes. It's just a little side area I whipped up in an hour or so to test out the new "Ground Cover" functionality in the latest version of the engine. Which is handling rendering the grass and rocks in the above screens. The sneaky GG code monkeys added this in without much fanfare and I've only just realized that it is there (I'm slow :P). You'll have seen the like in other games, it's basically an invisible radius around the player which fades in and out foliage and small detail models. And it's pretty damn sweet.

So yeah, Ghevist is more of a lore tie in, if you take the time to explore in Scars of War you can find areas you might read about in books and/or get side quests to go to these places. There may or may not be cool stuff to discover there. All I'm saying is, if I discovered a remote lake hidden in the mountains with an island in the middle, I'd probably get my swimming trunks on. ;)

Ghevist takes it's inspiration from Crater Lake, which I visited about a year or so ago when I was in Oregon on a business trip :

A really stunning place to visit if you're in Oregon, worth the drive.

Celebratory

Gareth Fouche — 2008-06-24T13:11:41+00:00

(Mirrored from my blog)

Well, this post is a day late, but nevermind. It was my birthday yesterday, I am now officially 26 years of age. Hooray for surviving another year!

Interestingly, it is now approximately 3 years since I started work on Scars of War specifically and 7 years since I first started teaching myself game development techniques with the goal of actually making a game. It's been a long journey, with still more to come, but it's been a hell of a ride so far. It seems like such a long time, seeing it in writing, almost a decade, but honestly the time has flown by.

And this year has been the best year yet. I've come so far since my first tentative steps, teaching myself how to use OpenGL and windows API calls. Probably the biggest shift this year is moving the project out into the public spotlight, getting the old blog up and running, starting on the website (yeah, I know I've been lazy there, need to jack up and get it finished), spreading the word on gaming forums. It was and continues to be kind of nerve wracking, honestly. Laboring over something for years in private is one thing, wheeling it out in front of an audience for them to scrutinize is another entirely. A good litmus test though.

This "PR" work (because that is what it is, make no mistake, even though you strive to present yourself honestly and plainly it is still a form of public relations and marketing) is also a surprising amount of work. The publics ability to consume new information and updates far outstrips an individual or even a companies ability to produce those updates. A double edged sword, in some ways, but simply another aspect you have to juggle as an indie. It may be taxing but thankfully it is also enjoyable and rewarding, like so many other aspects of being an indie developer. Showing off your work is nerve-wracking but those moments when someone appreciates what you're working so hard for, when they express the excitement you hoped they would feel, those moments are just...special.

Opening up my development to the public has also opened an unexpected number of doors. Some game sites (RPGWatch, Gamebanshee, the Codex) have begun to follow the development, a fact that still seems somewhat surreal to me, seeing my name in their news posts. And I recently participated in the ITS roundtable discussion, a discussion which included quite a few luminaries of the RPG field. Humbling company to be in, that. Thanks go to Vince for making that happen.

It is funny, this whole journey, because there is no clearly defined line which says "here, here is where you are officially a game developer". You just work at it and one day you realise that you have become one, that you spend your time working on it and sacrificing for it and thinking about it and moving in those social circles. And you realise you've crossed that line, wherever it was. That the difference between you and the bigger players is nothing besides resources and the history they have accumulated behind their "brand". As arrogant as it may sound you realise it isn't an externally imposed title, it's not something you are awarded by a committee . It is simply a way of being and doing. You are what you do and think about all day.

Heh, look at me, I've gone all strange and philosophical. :p

I was commenting to Vince when we were chatting a while ago that I had a strange thought driving home one night. That I should tell my girlfriend that if I should get into a car accident and die or end up in a coma or something, that she should go onto my blog and tell people that I stopped not because I gave up but because I had suffered an accident. It was important to me that the people who were anticipating SoW and supporting my development would know that. Lol, what a strange thought hey? Priorities, I have them.

Anyway, that's enough rambling. It must be the onset of old age coming on, I tell you. ;)

The Gingerbread Villa

Gareth Fouche — 2008-05-13T19:15:25+00:00

Just a small update.

This is a building I started working on a while back. I didn't finish it at the time, code work took priority, but I've come back to finishing it now.

I started off with some concept art :

It's, heh, a bit bright and cartooney, yes? A mate of mine saw it and said it looked like a gingerbread Spanish villa, not quite what I was going for, but funny nonetheless. Concept art isn't really for public consumption, well mine isn't, I'm not a good enough artist to constantly churn out quality works, they are more quick and dirty sketches for me to nail down a concept in my mind. I was going for a sun drenched villa, a rich estate with a bell tower from which to signal the workers in the fields. Bright, saturated colours.

So this is the model I've been working on.

SoW - Some concept art

Gareth Fouche — 2008-04-14T17:01:26+00:00

Some of you will already have seen these on my other blog but for those hopeless degenerates who are too lazy to navigate their way there, here is some concept art. ;)

First up, Mijhati, Imarathi God-Sorceress. Actually, a mask/headdress representation of her :

Click here for full size

Next, the General :

Click here for full size

General Rheygar? Imarathi God-Sorceress? "Whozzat?" I hear you ask. Luckily, I wrote up some lore a while back to give you a little taste of the world and setting, might shine some light here :

The War in the West

Blog of War

Gareth Fouche — 2008-04-02T11:36:04+00:00

Well, this will be a short post, for once, heh.

Just letting people know I have started an official developer diary blog. It can be found here :

scarsofwargame.com/blog/

I tend to ramble on long windedly about game development and gaming in general. Fear not, this blog isn't supplanting my GG posts, in general I will post up torque related updates here on GG as well. But I decided to start it for a few reasons :

1) Get people used to going to the official SoW domain for updates, in preparation for the site going live (it hasn't yet). A central source of information and updates is crucial for PR and community building. ;)

2) Create a place for the non-technical to follow SoW dev progress. I tend to go in depth into code systems and suchlike here on GG, think it might swamp your average gamer in jargon.

3) Motivate myself to make more regular news updates.

4) A place to rant, occasionally.

Anyway, give it a look, you may find it amusing.

Scars of Bloom

Gareth Fouche — 2008-02-28T20:32:39+00:00

It's all Josh Josh Engebretson's fault.

He forced me, forced me I tell you, to port to TGEA. I've betrayed everything I believe in. :(

Heh, just kidding. But it is his fault. Him and those damn videos of his mutant Torque-Ogre-Python hybrid. I witnessed it's might, it's beauty, and I knew envy. My heart seized with the desire to posses it, to make it my own. Forever.

Ok, I'm in a funny, dramatic mood. Actually, I'm always in that mood, I usually just hide it better.

Basically, I saw his videos and the technolust I struggle to subdue roared up like crazy. Shaders! Shiny! Physics! Gimme gimme gimme! People who read my posts regularly have probably picked up that I DON'T believe in automatically porting your project to a shinier platform simply because it comes out and looks all nifty. That if you are in the middle of a project in TGE, the best thing, the wisest thing, is to finish it in TGE then move on for your NEXT game. Get a game finished, then port. Thats the clever thing to do. Finish the race before starting a new one.

And dammit all, I've betrayed that. *Waves fist angrily at Josh*

Actually, it was more than just Josh's cool vids. I got into a discussion with guys at work about graphics and suchlike, began reminiscing about the days when I was writing my own engine...I used to really enjoy it. It was frustrating and time consuming, sure, but learning new techniques, playing with technology, there is something satisfying about that, in a "tinkering with your car engine" kind of way. I hadn't realized how much I missed that. RPGs are massively data driven. Which means 90% of what I write is data structures to store data, and functions to access and manipulate that data. It's not really cutting edge programming. I remember playing with neural networks, working out shaders from the DX API...and I missed that. :(

So the fire burned brightly, and I couldn't bring it back under control again. I spent an entire weekend when I could have been working on gameplay looking at more advanced engines. First, I looked at TGEA, I own a license after all. People complain on the forums, but this is a reality of all forums, everywhere. I needed to see for myself. I got the basic SDK compiling, played with the basic level, looked through the code...hmmm, seemed like there was a lot commented out. Editors broken. My levels didn't work so well. Some architecture changes meant resources I relied on now called functions that hadn't just changed, they were nonexistent. Ouch.

So then, and this is demonstrative of my craziness, I downloaded Ogre. Just wanted a look, I thought. Let me see the demos....oh look, it is a plugin system. Josh plugged it on top of Torque using Python, I wonder if I could too...I went off like that for a bit, I dunno, I may have been drooling. But after a while, sense returned. What was I thinking? I'd come so far, and now I was thinking, even if only half seriously, about trying to put in a different renderer? Nuts, just plain nuts.

So I settled down, got back to my TGE version. And went happily along there for a while...until Matt Fairfax intervened. Dammit Matt, you are with Josh on my List. He posts this uber sweet writeup of all these TGEA enhancements...high res terrain textures (*weeps at the thought*), fixes to the missing bits of TGEA, editors restored and upgraded, all on top of adding in mission editor improvements. The mission editor in TGE is a bit fiddly, after using CTor for a while going back to TGE feels like a downgrade.

So this incredibly tempting update is on the way...and the embers re-ignite. I can have shaders, bloom, high res terrains, enhanced time-saving editors, polysoup, AND satisfy my urge to play with cool tech again? I failed my saving throw versus will effects and was hooked.

So I ported. First I bought the AFX upgrade. Oh, did I mention that happened about that time too? I wouldn't have moved without AFX, technolust or not. It's too useful, too integral to my project. So I took the AFX base and began the process of porting.

And...well, it was a bit painful. Porting and merging always is. Took me about 2 days of wrangling to get the majority of it in though, not bad, considering. Like I said, 90% of what I do is data driven. And the 2 engines are 90% the same. So, except for the gfx parts, it was fairly easy. Except for the gfx parts.

I was left with a few major systems to fix, but by this point I was on a roll. I discovered the editors weren't as broken as I thought, using legacy terrain is pretty decent. And a lot of the commented out code is simple stuff, like the rendering of boxes in editor mode or whatever. As I went into a bit more depth I realized I could put them back in pretty easily. I've decided to wait for Matt's update there, since I don't want to replicate work and it isn't holding me back, but otherwise I'll do it myself later.

One thing I did have to do was port the dynamic skins resource. Like I said, I had about 3 major systems left to fix after the port, the dynamic skins resource being the largest, hardest one. TGEA handles textures in a wildly different manner from TGE. I would need to dig in...

But first I went on holiday! See, at the same time things had been crazy at work, weekends at the office and suchlike. So it was time to get out, get away. We went up to the scenic Drakensburg, man I needed it :

Beautiful scenery, sun, fresh air :

I claim this river in the name of Garethtopia! Damn, where'd I leave my flag?

Does this pizza make me look sexy? Yeah baby, yeah.

Ah, lets have lunch by the lake. So tranquil. Little did we realise we were about to be surrounded by a pack of baboons. A large alpha male would jump onto the chair next to me, bare it's yellow fangs, then snatch the bag of rolls. Bastards. Those were tasty rolls. We decided discretion was the better part of valor and fled. Hey, I've watched a baboon chase a leopard out of a tree it wanted to sit in. If it's good enough for leopards, it's good enough for me.

Right, so, refreshed, I got back into it. Diving into the innards of TGEA's graphics layer, I spent a weekend learning about Materials and their awesome voodoo. One thing I did find is that TGEA's graphics are nice, really nice. The layout of the gfx layer is pretty clean. The whole thing just seems more structured than TGE.

Anyway, I got the port going. Well, not quite a port. I don't blit textures onto a base, I use shaders to combine them dynamically. Checkit :

Looks pretty much the same as the old shots right? Heh, well it's pure shader blending, so it should be a hellova lot faster.

I also needed to implement material swapping to get this working, so now I can do things like this :

Why would a man have a glowey glass head? I think a better question is why wouldn't he? ;)

Some of you will already be aware, I wrote it all up into a nice resource, explaining the theory behind the implementation, how materials work, etc. You can find it here, GG has finally approved it :

garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=14264

So that is where we are right now. Scars of War has gone hi-tech. I suppose giving into technolust isn't always that bad. In fact I think I'm going to rename my game to Scars of Bloom. This can be the default bloom level :

Of course, the player will be able to change the intensity via a slider. Anything from "eye-searing" to "nuclear holocaust". ;)

-till next time, watch out for baboons!

SoW - Character Customization

Gareth Fouche — 2008-01-16T06:18:38+00:00

(Before I start, please note : I know the body textures are a bit screwy, especially around the neck. Before I get 5 posts pointing that out ;))

The holidays were, as always, pretty hectic, but I finally got a chance to sit down and get some dev done. Specifically, I finally got round to tearing out my old character customization code and implementing a new system.

Now, I've shown my customizable game characters before on this blog but the key thing is that they were screens from 3DS max. The code didn't support those options, so neither the player nor the designer (in both cases me) could use them. So I got down into the code with an axe and started hacking things out.

First I created DB structures. The DB links character races with "skinsets", which are conceptual groupings of customization options. So as a Designer you can link different skin colours, eye colours, hairstyles etc together under a skin set, and then link a race to any number of skinsets. Then, when the player chooses a race, it automatically looks up all the options you can choose from. And it is simple for a modder to go into the DB and add or change these. :) Additionally, you can specify any customization option as "Playable". If you set that value to false, only NPCs can use it. So, for example, you can limit the PaleSkin set and RedEyes to the NPC vampire race, or whatever.

Previously, I was using a series of menu guis with the GuiObjectView resource to show a model and allow the player to select a race etc. Well, I decided I wanted something nicer. Something like you see in modern RPGs.

So instead I modified my startup code to load up a Character Creation Mission. I added code to lock the players position so pressing the arrow keys doesn't move him or the camera. Then I dropped 2 spawn points, 1 near the head and one further back, looking at the body, and added buttons which let you set your view to those 2 points. A slider to rotate your char on his pedestal, some drop down lists to select your customization options, a hastily-whipped up ruined building to set the player on, and viola, character customization screen :

Still a WIP, but coming along nicely. Best of all, I created it in such a way that this time you can edit either the player or NPCs, depending on where you load this screen from. So Modders will use exactly the same thing to make NPCs, just with all options available to them. :)

SoW - Environments.

Gareth Fouche — 2007-12-04T18:25:06+00:00

I have to admit, Scars development has been pretty slow the last month or so. There are 2 reasons for this. First, the release of a lot of games that I've been waiting ages for. Mask of the Betrayer, The Witcher, Hellgate London, The Orange Box.

And the second, far less pleasant reason, is deadlines. My project has reached crunch time at work, so that means late nights and weekends spent at the office, hooray. Hopefully that won't last too much longer, I'm looking forward to some vacation time around Christmas.

But anyway, I have done some work, mostly on the environment side, laying out areas and levels. So, since I don't have much to talk about on the code side, let me distract you with pictures :P

First, the village of Bhenninstrad, located in the north of Mirtar :

Bhenninstrads distance from the Lethani Border kept it away from most of the conflict, sparing it from the devastation of more southern settlements...or did it...?

Next up, the Atharan Highlands. Forestry is the major source of income in these parts, yet the mills stand empty. The Foresters Union are protesting unfair wages and working conditions, refusing to work until their demands are met. Attempts to negotiate have so far failed and the gossip in the taverns is that things are beginning to get violent.

And finally, a picture of an underground research complex I'm working on, aka a "dungeon", in Constructor.

Till next time... :)