Sunday 8 August 2010

Mortality test - We Are Not Immortal ... allegedly ...

Death comes to us all ... admittedly that's not been proven IRL yet ... but chances are it's a safe bet. In games, you tend to have the option to respawn ... not sure about IRL ...

Apparently ... you who are reading this ... may actually be mortal ...

I know, it's obviously incredibly unfair - why are you and me getting singled out like this? The world might actually continue without us ... clearly a grevious bias against us personally ... well, me anyway ... I mean ... what if there isn't a respawn option? And even if there is ... you're gonna lose all of your loot! And restart at level one! You might as well just rage-quit the concept of reincarnation all together, settle for a cloud and learn to play a harp ...


But enough about IRL, in gaming you respawn ... or at the very least restart the game, it doesn't just delete from your hard-drive when you avatar bites the dust and then refuse to redownload another copy. If it did, people would be at your door with pitchforks ...

But rather than just "pop back" into the game, I decided to make a little death sequence everytime the player buys the farm ... and keep it short, because the player might get to see it quite a bit if they're having a bad day at the keyboard ...

Initially this worked ... okayish ... not used to messing around with camera functions or the sort, and then in the new build it broke. But rather than my usual tactic of try every combination of events and scripts which I could possibly think of - then trawl the forums for info that usual relates to redundant engine versions, I just looked up the new docs and found all the camera functions and then linked my system to corpse mode. And it was better than before. Yes those folks at GG, TP, or WTF it's called now, have finally got out a full engine API and script reference. Docs for teh win! as our cousins across the pond tend to shout ... a lot ...



And what's more restful than a chapel of rest? As long as it's only a few seconds, or else it'll get annoying.

Once again, Huzzar for PureLight. Just 2 tonemaps and 3 meshes. Outside of the chapel is a straight unlightmapped mesh, with the interior and interior props, collected together as a Prefab (first prefab I've used, and boy do these thigns look useful!). And it's a fully enterable building too, so I can use it in-game as a prop as well.

Originally I'd used a realistic lighting technique for the tonemaps ... but thought it looked a bit dull, so I arty'd the whole thing up with shadow blockers and multiple spotlight through each window, casting varying degrees of light intensity around the interior.


Admittedly this screenie is a bit dark on the ambient ...


So here's another ...

Window on the left took me over nine thousand hours in MS Paint ... and the one on the right took my about 9 seconds after I remembered how to draw ... out of practise ...

Repawn/quit dialogue is still just a stock GUI, so I'll need to replace that with something completely custom, but all in all, I thought it was quite a nice touch.

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