Test Tweak Twiddle

With a basic level blocked out, the past month has been mostly about testing, tweaking and twiddling with gameplay. This meant a lot of playtesting followed by minor adjustments to scripts and code, as well as the usual "let's streamline everything" followed by the equally usual "oh god everything is broken now", followed by fixing it. None of this makes for particularly interesting pictures of videos.

One thing which is "screenshotable" is the new level based statistics screen which now pops up at the end of the level. Previously at the end of each level a continued game progress screen would display, giving various statistics on the player's progress that run. Now a minor version detailing statistics from the previously completed level displays with information and percentages relating to player activity.

From the top; time taken to complete level (or die a horrible death, whichever comes sooner), score for that level, swag parcels opened, cash looted, enemies killed, overall percentage for that level/world and finally the pre-existing, remaining cash on exit converted to points. Once art and animation are the priority "something interesting" will fill the left side of the screen too - probably the players character with a celebratory animation corresponding to level completedness.

This level statistic interface then fades into the standard game progress screen which gives a more indepth view of statistics which the player has achieved.

I had also started to list the various types of enemy and player characters and abilities which I want to feature in the game. Variation is the nemesis of repetition and thus a wide assortment of enemies and capabilities is something to strive for. Currently in the way of hostile attacks I have a simple melee enemy, a charging enemy and projectile shooting one. These are certainly the main themes for the opposition which can feature good variations. On top of this I have already coded "elite" enemies who have special abilities ranging from contact based damage to temporarily slowing the player for a few seconds. These elites carry a certain colour and aura to distinguish themselves to the player as extra inhospitable. They also carry more hit points.

Hit points carry cash which is used to open swag parcels for the player to gain powerups and useable items. Each level the cost of powerups increase, but as the player becomes more powerful and enemies more numerous the amount of lootable coins also increased rather too fast. I have had to reduce the amount of cash enemies drop in later levels as a result of this.

The entire system for usable items has had an overhaul. Previously the player could collect items and be able to use the current highlighted one on screen. Every three seconds thecurrently  sclected item would advance to the next. This became incredibly infuriating when in the throes of combat to try and time using the right item at the best time and often led to the wrong item being used. This has now changed to allow the player to manually cycle through the list of useable items with a simple button press to choose which will be active.

So there we have it. I am continuing to list enemy types, and their abilities in prepartion of when they become actual models. Until then, huzzah for placeholder cubes!

Swag Em Up - 100 Collectable Power-Ups

It took some doing, but I managed to design and code, a full 100 collectable power-ups. Most of the artwork is still placeholder but all bonuses, attributes, special attacks, etc work in practice.

They come in 6 flavours:

• ATTACK - bonus event on striking an enemy. eg: critical damage, exploding attack
• DEFEND - bonus event on being hit. eg: shield stops damage, retribution attack against enemy
• TEMPORARY - boost to attributes for x seconds. eg: for 8 seconds speed x2, increased healing
• PERMANENT - attribute increments. eg: increment health, speed, healing
• PASSIVE - works passively. eg: cause damage on touch, enemies drop more loot
• ITEM - Items are single use and player can use any item that they have collected when they wish. Can be good for getting out of trouble when your back is to the wall.

So here's some pics and videos of a few of more of them being tested. See last blog for previous ones.

 Bonus offensive machine-gun and grenade spam attacks.

Super Orbital Laser (anyone guessing the source of the name wins a free internet)

The Zone of Brass Monkies - slows all enemy who enter it.

Napalm Strike (need to work on those particles, not entirely satisfied with those flames)

And a quick test of shields in various colours.

I also spent some time reading through the code (this is why it's important to leave comments people!) and found a few things I didn't previously know about explosions - such as you can tie animated meshes to them. This help save a bit of overhead on things as in Airship Dragoon I had spawned "concussion blast spheres" seperately. So I decided to make the basic impact attack a little more interesting.

With the swag collectables coded if not modeled, next up is to test my ideas on how to actually model the environment and levels. And it looks something a little bit like this:

Move Rock - Circumnavigate Rock - Go Off On Tangent

Those pesky rocks eh? We all have our rock ... some of these rocks might even be real rocks ... but for most of us it's a metaphycisal rock ... or at least it's not real anyhow.

Okay ... enough about rocks, real or imaginery.

Game development is a bit like a Japanese RPG - everyone is slightly squashed and absurdly cute ... no wait ... that's not right! There's a lot of GRINDING and leveling up can get to be a real pain in the derriere. Everyone gets burned out after a while, especially when your on an "all hours the Great Magnet sends" routine.


It's even worse if you're making an MMO!

So rather than spend ALL week down the pub or ALL my time reading mildly interesting but mostly inane Wikipedia articles about what someone I've never heard of was rumoured to have done on a particular date in the 17th Century, I decided to have a look at the RTSprotoype information in the stock documentation and see how the camera system and screen-to-terrain input worked - two things which I didn't know anything about.

And from there I decided to build another Tutorial series, detailing how to create a 3rd person, turnbased, squad tactics/action hybrid gametype which follows the gameplay style of "Valkyria Chronicles" ... which I've never actually played, but have watched the whole game streamed. Originally I was thinking of writing a Tutorial for full turnbased tactical game but thought that Valkyira Chronicles" mix of turns and action was quite novel.

The whole tutorial is complete in theGarageGames Resources Section here and also in the T3D Tutorials Section of TDN.

And here's a video of what it looks like:




So, the next time you hear somebody say that :

Torque can only make Tribes style FPS games

Link them with that.


Oh hi, Catchick ... who still doesn't have a real name and maybe will always be known by what a certain Mr.Kiss first refered to her as ...

... so back to getting this demo out ... which I could've finished a month ago if I hadn't been looking for something else to do instead ... cue pub and wikipedia. The demo itself is nearly finished, it's "that close" - but you cannot see me holding my thumb and finger a little way apart to demonstrate, so you'll have to take my word that it's about four inches or ten centimeters in new money. And the demo is going to get finished and then released.

It's been a long time and a shed load of work involving a shed load of assets, but that's kinda what a FPS narrative campaign is about, and because of this I've also been thinking of "procedural content" more. In my GarageGames profile it reads:

One Bloke ... In His Bedroom ... Trying To Make Computer Games ... eventually ...

... Trying To Make Computer Games ... eventually ... was kinda in there as a joke about how long it takes to actually complete anything, but someday I'd like to edit it to read ... Making Computer Games. So to that aim, post next demo release, FPS project is going on the back burner, and an old skool (I hate that phrase!) turnbased, tactics game featuring an entirely procedurally driven campaign system will come to the fore with the intention of shipping before the year is out - in other words, six months. I did previously moot the idea in a previous blog about an X-Com style game idea I had, and my recent "Valkyria Chronicles" style game Tutorial gave a rough proof of concept for the combat/gameplay control system.



It'll still be massive - I just won't have to script every single fart an Ai makes ... but first, finish off Dubious Demo 2.1, cos this time, it's got the start of a Narrative Campaign ..

Splosh Screens, Selection Screens, Demo Screens

With construction of a vaguely working alpha demo in progress, I was hammering away at the splash screen license obligations ... a glance to irc and wtf everybody's just got sacked that worked on the engine tech I use ...

So, it's been user interface work recently, and additional gametype ... err ... types.

I'd been quite chuffed with my implementation of a randomized gametype, and had expanded on the initial idea. There were 5 open areas of a 2km level, the player was randomly equipped and initially randomly spawned at one area and each area had to be cleared in any order the player fancied. Random numbers of Enemy Ai were randomly spread through each area, and randomly armed with either short or long range weapons depending on what sort of view they had. Hiding inside a house = short range, view from a window or rooftop = long range.

I figured I could throw in a few more random ideas to increase gameplay, and so came up with strongpoints and counterattacks on top of clearance ... which happen ... randomly. Thus each area could be a standard clearance operation where the player had to hunt down each Enemy spread throughout the area, but now it could also be an assault against a randomly chosen building crowded with hostile Ai, or the enemy Ai would come looking for trouble when they heard allies shooting ... but only halfway from their defensive position to player spawn area to prevent spawnkills. Regardless of random tactic type, all short-range weaponed Ai always counterattacked over a very short distance to prevent themselves being picked off at range, that way long-ranged Ai would stay put to provide supporting fire whilst short-ranged would be mobile around the goal node.


First attempt at Ai pathfinding in level

And I'd managed to fit in my "anti last man standing" idea, where the allied Ai swarm over the location of the last remaining enemy, thus preventing those frustrating "can't find the last bad guy to finish the level" type issues which can occur with such things.

I gave the player 3 respawns per area, and had dead Ai drop either ammunition, grenades or a small health pack. Each area took me around 20 minutes to play through, and taking down all 5 areas of the map could take 2 hours. So I made a "fast gametype".


Level Selection and Fast Game Mode

Fast gametype was a random strongpoint attack in a single area, with a slightly more beefed up number of random enemies to guarentee plenty of action. This made me think of a few variations for additional gametypes ... but ... y'know ... one thing at a time.

As ever, I found a gazzilion issues with everything I did, great swathes of script wrote at 5am that were never going to function properly in the cold light of day, and various other bugs that got stomped on and features that got relentlessly tweaked.

All this new stuff needed a user interface. Not just for mission selection, but also the type of instructions and info that you'd expect, such as what the controls are and what the differences between the various weapons are.

First Attempt at user interface that vaguely makes sense

I also thought that it might be a good idea to explain what the hell the whole thing is ... plus I then had to look through all of my stuff to see what I'd used. Now, I have attempted to do as much as I can almost all of the audio is my own - but I couldn't get a good fire/burning loop, but everything else is self done. All of the models are hamfistedly made, rigged, textured, animated by myself. I used various self shot photos for base texture templates and tiled them myself ... and then got the rest of the templates from on-line. Fonts and music weren't even worth my attempting and so were straight off licensed from the start. I haven't even looked at Fmod Ex yet, having just thrown in the audio dll. And that's all this stuff takes so much time.


Credit Page attempt 2

And then there were some annoying issues. My pathfinding is based on a waypoint resource, though it hasn't scaled well to such a large and open environment. I've got a level with a lot of changes in height and direction and the sheer number of waypoint style objects for the Ai to navigate around the whole thing has eaten 25 percent of my performance - which is annoying ...

But currently ... that's how my alpha demo will be going out. Afterwards I'll have to take a look at nodegrids and maybe other solutions as a replacement.

Also I need to do a bit of 2D artwork to "tart" it up a bit, and 2 of my buildings are still placeholders. And there's some functions hacking I think I might try as a performance test ...

But all in all, we're well on our way ... and ... allegedly ... I should be able to crank out a rough but playable demo full of issues by the end of November. Which is 12 days away ... awww hell ...

Cliche versus unCliche! Also Less Squinting and Forget How to Draw

I decided to take advantage of the New Year Sales - also getting in before VAT was going to go back up to 17.5% - to rid myself of the constantly malfunctioning Dell RAID setup which I've spent 3 years complaining about ... but not done anything decisive to stop complaining about it. Well I have now, getting a single Western Digital with more cache than the RAID, and also the new working copy of Vista ... I think it's called Windows7 ... but basically it's Vista without the bugs.

Also, whilst my folks had spent a month in the States jamming with 1950s rock stars, I'd swiped their digital TV to use as a monitor. I had quite liked this on the grounds that previously, on my old 20inch monitor I couldn't read text on the internet at full resolution and modeling in Blender was a pain. So I invested in some screen real estate and bought a 1080p TV to replace my monitor, and I can now see what I'm doing in full resolution without squinting. Or drop a resolution and everything is HUGE.

After a bit of "faffing", I got the brightness, contrast, colour to be the same as my monitor.



I feel a sudden need to explain that I don't really have the illustrated desktop background ...

Right, that's my budget for the next decade blown - back to deving.

I'd needed to come up with some sort of bad guys of a scary humanoid nature. So, I started on the Cliche. Scary Humanoid Monsters come in a variety of cliched forms ... they're cliches because they're humanoid and thus familiar, they look a bit like "us" because that's basically what they're based on (not to mention often in film they actually are a guy in a sweaty rubber suit), they are familiar and yet alien.

They are most often slow moving hunters, stalking their prey, creeping out of the background to eat/maul/shag the stupid human who is centre screen, waving a flashlight around to draw attention to themselves (apparently it all adds tension). They do come in sub-sections, zombie, Nosferatu (as opposed to sparkling vampires ... bawwwww!), and the humanoid alien monster aka guy sweating in a rubber suit.

Mostly I just plan the visual stuff in my head and then model/texture it stream-of-consciousness style. However I decided to do a bit of pre-planning.



Which is when I forgot how to draw ...

The problem with the humanoid alien is that there is no way of avoiding the cliche of a certain HR Giger designed humanoid alien. It's either that or Blue Space Furries --- or a guy with pointy ears and blue blood.

At first I wanted a fairly smooth mix of grey bone and pink skin - and tried to swipe the mouth shape from the "pink thing" in Pan's Labyrinth. I didn't quite manage to get the same "choked look", but never mind (probably should have bloated the tongue out more).

Anyhow, this all caused plenty of frustration and I just couldn't get something that I liked --- so instead I decided to do something that was bearable, ditched the smooth bone/skin idea (the whole "grey" thing stank too much of cliche for this particular cliche) in favour of a rough, almost oxidized look with a hefty metal shine. Animations seemed okayish, I wanted a it to sort of strut or "mince" -- yes, "mince" -- as it lopes slowly(<--cliche) torwards at it's prey.



It's got big hands ... all the better for flailing around and battering the player ... like a zombie ... Giger's alien ... the rest of the slow moving humanoid monster cliches. So I decided to throw in an unCliche ... which might actually be a cliche in itself ... or ... something ...

Anyhow, the slightly glowing bits are the hint, and they wash around the model's body. Fade isn't currently functioning, so it's a bit on/off when it happens.



The initial tests were just based on collision events, and then redone so that it attacks via a raycast based on range from target (only about 4 metres). Purple Swirlyness, some damage via a smartbomb effect (doesn't hit teammates) that goes out to an area of around 8 metres rather than just hitting it's target, lots of impulse, no clawing. And as an added cliche - ondeath, it goes out with a bang! Energy Explosion Audio provided by my GPU fan running Torque - and then flanged in Audacity (if it sounded like that normally I think that there would be something very wrong!).

All-in-all, not as bad as it could have turned out, and the colourful explosion effect is quite nice, distracting and I think can generally cause some confusion in-game. Guess I need a variation on the theme, players love variety, and some sort of fast-moving-but-easier-to-kill-hunter-cliche is probably on the cards, some more humanoid aliens that can use guns, and then the really awkward task of making some scary starfish aliens which really look alien (pulls out the Lovecraft books) --- hope I remember how to draw by then ... I'm really out of practise.

And what they look like in action against a conventional army.

Fluffy Bunny Slippers

A mild reorganization, not so much of what I'm doing more how I'm approaching it. Priority is now a multi-level demo, polished to how the whole thing will eventaully/allededly/hopefully look and play. This can act on a number of levels.


Normals and spec, with basemap standing in for diffuse for the time being

Gametest, make sure the damn thing actually works, get feedback, extra bughunting in case I've missed anything (though I'm usually on the ball on how a player will attempt to break the game), see how it works across multiple types of box for I have only one, and state of the art it ain't.
Act as publicity, getting something out there, showing existance, get known.
Backstory. Narrative is an important element in my plan, and I don't want it to appear tact on as an after thought (think practically any major 3A big-budget release) or as some sort of shallow excuse for action and mayhem. It needs to be integrated, but not overwhelming. You can't play narrative, but you should be able to experience it as part of a unified whole, and it should complement the gameplay. Not be 5 hours of cutscene gobbledigook (I'm looking at you Hideo).


Also, fluffy bunny slippers.

I figured it was safe to increase polycount a notch and watched Jonathon Williamson's tuts on modeling a head in Blender at CGCookie. I recommend it greatly, though after watching it, I did ignore it and work my own, slightly organic way ... which brought a few extra problems but hey ... the general process was taken.

After that, more messing trying to sort out a decent body. I'vestill a few problems with deformation in various areas (like anywhere the mesh deforms ... ) but I now understand what is wrong, and if I don't I've a pretty good idea of how to fix it. Things are looking/working better.



And still no bald spacemarines ... infact, getting further away from the cliche every bunny slipper. Surely more awesome moustaches to come. Possibly twizzled.

Game characters that are recognisable, are more often than not devoid of character. Lara was huge boobs. Master Chef of Hallo was a suit of armour barking gruff orders down the spaceship's mess hall. Gordon was mute but at least he was speccy and had a facial hair. How come his specs never fell off? And just how good was his eyesight without them. Was that why he carried that damn crowbar instead of a BFG, couldn't see anything until it was right on top of him .... [/tangent_of_doom]



I had also been thinking about reflective ambient lighting --- on the cheap. Back when I was modding I used to like to put in subtle lighting effects, to catch the edges of models from opposite angles and help create depth on screen in the shadows. This was usually a cold, bluish backlight to complement warm, yellowish sunlight, but on a night level, I could go a little artier with pinks and blues and greens. It all looked rather nifty.



So I decided to do it again. I'm not aiming for realism or 12 million shades of grey/brown, so why not ...

Which was when I noticed a forum thread on the same sort of idea, but with a fancy, technological solution. But it did mention using primary colours, which I thought was a rather good idea. So I've setup a rather basic triangluar crossfire of RYB to pose as arty reflective ambient lighting.


Triangular Crossfire of Psuedo-Reflective Ambient Colours

As a foil to my previously developed plans of large, rural and urban, open areas, I've been designing a bit of claustrophobia. Tight, industrial style tunnels and interiors. Currently they are textureless, with teh basemap I used for the normals being used as diffuse, so it all looks a bit metallic and shiny. But I'll colour coordinate them to the seperate areas for variety and artiness.



T3D beta2 seemed to have a whole lot of initial issues sorted -- which is what a beta is for. It still all looks rather promising. And after a fair bit of messing, I transported the basics of my AI system over and let them have a good run about.



Roll on beta3, and can I haz more hours in a day, plox, it's flippin' nearly monsoon season, better known as Wimbledon.

Thmexthy Lewt

Thmexthy Lewt - as a girl once described the spoils of a WoW raid to me.

So, we now have Beta1 of new tech. And very promising it looks too. It's got shiny bits, quite a lot of shiny bits. They don't all work, which is why it's Beta1.


Chaps! My chaps, off for a bit of jog

The tools are nice, mostly realtime editing, and thus give a lot of decent close control, especially with the Materials Editor which is a real time saver. No more exiting the app to type stuff into files, only to reload it and not like it, and thus exit to tweak it all again.


It's a first port - and it works ... which is nice ...

After a fair bit of playing with the tools, I've made a superfast port of my TGEA stuff, some of it anyhow. It doesn't require too much rejigging, a few folder/destination changes in files, moving the spec map from the diffuse to the normal. The textures themselves will need a bit of a retouch to cope with the new lighting system, they're a bit dark now, but at least everything I've moved across seems to work at a base level.


Wait till you see the whites of their eyes ... or not ...

So I've had my AI running about, shooting the crap out of each other. It's always nice to know that it works. I've also fixed a couple of memory leaks I found in my base AI script.

Still got a host of textures to rejigg specmaps over to normals. After which It'll be time to stick my previously built mesh town in and see how it works.


A shiny bit.

Roll on bugs fixes and Beta2.

Tris versus Textures

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, someone made a post on the forums or in a blog which gave the memory useage for various texture sizes. I noted that useage did not double with size, but was on a much more aggressive scale. Thus 1024x gave a lot more of a kicking to Vram than two 512x.

So, town2 version (counts on fingers) er ... 4? is done. It's a mesh model, with all of the buildings enterable. No facades this time. The 2 storey facade textures (1024x) have been ditched in favour of standard 512x brickwork textures (which the facades were previously based on and had been used around the map for low walls). All doors and windows are now modeled, and are proper openings. All buildings are now fully enterable and made up of multiple rooms. Each building has at least one staircase, large buildings have two. Access to and from upstairs is granted. Access through all buildings now exists.


Prefab houses

There are currently 6 building types being used as prefabs, with a couple of custom ones (eg: church and chapel - church is still a facade, the only one left). All have at least one front and back external door, a minumum of 8 windows and 7 rooms. All have at least one staircase.

There are 50 buildings in the village. That's 641 windows, 180 external doors, 578 rooms, with 81 staircases, all linked, all useable, all explorable. I didn't count how many internal doors there were, but obviously they are what seperate the rooms so work it out (it might even be the same number as the rooms).

Needless to say this has affected the tris slightly. Tris now stands at around 48k up from 15k. And it's also affected performance - for the better.


From all closed facades to 1399-ish openings for view and movement.

Previously, with most of my Vcard (256mb 7900GS) settings on "performance" with x2 AA and Anisotropic OFF and display on x768, I was recording 165fps with the polysouped, facade mesh.

Dispensing of the services of the 1024x facade textures, and increasing the polysouped mesh by over 500%, I get the following results.

New Vcard settings are "quality" including x2 anistropic and AA. At x768 it gives a whopping 196fps, and at x1050 it gives an equally impressive 127fps.

I did have a few issues with exporting the model. I had to split the model into 6 seperate meshes, as together they exceeded the max vertices count. But as seperate meshes within the same model they exported fine.


There's lots more opportunites to worry about being ambushed. 1399 of them.

So, point proven on Vram and texture size against tris count. This was conducted on TGEA1.7.1, 1.8.1 would probably gain more of a performance boost (maybe 10%). How this will work with new tech remains to be seen, but I'd be quietly hopeful that all will be well.

In the meantime I have a Campaign for Real Ale Festival to go to, the last refuge of Saint George Flag waving, folk singing, Morris Dancing, sandal wearing, unkempt beardies who have a deep understanding of the different forms of droppings excreted by the monstrous badger of doom.

BADGER_OF_DOOM is also the current codename for my project.

God save England, 'arry and Saint George!

Integrated AI Routines Test

A(nother) test of pathfinding (from previous post) which is now using Astar, my new targeting and combat routines, and a basic "Teflon" script to stop the AI bumping into each other and getting stuck. They do try to check for a clean shot but I've still had to use a friendly-fire suppression script for blue-on-blue projectile collisions, especially with the spread of shotguns.

I had followed a tutorial on how to make decent quality videos for posting on YouTube, but it's still not great quality once uploaded. The audio files are placeholder sounds scrounged from games I own. Sorting my own audio out is currently a low priority. Getting a working-but-dubious-demo is the priority.



Not a commentary on China and Tibet. It's just riot coppers fighting armed civilians (who need their LODs fixing).