Guns, Guns, Guns, Guns, Guns, Guns, and err ... Guns

Did I mention guns at all? In case not ... then I've been working on guns and reloading systems for guns and animations for reloading of ... guns. Oh, and a cricketbat ... which isn't really a gun ... unless it shoots fireballs ... which it doesn't ...

After much thinking about the best way of doing things, and generally reading up on what others had posted previously, I drew up an ammunition_pool->weapon_magazine->reloading_system which I was vaguely happy with and bugtested the hell out of it.

Even though, some little issue did slip through for a few weeks, when the whole thing would fail on very high rate of fire weapons if the player pressed various buttons in a certain sequence ... the sort of sequence which would only happen in the panic of gameplay when something leaps out of shadows and tries to stick it's tentacles in you ... but that's what playtesting is there to catch.

I'd been trying to use an integrated automatic and manual reloading system from the top tier of the process, and had it check so that they wouldn't clash ... except under a certain combination of mouse presses it all failed, and I'd thought it was because of something else and had remedied that - except I'd only jiggled the failure around so that it was waiting to be triggered by an even more elaborate set of mouse button mashing. In the end dividing the top tier of the reloading into seperate manual/automatic check functions before reintegrating them into the main control function sorted out this little issue.

How many hands does it take to reload a gun? Four ... just not showing all at once.

And with a working reloading system, I knocked up some reloading animations. Nothing fancy, just whip the mag/clip out and slap another one in. I'd previously decided against my initial plan of using the full 3rd person model in first person due to the aiming issues that I had faced when going past 56 degrees. I'd modded the code so that the EyeOffset settings didn't stick to the screen and so the weapon jigs around in first person as the player model animates.

Slap in some "bonus" hands solely for first person, attached to the weapon and animating with it, and reload animations came along. Whilst I made my first person "bonus" hands animations, I might need to rejig them a touch in places to deal with the explanation of floating point precision in NearClip that Ben Garney expained - in a nice idiot proof explanation ... which always helps - or rejig my first-person rendering into a seperate pass ...



All audio custom done with a bit of help in Audacity - more open source goodness.

I also did a fair bit of "field testing" my 12 finalized(ish) weapons, tweaking them for balance so that everything has a strength and a weakness based on accuracy, rate of fire, damage, recoil, ammunition capacity and range. Weapons are generally split into short and long range types (and melee incase of ... well, melee weapons ...). Short range was fairly easy to balance and keep each weapon with it's own unique identity, but the longer range stuff required considerable more thought, not just for the player but also for how the Ai would use it.

Still a few weapons to do, I've previously installed a HL2 type double keybind so the player can carry 20 weapons and the kitchen sink, though I'm thinking of keeping carryable ammunition levels fairly lowish, 4 mags for each weapon. I've got 12 done and so need another 8, though currently they're not priorities. I've got them planned out and need a couple of explosive weapons, a super-sniper rifle, a rechargeable lazzor (balancing the plus of not needing ammo with the con of a charge up time) and a couple of BFGs (I'm thinking of something like a hand-held version of the "Hornet" swarm missile system from FreeSpace -> cos that was cool!) - then I just need 2 things which are bigger than a BFG ...

Whilst trying to keep my weapon textures simple ... I'm back to umming-and-ahhing on whether I need to add just a bit of edging detail/wear ... as they are quite blank ...

I knocked up another alien humanoid model - something that could use humanoid animations so that they could use humanoid firearms - which took a bit of time as I wasn't entirely certain of my creature design and ended up modeling it "organically" in Blender until I came up with something which wasn't entirely hateful. Still umming-and-ahhing on a texture and colour scheme for that, thinking of using a conplementary scheme and probably something fairly bright. I had an idea about a frill or something sporting an eye motif like butterflies do to try and make themselves look scary ...



Also fixed an issue of mesh penetration with knee related animations on my player/Ai models - can't believe I hadn't noticed that before. And made another material for lower LODs which doesn't cast shadows - uses the exact same texture, so no extra texture memory, but doesn't cost anything in dynamic shadowing at distance - didn't really see the point in a human sized lowpoly shape using up resources to cast a tiny shadow that may be hundreds of metres away from the camera and almost unnoticeable to the player. Then I promptly went and did the same thing for the lower LODs of all small objects.

And after all of my previous performance testing, I am now quite convinced that I can put worrying about drawcalls to bed.

Also redid my lightmaps with the new PureLight version after some mesh tweaking to make the materials more productive for performance ...
... and did a bit of custom script render/hide areas on my initial level to compliment the zoning...
... and made a start on my custom player death-camera-respawn/quite UI sequence ...
... and gave a singleplayer load/save system the first thoughts ...
... and did various tweakings ... in general ...
... and went to a real ale festival ... and think I might go to some more ...

Fluppin' Drawcalls and Forget How to Use Blender and PureLight

And an end to said fluppin' testing of Drawcalls. I was going to use fluffin' but after a quick check on the interwebz, it turns out "fluffer" has a rude conotation --- I mean, who would of thought it? So flup it is.

No pics. Just the facts, ma'am.

I had a quick test --- read that as far too much time --- ripping the whole drawcall/performance thing to bits and seeing what I could get it down to.

In previously mutterings on the whole performance thang I'd made it clear "why" I'd done things in a certain way previously, older tech, older hardware, a paranoia of >512px.

First off I amalgamated a few of 512 and few 256 non-tiling textures into larger 1024s. And drawcalls fell, fps went up by a bit.

I'd also extended the fixation with 512 to my lightmaps, splitting up meshes into ever smaller pieces to get the texture size down, so next up was to stitch all those meshes back together into larger ones to reduce instancing.

This meant realising that I'd forgot how to use pureLight ... and after a fair bit of jiggery-pokery, remembered that I had to delete the object in PL before replacing it if I'd changed materials or UVs (or it'd import with mixed by UVs), and if the mesh-object in Blender wasn't at 0 0 0 then the object/node it's parented to bloody had better be - even though that thing isn't getting exported - such as price to pay for using Open Source apps for these sorts of things. Oh, and collada doesn't do curvy and thus ase is needed. And ase needs materials and UVs, and collada sorts it's materials from it's UVs so time saver there ... as long as you don't want soft edges...

*note to self: write this stuff down on more than post-it notes sometime*

And finally, I took a look at what renders and what occludes. Previously I'd used zoning to split my corridor-crawler of a level into 3 main areas, and kept to the same principle with scripting, just dropping the zoning (though they might come back, at the moment there's a bit of an issue with portals at certain acute angles and things suddenly not rendering that should).

And so the up shot was this.

(GTS250 - Advanced Lighting @ 1024px without shadows / with shadows)
old drawcall average = 783 / 1076
new drawcall average = 410 /602

And the biggy - busy scene @ 1080p with everything maxed out
old drawcalls / minfps = 2295 / 57
new drawcalls / minfps = 869 / 80

So, as a total average of all my recordings, drawcalls were reduced by a third, and fps increased by a fifth. Which was nice...

In other news I saw ... well, heard some music I liked, and had to approach the guy on spec for commercial licensing (same chap I used on my lightmap video under CC). He appeared reasonable, so we'll see how that goes once this Easter break thing is out of the way.

Also, I redid my weapons with first person hands and reloading animations, and dug out an old (deactivated - don't call teh Fedz!) lever-action rifle for the metal scraping audio. At which point I discovered nearClip and the fact that it defaults to 10cm, which causes all kindsa hassle with camera penetration on aim-down-sight animations. If only I'd realized that before. I set it to 1cm and things are better. Still need to do a couple more bangsticks for my proposed demo, and so video of all of this later.

End of rambling stream of conciousness...

Raging Texture Terror Usurped By Drawcall Delerium!

February flew ... fled ... or fffffff .... apparently ... or at least I didn't get a blog done anyhow. This may or may not be the same thing.

But we've been busy, 'cos ... well ... we're always busy ... and not just with talking about myself in 3rd person.

Having had a good read through some resources, I appropriated all the bits I liked into a custom weapon->clip->inventory system. Figured it'd take a good effort, say 16 hours, so settled in for a mammoth stint. And I did then iron out all the bugs after around 60 hours ... not quite what I'd planned on and hard to say how much of that time was actually spent rewriting the same thing from scratch after various mess ups as it's all a bit hazy but it did all get done in that week, and every possible way that the player could try to break the cycle and cause a bug has been covered. It's really all about logical arguements ... and me not considering all of them before starting. What happens if you have auto-reload and the player hits manual reload? Or tries to change weapons? Or aims down sights in mid reload? Or ... any of a number of things which cropped up as bugs and had to be squashed.



Still have to sort out my first person weapon, arm animations, and it will have to be a seperate arm attached to the weapon model in first person, as expanding on my previous synchronize aim-down-sight with 3rd person model hasn't proved successful.


Ripples - Automatic weapon fire - the perfect skipping stone?

And whilst messing with the whole weapon stuff, we've also had a good go at particle effects in general. Redoing all my weapon impact particles, ditching muzzle flashes in favour of mesh ones, and sorting out the impacts. I also "pooled" as many datablocks as possible for both particles and sounds, rather than having all individual ones listed in the individual weapons' cs files.

After browsing around I found that Indy Games company "Sickhead" had mentioned about the incompatibility of dogs and particle effect sources, and it hadn't occured to me to use actual effects like water or smoke for source material for particles before, as opposed to just trying to draw them, which I had done previously. And it all appeared much better.


Fire and Smoke particles made with real smoke

I also knocked up a little script to loadup specific datablocks for specific missions/levels in an attempt to keep preloading overhead down. I worked out a bit of info on audio and mainmenu music, as well as started to build the basis for my final play GUI. This involved a certain amount of umm/ah about how much GUI to actually have and especially the fate of the dreaded "crosshair". In the end I settle on a fair bit of GUI clutter on-screen, as I'm not after supposed realism. Most of it will be achieved as pop-ups - think inventory system akin to HL2, and I decided on an empty circular reticle as opposed to crosshair/no crosshair, which can be toggled and faded through 4 iterations or turned off completely. I've still a few more design decisions to make on the whole GUI thing ... but most of it is sketched into the cunning plan.



I also started to think about terrains and environments more, knocking up some terrain textures and fiddling with various settings. In the end I decided against parallax and continued to err on the side of numbers of stuff rather than eyecandy. I came up with a painterly style for skyboxes ... all very artistic and not half as difficult to make the sides join up seamlessly as I had initally feared. Also found out/had forgotten that relfection maps need to be rotated 180 degrees from the skybox, so you can't just use the same thing.



Did I mention textures?

As a remnant of TGE/A, when I found my texture memory being devoured by large textures, I've had a bit of paranoia about texture sizes, and had always tried to use as small an image size as I could (max 512) and split UV maps between multiple small textures. Of course this doesn't take into account drawcalls, and so I had a bit of a rearrange, merging a number of UVmaps into single textures. Most noticeably in my AI/Player models, which I had previously split into boots/trousers/jacket/armour/hands/headgear/face/extras - and that all produces a fair few extra drawcalls. Amalgamting all of that into a single UVmap (still only x1024) gives me a reduction of around 1500 drawcalls per 25 Ai characters, and a mild boost to fps on my current GTS250. So, texture memory paranoia has been vanquished! Or at least replaced with drawcall paranoia ...

And I did the same on a number of props which use several textures.


Groundcover is currently placeholder I knocked up quickly

Also did some general tweaking, made more models, messed around with my AI scripts a little, and started to contemplate how best to create an in-game save/load system. And some other stuff ... which I can't remember. Did I mention doubling up weapon selection on the 0-9 buttons a la HL2 so you can choose 20 weapons with 10 keys in a previous blog? If not, that's done too and bug squashed.

The engine I'm using (Torque3D) is another beta and it is shaping up nicely, and I've already been modding how the quality options of the new OptionsGUI works, to make some of the changes more noticeable in both terms of performance/eyecandy gain/loss.

Still on my list of not yet accomplished, are to redo the weapons (for the ump-frickin-teenth time) and have them work with animated 1st person arms which render/no render on 1st/3rd person camera, sort out clip/ammo reloading animations for all of this (12 weapons so far - 20 planned), make some more AI models (say 2 distinct types). After that it's tweaking AI scripts, and then soem actual gameplay making! Which has been so long I might have actually forgetton how to do it!

So ... not too much in February which was planned but didn't get done, and plenty that didn't get planned that did get done --- but that's the adhoc production nature of being one bloke, in his bedroom, trying to make computer games.


If I actually manage to get my proposed demo out by April ... it'll be exactly 2 years since my last demo.