Legend of Bob: Trees, Fog and Smoke
Finally after a lot of effort, I got the tree model I had down to 40,000 faces, making it almost acceptable to put into the Totus Village Map in my AGT project. It still got that great, the game lags a lot around the camera is facing that direction, probably because it is being cel shaded.
I've also added a smoke particle effect, though I'm currently "borrowing" the smoke from Wind Waker.
At some point I'll be creating a campfire model to place below the smoke, and a small particle effect for fire. One thing I'd like to add to the map eventually would be some street lamps.
One thing last thing I'm happy about getting into the game is fog, though it wasn't needed it showed me how to do something I've been trying to figure out.
I was playing around with the values and different fog equations when I got distant objects to flatten to silhouettes like the landscape does in World of Warcraft.
Legend of Bob: GUI
After playing around a bit with Ogre3D, I decided making a 2D quad and rendering a GUI just wasn't happening when I tried doing it manually, so I've decided to use the built in GUI, despite its limitations.
Before setting up a ".overlay" file for the GUI, I decided to manually enter the information into Ogre3D, and despite the texture coordinates being messed up, everything was fine.
Using C.E.G.U.I (Crazy Eddie's Graphical User Interface), I setup an overlay file for the message box that would be displayed when talking to NPCs.
I brought in the edges slightly after a recommendation from one of my housemates, and then move the faceset image up slightly.
Guest Lecture: Thomas Hulvershorn from IPlay
Another guest lecture in Business of Computer Games today at the university.
So, apparently mobile game development is one of the fastest growing areas of the game industry, which quite frankley isn't that impressive, it just means its starting up, other areas of the game industry won't be growing that much when they've had 10-20 years to establish themselves.
I-Play is one of the companies out there developing for the mobile phone, using the "shotgun" technique (this meaning them release several games in the short space of time), which according to the lecturer, Thomas, 30 in the last two years.
The first part of the lecture was about developing for the mobile phone, something which interested me being a developer myself. When a game is decided to developed, the programmers are given a list of handsets that it must work on, and get to work on it. Whether or not they use the same source and just use precompiler states for different platforms wasn't mentioned though.
Thomas also pointed out the differences in mobile phone development, like the restrictions of memory, keypad size, screen size, etc, and how on some phones, music is limited to midi output, and all this must be taken into consideration. As well as what to do if there is a phone call, or the battery is getting low.
One thing I noticed when it came to the porting of games to different phones was that the same game was the same price even when it had worse graphics, which I suppose when I gets down to the cost of $5, I could let it fly as long as if I upgrade my phonem I have access to the other phone version as well.
The second part of the lecture was about the Quality Assurance (QA), Thomas' specialist field, revealing to us some of the terms they use such as 'black box', which means testing a game to make sure if it says it has something, it is there. Or 'white box', the complete opposite, which is about checking the code rather than the functionality.
After the lecture I was kind of left with a sense of emptiness, when we were told to bring our mobile phones in I expected we might get a free game to try from them, or possible some kind of fun exercise to find a bug, or even maybe a sign up sheet for QA, but it seemed more like free market research.
However the lecture wasn't a complete loss, there was a lot of information into the workings of the testing environment for mobile phones.
The main question now is whether or not we'll get someone to talk to us about starting your own game company. I've heard rumors about there was supposed to be someone but they didn't turn up, which would be nice.
It would also be nice to maybe get someone from Blizzard to talk about being a GM for their MMORPG World of Warcraft or game development for them.