Last Ray of Hope

With my work on getting even better frame rates in my engine, I’ve began instancing objects, z-ordering, scenegraphing, etc. And to make the most of this, I’ve begun to learn to use Maya with some helpful tips from the artists and work. So I’ve started to improve the quality of my original Totus Village model I made using Milkshape3D.

As you can see I’ve added doorways now, and well as roofs (although some are still not quite complete roofs yet). There is a new terrain being work on, that will hopefully be better for area Totus village is in (between two mountain ranges, with a forest to the south and plains to the north).

I’m currently decided what to do with the walls, its hard to tell from the original SNES graphics what they were trying to do with the walls. On the one hand they appear to be supported by beams, on the other those shadows on the beams could just the be the wall on the upper half. I’ve began working on a tool that takes the COLLADA file and converts it to my geometry format, as well as some geometry optimisations through Tootle.

The day of the hand was today, so myself and my housemates did an all nighter to add the finishing touches to our AGT projects, and despite not liking coffee, by the end of the night I was drinking it.

One of my housemates, Johnny, made me a great loading screen and title screen. The loading screen, would have been better if the candle flickered, but I didn’t have time to multithread it.

More research is needed to know if Ogre3D can be multithreaded safely.

The title screen is just as basic as the loading screen, after I created a Lua script to control it. It has only two options, “Start New Game” and “Exit”.

I wish, as with the loading screen I had time to improve it, maybe some ambient music for the background, and the ability to save and load.

I finally rewrote my Cel Shading shader from DirectX to Cg, giving a very nice effect compared with the old one. The one I was using previously was per vertex shading, which gave an ugly look, however the one I’ve converted over from DirectX I wrote a while ago uses per pixel shading.

However there is a downside, the black outline edge is current done by drawing backfaces in wireframe with line thickness, the lower the anti-aliasing, the worse it appears. I’m thinking that if I use the depth buffer I can generate my own outlines based on depth change per pixel.

I have also modified the texture splat ARGB map to be smoother and use more toon like textures rather than realistic to go more with the overall theme of the game.

The contrast before was noticable, however the lack of shadows does give the impression now that the character is hovering above the ground, so I added basic shadows to solve this.

To finish off the post process effects, I added a Bloom shader.

Lots more work done on Tales of Phantasia last night, animations, NPC interaction and a bit more framework optimization. Screenshots to be added soon.

Not only did I do that, but I finally got around to putting the finishing touches to my event system, now it now the type of variable that is being set, and I also finally found a use for template functions (thats right, functions, not classes, didn’t know they existed til last month).

What use you say? Quick function overloading, not really much point, but it saves the hassle of type casts. I’m currently using a 32bit unsigned integer for storing the variable type, which gives me 32 potential arguments for my events, I only use 5 at the moment, and I think I can remove one of them.

template
void SetArgumentAsNumber( const unsigned int inIndex, const T inValue )
{
 Arg[inIndex].d = (double)inValue;
 m_type &= ~( 1 << inIndex );
}

void SetArgumentAsString( const unsigned int inIndex, const char *string )
{
 Arg[inIndex].text = string;
 m_type |= ( 1 << inIndex );
}

bool IsArgumentAString( const unsigned int inIndex ) const
{
 return ( m_type & ( 1 << inIndex ) ) ? true : false;
}

After a bit of thinking, I’ve decided that it would be better if the game was in a night time mode.

So I’ve changed the skybox for my AGT project to be of a night sky with stars.

I’ve also reduced the fog near and far distance to be closer, and then darkened the colour. These worked together quite well, and the night effect was achieved.

I think with a bit of Bloom, the snow would look great like this.

I decided to change the grass texture to a snow texture, and make the town a snowy scene. However it didn’t look right. So I decided to add a snow particle effect.

The snowflakes are additive and alpha blended, and so give a glow, and stop at ground level, this is ruining slightly with the river since it is just slightly less than ground level.

Also the fact that a vertex shader is being for the water to make it look like it is moving, the snow shouldn’t settle on it, but it does.

Unfortunately that is not much I can do about it, at some point I may go through and setup multiple emitters that bypass the areas that the snow has a problem with, or adjust it so that it stops at a different ground level.

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.

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.

After getting my Totus Village model to a point where it can be used in a game, I’ve decided to use it in my AGT project “Legend of Bob”. It is still a work in progress, at the moment I only have a fish and a player model.

Over time I’ll be upgrading the models and effects to be better designed as more of the engine becomes active. At the moment I’m using a large texture (4096×4096 pixels) for the ground texture.

This ground texture is used to composite other smaller textures using a method known as “texture splatting“, which gives soft transitions between different textures depending on the mixture of colours.

I’ve used this method for transitioning between grass, sand, and rock.

The water has been upgraded from its original appearance to be more cartoon like, originally it was a semi transparent water texture.

Now the water texture is an opaque Toon shaded graphic that I found in a Ocean based game on the internet. At some point I’ll hopefully get around to making my own.

The town model is the most impressive part of the first town so far, being 52618 faces, 40000 of which are the tree (almost as bad as that 30000 face fish I had at one point).

But it is slowly being optimized, removing and merging polygons, and then afterwards, it will be split up and loaded as separate models, before being compiled into static geometry.

I’ve modified my shaders to give rings of brightness depending on the closeness to the player, this gives a more toon like effect, however I think the dark values are too strong at the moment, and need to be more subtle.

Added texture splatting to Tales of Phantasia for the ground. For those of you who don’t know what texture splatting is, its when you use a texture with ARGB values on it which represent different textures. Their value out of 255 represents the percentage of the texture that should be mixed. So if you had 128 of green and 128 of blue, and green represented grass and blue represented sand, you would have 50% sand and 50% grass texture.

Using this technique, you can get gradient transitions between different textures, or have a bit of grass within your stone path, rather than using seperate textures or splitting up the model.