This reading week

Hey all another team overlord update. Obviously this week there hasn’t been a lot to say since everyone I’m sure has been spending quite some time this week furiously studying for the midterms coming up. So I know overall there wouldn’t be a lot of team collaboration this week because I know that each member of the group was assigned tasks to cater to and details were hammered out before the break.

Anyway so this week as far as I know the artists are still pretty much working on models from a list our main artist compiled together and are working on level designs.Gary’s also already done an amazing job with the math classes and parsing for a bvh file as everything from what I’ve used from it all work totally fine. He’s also still working on as he’s mentioned before a camera and player control system for our game.  As for me I’ve been working solidifying the AI system for our game and think the way it’s currently structured is fairly clean and organized. Another thing I’ve been lately working on is our full blown animations system for our game where we will be doing actual skeletal animations for our characters.  The way its progressing so far I think is right on track after some testing with Gary’s parsing for the bvh , we so far have  a framework skeleton animating which is awesome.

Yay skeletons

I also have been running a lot debugging tests and such as well as basically now having all frames of animation for our skeleton represented by quaternion orientations instead which makes it even better and smoother to animate. Some things I’ve also been working on with animations is interpolation of key frames which I have been using slerp for and is one of the key elements that need to get ironed out, hopefully by next week it’ll be done as it’s important to be able to blend the animations in a nice clean organized manner. Also as a goal next week I’m hoping to have it so characters are fully skinned and animated properly as well as fully fleshing out the framework so I have fairly good idea how to further set it up as soon I have my hands on a rigged character.

Here’s hoping we’ll have prettier and cooler stuff to show next week.

Gordon

Post-Shader Programming

Hey guys,

Yay math.

So for those of you who may or may not know, me and Gordon have gotten to 65. This means we’re done with the shader homework questions for the rest of the semester. So what does this mean for GDW? Well it means a few things. The first thing is that we’re done; we don’t have to stress over getting them done anymore. The second thing is that we can convert all the time we spent doing shaders into working on GDW, so essentially starting now we’re going to be doing a lot of programming for our game. Lastly, it also means that we have a half-decent shader library going on that we can already use for our GDW.

Which is awesome.

So this week Gordon has been working on his behaviour class. He had a pretty good class going last semester and this semester hes looking to update and fix it so that it will work for this semester’s game. Our enemies are going to be having some interesting AI, and his behaviour class should make it quite easy to attach certain AIs to certain enemies so that they do different things.

Hurray for parsing BVHs.

As for me, I’ve been working on a few things. My goal is to make a pretty awesome camera system that will not only follow the player around but to also offer the opportunity to explore the world around us, since we want to make our game pretty. In addition to that I’ve also been working on some math and skeleton stuff. I fixed up my matrix and quaternion classes so I’m (pretty) sure that they work fine now, so they do everything from basic addition and subtraction to rotations to inverses and so on. Should have a lot of potential uses for those guys. I also managed to parse a BVH file, yay. We also plan on having skeletons in our game, so parsing a BVH is the first step for that.

We’ve been also working on a variety of other stuff and have plans for a lot more in the near future. Don’t want to spoil everything right now though, so keep checking back!

Gary

Productivity

Howdy all, Its Blog time with Team Overlord again 😀

First and foremost I’d like to say I hope our beloved Team Member Rachel Fung had a wonderful birthday this past sunday and we all send her our best wishes. Rachel has been a powerful driving force for Team Overlord’s art since the very begining and has progressed very far along the way.

Hope you had fun Rachel!

Now for the last little bit, we’ve been a wee bit worried that we werent spending enough time on what we REALLY wanted to do, the game. We’ve kind of been distracted by work for other courses (*cough* shaders! *cough*). To circumvent this issue, we decided that over the weekend we would have

(*drumroll*)

THE TEAM OVERLORD GAME JAM!

What is the Team Overlord Game Jam? (think people might get mad if we called it TO Jam? :P)
It’s US, locking ourselves in ONE room, for TWELVE staight hours, to do nothing, but PRODUCTIVE WORK FOR OUR GAME! (lunch breaks included). And productive we were, as it allowed us to hammer out alot of he basic stuff for getting our game going nice and smoothly. One place this helped huge amounts in was the programming department. You see, our lead programmers (Gary Ng, and Gordan Tan), both being fabulousin their own right, had been doing a fair bit of work in the shader department for Dr.Hogue’s class (Gordon being the FIRST student with a full 65 exp!). As such, they both had different frameworks with different pieces tha were better than the others. For instance gary’s camera class is ridiculous and could give autodesk a run for its money, while Gordon’s OBJ loader can theoretically render 2 million pollis on screen with little to no trouble. SOO the entire session last saturday was devoted to merging the best elements of both and figuring out what else needed to be made to form a super Framework. It was a grueling task for the two entrepid programmers but they were able to trudge their way through the grit of it.

A few texturing issues, kinda looks like modern art

Why yes, that IS a beatiful wireframe shot with GPU enabled particles.

Meanwhile, over in the art department, we were able to get some serious work done in the art department, with myself, mack and alex knocking out alot of issues in terms of game and level design. Rachel was not able to make it this time but she assures us she’ll make up for it the next time. (OH WAIT, DID I JUST MENTION WERE DOING THIS MORE THAN ONCE?!?)

Yes, the Game jam was so productive we’ve decided to attempt to do it on a bi-monthly basis so we can really just stuff as much razzle-dazzle in as we can. Back to the art department, Mack and Alex were both able to finish up a base design of a level each, while I managed to get a little down and dirty with mudbox to produce an example level for Gary and Gordon to practice with.

120k polies, no big for us. (note: we're not actually using in game....IM AN EFFICIENT MODELLER!)

Here’s is a gorgeous version I mocked up with baked in lighting and textures.

Mmm I love Turtles (ha, ha, because i used the TURTLE renderer....in maya...ha?)

Add to that the crazy amount of work we got done on our main 3D assets (including our main characters, enemies, and various props and you have a productive weekend indeed..
Heres looking forward to the next time.

so a few weeks …

so a few weeks have passed now and we are getting a little bit closer to midterms when, production of the game usually comes to a bit of a hault. fortunately we have a few concepts from paper that have started to take form and hopefully they can be integrated into a level soon. for the programming side of things there isn’t exactly much to show off. I know Gary has been working hard on the level editor and some nice progress has been made from that, unfortunately blocks of code don’t exactly make the prettiest pictures, so its not exactly the easiest thing to visualize. however for our other programmers, there seems to be alot of progress in the shader department. hopefully I will be able to get a print screen of some of the cool effects Gordon and Gary have been working on so we can show off a bit of what our game might look like shaded, but for now that will have to be something for the future.

in other art related news,  a few assets have been coming along nicely. For the better part of the week I know Branan has been working hard on getting some humanoid models looking nice and that will define a core for our game. meanwhile Rachel has some nice enemy designs going, that I personally think look pretty cool

So this is a really awesome wolf design, and personally I can’t wait to see this textured, rigged and in game. I’m not sure if this will be the final model but I really like it a lot, so hopefully we can keep it in.

some other things we have been doing are really trying to flush out design concepts. you will notice in last weeks post we got some nice looking world map concepts being created, and this week we are starting to focus in on each individual part of the world.

here is a sort of level design I created on google sketch up and have been trying to recreate in maya.

so as you can see there is quite a bit of elevation going on in this design of this level. hopefully the programmers will be able to do the collision detection for elevation because I really like this design, I imagine the trough in the middle to be a river flowing from a water fall and the highest area is a bright green meadow.

well that’s most of what we have to report for this week. hopefully for next week alot of this stuff starts coming together as a whole and we can actually start to see how it will all look in a level and maybe with some textures.
until then; thanks for reading and hope you had a good weekend!