Fun Time Countdown

Hey guys,

Random BVH issues aside, we have GPU mesh skinning!

So code freeze is pretty much a week and a bit away. We’re making some serious progress for our game and we should have a pretty sick game for code freeze and an even sicker game for the game con coming up. Here’s a bit of an update as to what we accomplished over the last week.

In terms of programming, me and Gordon have been getting a lot done. I spent a lot of time over the last week doing gameplay programming and improving our game’s framework. Gordon has been working on GPU mesh skinning for a long time now, and between Branan constantly making and fixing BVH and skin files and Gordon tweaking and debugging his code, we pretty much have it done. Now all that’s left is to integrate it into my engine and finishing fine tuning it and then Branan could pump out a ton of animations for our characters in our game. Gordon and I also managed to integrate his behaviour class into my engine so now our enemies have a reasonably solid AI. Last semester in SHFT our enemies just constantly seeked the player which was effective, but it wasn’t the most advanced AI. In our game this semester we plan on having a better AI system so you guys could look out for that.From the art side, Branan has been constantly working with me and Gordon to get our main character fully rigged and animated. He’s currently in the process of creating animations for our characters such as running and walking. Alex is still working on the level design of our game, but it’s coming together pretty nicely. Mack started to edit some of the sound effects that they recorded last week and is currently in the process of creating new sound effects and the music for our game. Rachel has been texturing our assets as well as designing 2D elements for our game such as our HUD.

The game is really starting to shape up now. We still have a lot to do, but with every passing day progress can be seen.

 

Gary

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

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.

Untitled

Rachel made my map pretty.

Hey guys,

So on Monday we had a pretty thorough discussion on the world we want to create. Rachel took my map I created and made it a lot better, Mack had a few level designs and Branan had a pretty detailed outline of how he wanted the world to pan out from the player’s perspective. We still haven’t gotten around to fleshing out 100% of the world, but we have a really good idea of what we want to do, so we’re going to start from there and see how we do.

This week we wanted to start production. I personally was in charge of working on ripping out the RTS elements from SHFT among other things. Unfortunately as I mentioned in my other blog, I encountered some issues. Not going to go too much in detail there, but essentially I think I have things ripped out, but I can’t check to make sure. Which is unfortunate.

The android Branan made for Global Game Jam 2012

Branan has also been working on a humanoid model for a while now and it’s coming together. It looks pretty good. I don’t have a picture to show off, but he also participated in Global Game Jam 2012 this weekend and he rigged up an android model which he says is going to be a trial for our human characters in our GDW game. It looks pretty sick so I’m excited to see what we end up doing with it.

Mack and Rachel have been working on some concept art for the game as well and have hopefully started working on the preliminary artwork we need for our game. Alex and Gordon have been working on learning shaders that we may or may not need for our game. We want our game to be super pretty so we need as many graphical awesomeness as we can get.

Other than that there isn’t too much to talk about in terms of our group’s progress. We have the base game planned out already, we just need to start working on actually developing the game itself now.

Gary