Anime Tennis Babes - New Screen
Community Forums/Showcase/Anime Tennis Babes - New Screen
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Still working hard on ATB, maybe a little too hard, and thought I'd post another screenshot. The graphics are slightly improved, better textures, more detail, better lighting, etc. Most of the improvements have been behind the scenes though. I've implemented doubles, two players, tournaments, the GUI, menus, control configurations, lots of AI tweaks, speed changes, etc. I've also ensured that it works ok as low as 640x480x16bpp ( had a few zbuffer issues to solve to make that work. ) It doesn't look as good at such a low res, of course, but it's still very playable. Demo soon, I promise. I could release a demo now, but I'd like to add some more extras and tweak the animations and sounds a little. And I need to convert some of these PNG's to JPG's, and see how small I can crush this down to. I have some stuff going on at home, so I may not be able to put much work in for a couple of weeks, but I hope to have a demo up before too long. |
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| looks really good. are you planning on adding multiplayer? |
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| Starting to look good. Can I ask how you did the soft shadows? |
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| Thanks guys. I don't plan on adding multiplayer since I don't really have the ability to test it properly. I'll consider it if there's enough interest, but it would be hard. The soft shadows are courtesy of SSwift's Shadow System. |
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| That does look good, yeah. Nice work! Hey, considering you're using sswift's shadow system, I highly suggest you add shadows to chairs, scoreboard, net and all the other extras if you're not already planning to. My focus gets drawn to them as they stick out without it. |
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| I did try that, but they don't look particularly good. I also tried lightmapping the stadium, but that doesn't look good either. In theory it should, and it is a good idea, but in practice it doesn't look very nice. Not to my eye anyway. Perhaps because I've gone for a cartoonish non-realistic style. |
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| love the advert boards in the background, you spelt 'puppies' wrong on them though :) |
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| Looks nice, except the audience it kind of flat. Maybe use a crude 3D model on faster systems? |
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| Looks great. Maybe try to use a non-antialiasied contour on the audience since the fading to black don't looks good with maskmode flag 4. you could also try to use alphamode 2 instead and use tga with a brighter background tone and a seperate transparency channel. |
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| hmm. how bout some shots with everything shadow enabled.. let us decide :). Looks very nice so far. some low(50) poly audience members (one surface'd be nice for that).have a 10,000 poly audience=20x10 rows=not bad at all. also, some textures for the benchs/scoreboard/judge stand thingie. |
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| I have considered using models for the audience, but there are a lot of audience members. A lot more than 200. I'll grant you they don't look great, but I'm all about performance, since I do hope to make money from this project, and you don't really pay them much attention when you're playing. I won't be changing it before the demo anyway, because I haven't been able to test on any really low spec machines yet. If it plays really well on low spec machines, I would consider it, but I don't want any more configuration options. I already have five different shadow modes, three different resolutions and color depth choices. If I make too many of those options, I'm going to lose potential customers who can't figure out what to disable to get more speed. JFK : I'll take another look at the crowd texture, but I'm fairly sure it's not antialiased any more. It was in an old version, but I'm almost certain I fixed that. I was hoping to avoid using an alpha channel for speed reasons. Again, if performance on low spec machines is better than I expect when I release the demo, I might reconsider. Bot Builder : Point taken on the textures. I just received a pack of textures in the mail this morning, so I'll see if I can find something suitable. VRam is curretly hovering around 10mb minimum, and I don't expect to get it under 8mb, so I have plenty of vram to spare before I'll get to 16mb. |
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Looks nice, you could make a few crowd models, which hold around 10-20 people on 1 surface...  912 Triangles, 1 surface. You could just swap out the texture to have different people. On top of this you could go mad and rig it so the crowd could stand up and applaud, watch the ball or just do 'random' things just to give it detail. Email me if you want the model. |
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| I think the style of the crowd actually works like it is is. Seems more fun that way. just my 2 pence worth |
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| Rob : Thanks for the offer, and that is a great model. Here's the problem. The screenshot above is taken from my options screen where the camera revolves constantly. It's better for screenshots because it adds a bit of variety to the angle and it's the only game mode I have where two CPU players play each other. If I use a static camera for the rest of the game modes, that limits the portion of the crowd that is visible. But a static camera has to be zoomed out slightly in order to show all the playable court. I'm not switching the camera when the players change ends ( you play from the top and the bottom of the screen ) so that saves that. But even so, that's a bare minimum of 18 rows of people visible from the static camera. That's 16,416 polys for the crowd. That number of poly's alone would probably slow some of the onboard Intel chips down too much for the game to be playable, and I'm very serious about making the game playable on low spec machines. If I thought I could get this published commercially, then I could afford commercial minimum requirements, but I don't see that happening. If there are any representatives of commercial publishers prowling the board, feel free to prove me wrong :P I can see this being published as on a shareware site though, and I really need to maximize my customer base if I'm only earning on a per-sale basis ( no advance. ) If the demo proves unplayable on low spec machines, and the extra poly's don't do too much damage on the cards that can play it anyway, I might consider it. I'll drop you an email about the model, and take a look at it in game. It'll probably be a temptation to use it once I see it in action, but I really can't see being able to afford another 16,000 poly's. Thanks Ruz, I'm glad someone likes it the way it is, because it's probably not gonna be viable to do differently. |
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| Since you already have the flat crowd working, it wouldn't do any harm to add the 3d crowd while keeping your flat crowd code in there too... then you could make it user-selectable. Cos they do look a bit funny. I also can't help thinking the other opjects need shadows too. If it looks funny, maybe the shadows are too dark? |
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| The shadows are too light, if anything. I suppose I could create the geometry and paint the shadow manually and place it in there. That might look ok, but it will look wrong when the players are closer to the net and their shadows are pale by comparison to the object shadows. I'll see what I can manage. I'm really trying to avoid more configurable options. I already five different shadow modes, as well as the res and depth options, and I can see inexperienced users giving up because it's too slow once they've turned all the options up to max. Again, I'll give it some thought and see what I can do. It depends how nicely I can paint the texture too. They could end up looking ugly as well as using lots of polys. EDIT : BTW, I have emailed Rob to ask to take a look at the crowd model. It would be stubborn and churlish of me not to even try it. I can't see being able to use it, but I'd be a fool not to test it. |
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| That loooks Damn Good Sibixus... ... the only thing that distracts from the scene, and is quite apparent from the jump is the flat people in the stands. From the camera angle, they are visibly flat cardboard cutouts. I know that this aspect of the scene is gonna be a pain... getting realistic looking gallery without killing the frame rate... and I wish I could offer a viable suggestion on how to do it... --Mike |
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| I'm really trying to avoid more configurable options. I already five different shadow modes, as well as the res and depth options, and I can see inexperienced users giving up because it's too slow once they've turned all the options up to max. Ah, well then what you need is a little bit of code that does some quick performance benchmarking upon first run, and automatically sets all the options to optimal. |
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| looking good :) any planned the first release date? |
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| I'm not actually working towards a demo, I'm working towards the final version, then I'll make a demo. There's not much more work to be done, but it might take a while because I have a lot of work to do around the house. Then I'll wait and see what opinions are on the demo before making any changes or additions, not to mention bug fixes. Then it's just a case of trying to find someone to publish it. Anyway, I've been working on the problems identified. I've added Rob's crowd model ( thanks for that ) and put on a basic texture. I can maybe improve the texture a little, but texturing is not my forte, so it's probably not gonna get a whole lot better. I've also added some sprite shadows under the static geometry. I've experimented with using SSwift's system for those objects, but it just doesn't look right. Now, I'd like to know which version of the crowd you prefer. Flat or 3d. The sprite shadows look nice, so I'm not getting rid of those now. I just want to know which crowd type you prefer.  I've managed a little jiggery pokery with the crowd so that I'm actually only adding another 6,500 polys to the render pipeline. I've offset that by halving the number of shadow casting lightsources and playing with the range to get some more performance. It will still be possible to turn it off if necessary, of course. |
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| Hmm.. I think you guys are exxagerating the crowd a bit. The action is on the court and that's where the eyes of the user will be focused for most of the game. The screenshots are looking great. Any chance of a demo soon? I am looking forward to purchasing this one if the game play is good. Barney |
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| I've come to the conclusion that there is no single perfect solution to the crowds. So there will be an option in the settings window when you start the game to pick 2d or 3d crowds. Performance may still be affected, despite trimming it down to 6,500 polys so people with low spec PC's may have to choose the faster option. Everyone else can pick the one they like looking at best. I am working on this as much as possible, so I do hope to have the beta complete soon. As soon as I have the beta finished, I will release a feature-limited demo to help my gauge performance, find out about any changes or additions people would like, and ask for help ensuring it's bug free. When it will go on sale, I really can't say. I can't offer it to a publisher until it's finished. All I can do at the moment is show it around and see who's interested. I have been approached by one publisher already, but nothing's definite there either. |
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| The 3D crowd looks substantially better in my opinion buuuuuuuut....... now you need better textures/detail for them. Instead of an audience of cardboard cutouts, you now have an audience composed of mannequins(sp?). :) I know it sounds nit pickity but something about them just doesn't sit right with me. Overall tho, game looks fab, gj! |
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| Ya, they're only 76 poly's per character, so there's a limit to what I can do with them. I will try to do a little something with the texture now obviously, but 12 characters crammed onto a single 256x256 texture doesn't leave me a lot of room. Plus I'm crap at painting ;) I would have been working on it already, but I got sidetracked playing the game for an hour. |
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| ooh. nice. you know it's a good game when the dev starts playing it along time :) I like the modeled crowd better, but the optimal solution is to add an option(as you have done). I like the sprite shadows BTW. Maybe the shadow for the stand thing with an umbrella could have a larger sprite? |
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| "ooh. nice. you know it's a good game when the dev starts playing it along time :)" wouldn't that make every game good then, cos all devs play their games alot :) |
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| The crowd is definitively better in 3D !! Just a little thing : is it an outdoor tennis court ? If it is and by the appearence of the ambient light, the light is comming from the sun... so why shadows of the players doesn't point in the same direction ? I know...i'm a perfectionist... Really look fun, don't know if you add a "puff" (a little smoke sprite when ball hit something) but it will add some "anime fun" to the game...just a suggestion. In the "anime fun" you can think of "displayed sounds" like : "Smash !!!" .... or "Ouch..." text appearing where the sound is emmited... Hey !! Wait a minute !!! It's a good idea, i will add this to my game, forget it :) Good luck in your dev. |
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