new creenshots
Community Forums/Showcase/new creenshots
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| here are some screenshots of my demo. been talking about it for a while and finally am making the sort of Progress i wanted to make. Still have to manually vertex light the level. I abandonded lightmapping in favour of this method. This is because multiply x2 gives me the kind of look I am after now. multiply x2 is great. Used 3 dx lights also.        |
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| BTW the fps is around 46 at 640 x480 on my system. in the screenies shown its set at 1024x768 32 bit. its also uses frame limiting. i turned off the flex shadow as it was slowing down stuff too much. I am going to do simple blobby shadows for characters from now on. still a lot of stuff to add , but its on the way to being finished at least graphically. notic all the icons are messed up, will fix that soon. anyway its not even called pearman anymore I abandoned that idea. |
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| Wow!!! that looks awesome Ruz! maybe there will be a downloadable demo soon? (hint hint, nudge nudge) :> |
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| yeah , when i actually manage to ovecome my fear of programming. there is n't much gameplay right now, but once I am totally happy with the graphics and animations I will make a determined effort to make it more fun to play. all you can do now is collect diamonds and kill enemies |
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| Cool - I like those weird characters... :) |
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| Very pretty... but I think you need some shadows, looks a little detached at the moment. |
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| I think it looks great. Some shadows would be nice. I would also work on the main character's legs. His bare legs seem too bright compared to his clothes, I might give him leggings of some kind. Also his feet seem too big, or perhaps his boots are too tall, or both. And the tips of his boots are too pointy. But other than that I love the look and the colors and the patterns on their clothing. One other thing I might work on though is the face of the jester guy. Seems a bit dark, and a blurry even from a distance. Trying to squeeze some more texture detail in that area would be nice. Oh and the stairs in the second to last shot would be better if they were actually made from geometry. To help the framerate you should try to reduce the number of surfaces you have. Each entity always has at least one surface, and each surface impacts the framerate much more than the number of polygons do. If you have two buildings next to eachother that use the same texture, then combining them into one mesh with one surface would help a lot. And if you've built your level anything like Rob built his it wouldn't surprise me if that fence were made out of a bunch of seperate entities. Combining all those into a single entity with a single surface would help a lot too. I would try to shoot for no more than 200 surfaces in your level. You can probably render as many as 400 in your game at once but you need to save some for characters and bullets and particle effects. |
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| Looks really nice, but as other people have commented, you really need the shadows as the characters all look like they are floating about the ground in the pics posted. If you need it, I can highly recommend sswift's shadow system. And no, he didn't pay me to say that! ;) Cheers, Ryan |
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| Is the game based on this guy? :-) http://www.blitzbasic.com/Account/showuser.php?id=24 |
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| hmm mr sswift are you going to force me to buy your shadow system. I am still thinking about it, but since | am playing this by ear i might just do some fake blob shadows for characters.not sure yet. I am a bit broke at the moment also. The rest of the scene will be vertex lit so you will have basic shadows. u yeah the stairs. i am ok with the fake stairs . they look ok to me . Thats how we did them for ps2 .It avoids that 'stair judder'though not everyone likes that look. re Surfaces , There are actually only 65 surfaces/textures there. The geometry is textured square by square with a lot of textures being shared. There are no 'big polys' as it were. This allows a consistent texture resolution throughout the level and allows me to locally map slight variations on the same tetxure. Things like fences are all part of the same big max scene so the buildings, ground/fences are all one entity. the trees are also one big entity, ie all the trees=one entity The Windmill body is part of the big max scene but the windmill sails are a seperate entity so they can turn in game. And so on with the carts and stuff.anythig deemed to be 'interactive' is imported seperately(obviously) The jesters face is actually farly detailed, I might have the face on multiply and the body on multiply x2. I will check it out. Anyway Here is that flat for the jester head( W.I.P.)  Thanks for the comments. I will put a lot of stuff right this week. Boots may or may not get changed I kind of like big silly feet |
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| Is the game based on this guy? :-) hmm not sure, its kind of developing in my head. It was called 'pearman' and the main guy was a little pearheaded man, but i gave up on that. The main character is called 'bob' , but other than That i haven't really thought it through enough yet. EDIT Ahh i see you mean rob. no, thats totally a coincidence. I have been working on pearman on and off for a few years now. Pearman appeared in pc gamer on the cd cover a few years back as UT mod EDIT |
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| To avoid stair judder simply stick a ramp over the steps and entityalpha stairramp,0 Also with regards to the windmill you could stick the blade on as part of the scene, stick a bone on it, assign the blade verts to the bone, then findchild blades and spin the child... keeps it all in the same surface then. But you probably know all this so I'll be quiet! |
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| good idea rob for the stairs, (Also it could be that i am too lazy to model the stairs) But if you think about how many extra polys will be needed its just not worth the effort IMHO. re the blade, the windmil body is part of the level mesh. don't want to loadanimesh the whole scene. |
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| "Ahh i see you mean rob. no, thats totally a coincidence." Suuurreeee... "Bob Pearman" is no relation to "Rob Pearmain". :-) <wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more!> |
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| " To avoid stair judder simply stick a ramp over the steps and entityalpha stairramp,0 " When he said stair judder, I thought he meant edge aliasing! That's a really clever solution to allowing the player to go up stairs though. The way I would have done it would have to make the player out of two spheres and figure out when one sphere can't move forward but the other can, and then move them up. For things like allowing the player to climb up ledges, that might be a good solution, but if all you want is for them to be able to climb stairs your solution is much simpler. |
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| Ruz: So you have lots of stuff combined... that's good. But maybe you took it too far? :-) If all the trees are one object that means they're all always going to be rendered even when you only see one on the screen. Maybe you would get some performance increase if you split them up so that only trees you are likely to see at the same time are grouped together? Same for other stuff. I just find it hard to beleive that Blitz would render that scene so slow. I guess you must not have a very fast video card? My video card is hardly top of the line, but my terrain system can push around 50K polys at 60-85fps. IT doesn't look like you have 50K polys there, and I had a ton of surfaces too. Oh and yeah that guy's face texture seems high enough res... Perhaps it is just because it is in 640x480 and it's being pushed down to a lower mipmap as a result. I wish you could control mipmaps more to push them "out" a bit so they don't switch quite so soon in lower resolutions. |
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| he he .I call everything 'bob' until i think of a name for it I am not a stalker honestly . 'When he said stair judder, I thought he meant edge aliasing! ' I was thinking about that metz advert. The 'judderman' |
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| yeah I have a fastish system but only a geforce 2 vid card. Mu specs are penitum4 , 3.01 ghz 1024 mb ram Hercules prophet 64mb geforce 2 vidcard re the trees , its jsut a pain cause I have no editor to play with. To be honest though i have tried it both ways and the fps is about the same. |
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| nice ! :) |
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| what resolution are the textures? |
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| cheers sunshine dreamer slenkar:128x128 for all of the level textures |
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| Screenies look great. My main comment was that you should add shadows for the characters, but you already know that. Can't wait for a demo. |
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| Damn that looks good. Best thing I've seen yet in Blitz? They just may be. Do you do any freelance art or does this take up all your spare time now? |
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| yup jhocking, will do something about the shadows.That may invlove drawing them on the screen in realtime using a felt tip Thanks Sybixsus . I do freelance when i can get it which isn't every often . i am really going to have to push to get another job soon . |
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| Wow. What can I say, that simply looks too good :) I have to agree though that it just lacks some shadows. |
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| Very nice! I have to agree on the stair thingie, and the trees look a little wimpy compared to the rest. I reckon, a good old blurry circle shadow below the characters would be enough. |
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| Looks good enough to eat (with sage nods to comments above about stairs/trees/feet/etc.) I'm curious about people's approach to stairs using an invisible ramp... how do you prevent sliding down when a character stops mid-stair (assuming gravity is also being used) ?? |
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| "how do you prevent sliding down when a character stops mid-stair" Blitz collisions allow you to disable sliding down. |
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| Isn't that to do with setting the collision parameters. you can set it to 'stop' if | am not mistaken. Fredborg I contemplated a blurry cirlce shadow, but How would I stop it penetrating the ground when you go over obstacles and down stairs. also jumoing it the air , the shadow should stay on the gorund. |
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| The easiest solution would be to use sswift's shadow system. You don't have to use it to render shadow images in real-time. If you use his system with a blurry circle image for the shadow, you won't get any of the overhead from rendering shadow images while still getting a shadow which clings perfectly to the surfaces it is cast onto. |
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| jh: Yes, but there's still a cost associated with projecting, and it is sometimes higher than the cost of rendering the maps when the levels have many polys receiving shadows. |
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| I think i am heading toward doing my own blobby shadows. I had no luck in getting sswifts shadow system to work at the moment. Its probably somehting simple, but i need to get on. If you look a the older tombraider shadows, they are perfectly adequate. i will try and emulate something like that. i already have a basic one set up and it looks fine.. when you run forward the shadow enlongates slightly and when you stay still it sligly wider. This gives the faint impression of movement. Only problem is it won't hug the terrain , but i will bodge it as much as possible. Perhaps I will try again with you system when I have more time SSwift. Thanks for trying anyway. |
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| very nice screen design, including all involved steps of course. |
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| Jfk,you lost me there? |
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| lost you? no idea what you're talking about, pls explain. |
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| I mean I didn't quite understand what you meant by 'including all involved steps of course' 'you lost me' means I did n't quite undertsand |
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| What Ruz means to say is that you're an umpa lumpa. |
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| perhaps I am the umpa lumpa. |
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| I even don't try to find "umpa lumpa" in the dictionary :) but with "all involved steps" I meant the screen design is a result of a lot of jobs including modeling, UV-mapping,texturing,choosing colors, contrasts and adjusting saturations and more. And each job is done very nicely. |
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| Yes , that sums it all up very well JFK i find the most important thing to to get the tonal values correct first then everything else works after. sometimes you can design a character that looks good by itself but crap in game. but I seem to be getting better at choosing the right colours now. I must have changed the textures a bilion times now for this level though. |
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 bit of a difference 8 months ago |
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| I even don't try to find "umpa lumpa" in the dictionary For all of your Oompa Loompa needs:http://www.oompa-loompas.net/ |
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| 'dumpity doo' |
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| what is your editor? |
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| 3dsmax is my editor panno.i export using puddings b3d exprter Imade a basic light editor to place my lights also. |
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| how did i miss this thread...this is top stuff Ruz |
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| I like it alot |
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| thanls. I am pleased by the overall response to my project so far,inspires to me carry on with it. looks as though I will be getting some help with the programming also, so i can concentrate on the graphics/animation |
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| As other pepole have said the only thg i would say is a bit weird is the feet |
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| s'ok,.. I have been redoing the feet and improving the character.I will post some more screens soon |
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| I am suing, using my name ;-) |
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| lol |
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| Looking super sweet mate. I'd be interested to hear how you finaly implement your shadow system. |
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| Looks great! One thing I noticed in those screenshots though is that the perspective looks a little out of whack. Perhaps you could try 'CameraZoom camera, 1.6', which is what I use. |
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| I am suing, using my name ;-) he he Pearman had been aorund for a while before I had heard of you Rob. its ctually called skinnybob the jester now anyay. It s odd though i came across your site before I even bought blitz while searching for pearman related stuff Cyberheater, we are using blobby shadows for the charatcers and vertex colouring for general shadows Axeman, I have heard other people complain about this, I will check it out Hey its nearly ready. its actually a game now, Quite simplistic gamplay right now but playable. Look out for the demo really soon. We have a few bugs to iron out yet |
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