Hiding from a band of orcs
Community Forums/Showcase/Hiding from a band of orcs
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 Blitz3D of course. Sniff it. ps - it might seem a bit dark - but I think it makes it look moody and mysterious. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8exkKmSdYNg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZLTNo-XGos        |
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| What did you do to piss all those Orcs off, Puki? |
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| Well, technically, the orcs are borrowed from Dark Messiah. The trees are Dexsoft trees and I am licenced to use them - as with the stable thing. I'm not sure if all of the ground vedgetation is legit - the mushrooms and ferns are Arteria or Dexsoft which I am licenced to use. |
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| the trees and landscape look good |
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| Nicely done Puki, what sort of framerates you getting with all those trees & vegetation? |
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| Not sure really - as it is not optimised. Currently it must be running at around 20-25FPS. The Dexsoft trees have LOD stages, I've not even implemented that - I'm just using the main mesh for everything. I only put 2 LOD stages on the grass, although there are more. The ferns and mushrooms only have onle LOD stage - the mushrooms being quit high-poly. I took the autofade out of the vedgetation as it was running fast enough at the time to do so. I also pushed the LOD on grass vedgetation right back to the point of being off. So, there is much potential with optimisation - baring in mind the light and shadows are real-time - there are no lightmaps or baked shadows. I didn't want to apply shadows to the tree trunks as I thought it would be wasteful and doing checks on the trees to check shading and adjust on-the-fly would also be wasteful. So, to break things I apply a realtime shade to the trees simply by using EntityColor - it makes no check whatsoever on the trees, so it can shade a tree that would be receiving light; however, it means thousands of trees are not uniformally lit and makes the scene much nice, albeit completely inaccurate - but, with the denseness of the forest area, the player won't really notice. EDIT: The wall is an Oblivion one - I bought a Dexsoft farmyard one and have forgotten to replace it. |
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This is a recent Leadwerks Engine screenshot by the guy behind the Leadwerks GDC video: I think I am catching up. EDIT: Although, people may squeak at me to lighten my shadows again. |
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| Interesting stuff. Personally I think your demo looks visually better. The LE screenie above seems a little "flat" somehow especially the sheep whilst yours tends to have more colour depth. I especially like the haze effect seen between the distant trees in the first & second pictures. Simple but very effective :) |
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| Wow! I think that LE shot has a very nice cinematic quality (probably due to HDR glare that might be going on). That under action must be really good (as good as performatically expensive, unfortunately...). As for Puki's shots (with me liking the second one), I think greater care need to be taken for the lighting. He's got the shadow and fog going on, but the lighting (both Direct and Ambient) need to be touched up until a more artistically pleasing result is found. I don't know, like you said, it does look dark, and perhaps unrealistically so (take a look at "hidingfromorcs6", for instance, the top of the trees need sunlight). EDIT: If you need a soundtrack to get on the mood, there's always good ol' WC III. |
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| on the non-graphical side i think gameplay is important.. |
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| I uploaded a low-quality video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZLTNo-XGos Technically, YouTube has not finished processing it - so the quality may improve further later when it is finished and made public. I am currently uploading a second, higer-res, video that will probably take an hour or two. EDIT: Uploaded a better quality one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8exkKmSdYNg |
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| I made a third video with increased light levels - does it seem better? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jD7_RDe55dg YouTube is odd as the thumbnails for the videos show (for me) an exaggerated colour and light level, whilst each video appears much, much darker to me. Can anyone confirm the the following YouTube thumbnails are like really bright, yet the videos are completely different?    To confuse things, the thumbnails are brighter than the actual footage before it gets converted by YouTube. I just want to know if it is me or not. Basically, the video footage is as per the screenshots previously posted - that is what the videos should look like. People often say my stuff looks dark and if the previous screenshots above look too dark, then I assume the videos are basically ridiculously dark? |
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| puki are you going to make a game or not? :) |
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| This is science - it is cutting-edge. My stuff is better-looking than Oblivion:  My stuff is so much more natural-looking:   It's Blitz3D not some high-cost commercial game engine. |
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| The latest video is a lot clearer than the first one Puki, and yes the thumbnails do appear a lot brighter than the video. The orcs ambling around in the woods somehow remind me of the Sidhe, the mythical people who fell from grace as told the legends of C¨²chulainn from the lands of T¨ªr na n¨®g. Very well done overall! |
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| So this is all DirectX7? Do you think that it is efficient enough to do complex scenes and games without framerates below 30 fps? |
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| Yep, this is vanilla Blitz3D. I think it is capable, BUT, you stil need high-end hardware to give as much processing power as possible to Blitz3D; however, this is no different than the situation with playing any high-end game. I'm using a 896MB GTX 260 Black Edition. My CPU is a paltry (by today's standards) Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4GHz. Baring in mind how much Blitz3D does on the CPU, there is a lot of potential to hand over to Blitz3D with a faster CPU. I love it. This is what Blitz3D is all about - fighting tooth and nail for it. It's like coding Quake on a 48K Spectrum. |
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| the video lags. It is my internet? ;) |
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| Puki this is a nice eye catcher, but it i think it is lagging. You can make nice looking scenes with external content. But you will never make a game in this or less graphics because a game is much more than 3D parts and a camera. I think there is no ressource for any game codes. I worked with different teams on 10 3D Projects using B3D and all ended in the same way. The FPS kill the projects. Look at professional DX7 games with all the restrictions in GFX and 3D. Low poly and small texture size. Many of them don't use alpha in any way to make the code fast. |
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| @puki: You can use fake tiled "leaves" texture on trunks of trees (and to project it with FastExt ShadowSystem). It will look very cool and doesn't demand additional rendering! And use LOD of tree model for shadows - It is provided in library and increase FPS! |
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| u_u, i am now, and no speack english :S |
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| puki are you using a scene graph type thing to display all the trees and grass? |
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