great pics!
lovely made room

Why not? I understand it's a 'graphical experiment' and I do respect that. Still I wonder why you do not want to make a game out of it. You've got great artists on your team and to be honest it obviously doesn't have to be a 40 hour RPG-game either.

Still, the screenshots are mighty impressive, keep up the good work.

salemlab: thanks

nalan: Actually it's not meant to be a "game", but we intend to release the level to the public 'when it's done' (as our friends from 3D Realms always stating ).

Tempelbauer: Thanks

PHeMoX: Thanks as well.
We do intend to put one tiny quest into this level and bringing up a Game pipeline which would be potentially extendable - but it took us months to get to this point what we now can see in those screenshots.

There are two people on this team: Slin and me

We simply don't have the time to make a multilevel game out of it (this relys especially to me, because I have a lot of "real" work to do as an artist to pay my bills ). And we are not quiet sure, if our graphical pipeline would fit into something bigger. Because we are bringing in all those tiny little but cool things like, reliefmapping, lightmapping, dynamic shadows, sometimes not so low poly models (e.g. for characters, which will have 5k up to 10k polys each... dunno, this is a matter of the number of things they will have and which I want to put into those characters), physics sim (already implemented but still a subject to change), a book/letter reading system, reflect/refract shading, a.s.o.

For example: Slin is working hard on the relief routine code to make it usable and really perfect for our needs - this takes time and a lot of testing which grayscale power would be best to sustain a good and convincible reliefshading. Checking out which grayscale power is best takes sometimes the whole day and will change everytime we alter the code (sometimes a bit of a frustrating work, but it have to be done).

another example: On my wishlist for the characters to interact with, is one big thing: If those characters are speaking, they should move their lips to the phonetic sounds of the spoken words... I do know well how to make a bone-rig-setup for facial/lipsync animation (have done this several times in 3ds max for professional work); I do know how to animate all this and bringing this into MED (and finally to WED and the running level), but... how does this work with the game code? Those questions will be answered on a later time and slin is the one who will research if it is possible for us or not.

Another point on my character-wishlist is a shading system which is known as "subsurface-scattering" in 3D graphics. No problem in 3ds max (through mental ray and the SSS Shader), but a big problem for our level. How to implement this? It could work with a realtime dynamic lightmapping which will add the lighting with the diffuse texture and an underlying subdermal map (orange/red/blue/purple colormap sampling) to fake the subsurface-scattering. A similiar technique was used to fake an SSS on the candles which we can see in the screenshots above (and it works well for the candles). But will it work for characters which would need more treatment regarding SSS Shading? The research for those questions to be answered will take a fair bit of time.

besides: I use very high resolution texture sizes, which are in the end real performance eaters... it's actually not common to use so many high-res textures on so many objects in realtime game levels (I have implemented mipmap levels up to 4 times per texture - so things are running acutally fast at the moment) - bringing this resolution down would mean to destroy the graphical appearance of the objects and the minimum quality they represent right now.

Slin and me are working on this level like this:
"Okay, we now have a cool normalmap shading; and specular shading, and selective ambient per model regarding the level ambient or declining it and soon a good lightmap shading - what next? Ah, yes... relief would be cool - can we do that?", and then we are going to check this; crawling through the level and try to bring this new feature into the level. Not a very straight forward way to do things... but it works


To sum things up: We will "proof" that a somehow small game level is playable with this kind of quality with 3ds-gs. Dreaming of a whole game would be more than we can do now.

But: you never know... maybe we gonna find a way to make a game out of it. But this Level (and the underground rent-room section) will be the only thing we gonna release... even with characters and a small quest to play, but it will only this one level at first (sorry).



regards
Tristan

Tristan: I perfectly understand this "adventure" to experiment with all these features. You mentioned alot of upcoming tasks you have to tackle.

But there are even more. If you really want to have more than only one room then you need a good interior scene-management. The ABT scene-management of A7 will not be perfect for that (especially if you heavily use shaders). Maybe this will also take some additional programming time to "invent" some zones, portals and similar solutions.

I wish you all the best with this project.

We thought about that a while ago and concluded that this underground rent-room level should be loaded seperately when you "enter/activate" the corresponding door.

Somekind of a workaround

Ok, this is a good approach in this case. For a non-action game like an Adventure this will be sufficient.

By the way: I just wrote you a PM.

Especially if you heavily use shaders? By all means explain what you mean here, because shaders usually are a.) not visible when out of view (and should in that case not drain much or any performance) and b.) a lot of shaders are distance based as far as it involves large plains of water for example.




I totally understand. There's a huge potential in making something great out of this though.



To be honest, regardless of what kind of game you'll be making, this is something you'll have to live with when it comes to having a small team. I do totally see how this makes it all look like a huge task, which it of course is.

PHeMox: that's true... I can not count all those hours I already have invested in this private project. And besides all the concernes; all the struggles we got so far with this experiment...

... it's also fun to do. I don't know why exactly, but I love to do this Low Poly stuff for this Level. Maybe it's because I can see a final working model within the realtime enviroment in just a few hours (from concepting to the final result), which I don't have with my usual work as a 3d artist (it takes days, sometimes weeks to finish a project/Image/contract/whatever in traditional High Polygon 3D Graphics - which is sometimes realy annoying).

I am approaching this level graphicaly as I always do for my usual work (so I pretending if it were just another 3D Scene I have done so many times before - except that this level is not a multimilion polygon scene like my usal 3ds max scenes)... that's the reason why I put all those High-Res Textures into the models and asked slin for programing a lot of shader effects for our experiment: To keep things with a visual quality I am used to for many years in 3D Graphics (hard task and this would not have been possible 3 or 4 years ago). It "seems" to work so far

So actually I am really happy right now.

Yeah... I would love to make a whole game - but we have to check with this experiment first, if it's possible the way we are doing things or not (and if so: Which restrictions have to be followed to keep the quality at the given level).

We'll see if it works in the end (I hope so).

PHeMoX, please stop this. At least within this thread. Frank is completely right in this case. You aren´t wrong as well, but all those things which speed shaders up, are far not comparable to not using shaders when looking at the speed.


That is something we think as well but for now even finishing this level is quite far away and thus a first, more relistic goal.

Slin: Ya you're right... we are six months away from finfish this level I think (If we keep implementing models on a somehow constant period of time - but that's unlikely at the moment).