The first and last post for June. Harvesting season started, and usually that means long days at work. Quickly programming and testing new machines, and trying to fix machines and the mood of their drivers when there are troubles. Quite a lot of work, but very rewarding if you see all your computer screens and automatic regulations doing magic with hydraulics and cylinders. Anyhow, time for a short break and another family visit in Poland. And who knows, maybe we can encourage our Dutch football team there! Although… winning with two points difference from Portugal… I think our orange dream ends early this year.
Busy, busy. Always a good diversion from the lack of progress on that other thing, you know, Tower22. Plenty of posts about a Radar Station, but how about n-e-w stuff hmmm? Let me answer this tactically… There are three kinds of progress: lot’s-of-talk (no progress), visible progress, and invisible progress. Let’s say we belong in the last category. Not that we didn’t make any visible progression. Several objects and textures were made, and I’m especially happy with the two concept-artists who joined and did quite a lot of drawings last months.
Making rooms
The main priority right now is to create rooms, textures, interior objects, and more rooms. Creating a few floors from the actual game. To get a good test-case for all the programming work, to get something playable. Unfortunately, that’s where the “visible progress” halts; it takes ages to finish a room. Not because it’s an insane amount of work to make a room + textures + objects (although at first when your asset library is empty, it actually is a lot of work), but because… because… everyone seems to be busy all the time. The ideas are there, the floorplans are there, also the concept drawings of room X Y and Z are on the table. The programming work is far enough to get it rendered and even “played” (walking around and stuff). And last but not least, each one knows what to do. So, what’s the hold up?
Two years earlier, I would make most stuff myself, or just borrow it from another game. Making rooms went a whole lot quicker, but of course, at the price of lower quality as I’m not that much of a 3D modeler or texture drawer. And you probably recognized some Halflife2 floortiles or footstep sounds ;). Obviously, if you want to make a good looking game, you’ll need artists with more talent to make each and every fart. Don’t underestimate the amount of things to make even for a stinky Soviet apartment interior. Several floor textures, wallpapers, decals, footstep-on-linoleum sounds, closet here, lamp there. Doors, kitchen, junk to place on that kitchen, and the list goes and on.
Count the assets
If you have a team of artists with sufficient time, you can relative quickly step through an asset list and create some momentum. With that I mean, once you made a few rooms, you can start reusing objects, sounds or textures for a next room so the development speed will accelerate. But Tower22 feels like a tractor running on Kentucky fried gravy stuck in the mud on a slope. Usually only one to three persons have some time do things in a week, so if two assets arrive in the mailbox each week while the total asset count is 20 for a room, it will get a looong journey. But unfortunately, that is reality at the moment, as most artists are busy with work (got to earn money right?), girlfriends, moving over to another place, and so on. And I wouldn’t be surprised if some just don’t really like to spend too much time on T22. Hey, I can’t force anyone. All I can try is to motivate them, and keep things going with clear short-term goals. But in the end, it’s their decision what they do in their free hours of course.
Maybe that’s the price I’m paying for asking talented artists. Students or less skilled artists are likely going to have more time (and will) to help you on whatever 3D model, drawing or other related game content. They are already happy they can help on a real game anyway! Skilled boys and girls on the other hand usually have their hands full on similar (paid / freelance) work. If you spend the whole day making 3D objects for Resident Evil 12, you probably aren’t that motivated anymore to make some more for T22 once you get home. I can understand that, and I’m not the pushing kind of guy. But at the same time this “permissiveness” isn’t really boosting the development speed of course. Should I take a step back, accept the fact you just can’t expect people who are skilled AND have a lot of time, and allow less talented people to help on the project? Maybe. A lead-artist who can guide and train them would be very helpful then. But honestly, I just want to see and hear quality, nothing less. Rather finish something with lower quality than nothing at all? No. All or nothing baby.
Progressbar.Visible := false;
Programming progress then? Quite a lot, but again, mostly “invisible”. That’s because a particular technique often needs a lot of preparations first. Studying the matter, pouring it in a multi-useful, clear way into the engine, expanding your tools so you can make use of it. And then finally apply it in a room and take a snapshot to show it (visible progress). Let’s give some examples, so you’ll know what I’ve been doing last months. For one, I tried to improve the performance. Implemented Unified Buffer Objects, made the loading times a lot quicker by using pre-compiled shaders, squeezed the rendering pipeline, and started on “Deferred Tiled Rendering”. I’ll be back on that in detail in some day. Either how, before you can implement it, you first need to know more about how GPU’s work, and “Compute Shaders”. So, support for OpenCL has been added to the engine. Actual Deferred Tile Rendering doesn’t work yet though, because may laptop is too old to perform required atomic operations. Hopefully the laptop finally dies by per accidentally dropping it in a potato harvester so I can get a new one from work hehe. Anyhow, the point is, even if Deferred Tiled Rendering had been implemented, you wouldn’t see any difference other than higher framerates (hopefully).
No, we won't win the war with photograp and rusty can objects. Nevertheless, also the little ones matter.
Second little thingy. I implemented AVI video streaming support. Basically you’ll read decode movie frames each time, then convert it to an OpenGL texture and apply it as usual. Thanks to some standard Microsoft libraries, the whole decoding part is monkey peanuts actually. But integrating AVI support carefully in the engine and tools takes some extra work. The goal was to import and use AVI files in exact the same way as any other texture. So that means you can apply movies on everything in the game. Computer screens, lights projecting a movie on a wall, animated floors, Monsters with television heads playing Tellsell, et cetera. Well, it succeeded. Yet it’s still “invisible progress”, as we don’t have a finished movie file to use yet :|
Another thing. Gameplay! All that talk about graphics always. Wouldn’t it be nice, also for the artists, to actually walk around in our rooms? Run a bit, make a jump, open a door, shoot something. You know, game stuff. A lot of programming work has been done here as well, but no end-results such as flying around with Jetpacks, solving Myst puzzles, or shooting smart monsters yet. What I did is making a “framework”. It doesn’t do anything, but using this framework you can attach a custom “behavior DLL” (a program) to each object or monster, or the game in general. These DLL’s decide what to show in the main menu, how to operate your inventory, how monster X should act and think, how fast your player can run, and so on. Every specific game detail will be implemented in these modules. The engine itself is just a toolbox that offers these DLL modules a lot of functions to do things (an “API”). Render something, spawn an object, play a sound, check if monster A can see monster B, et cetera. It works like an event-response system. The engine detects something, for example, if a barrel falls down and hits the ground. The specific DLL behind that barrel will decide what to do, and calls the API. Spawn particles, decrease health, play a “Bang!” sound, et cetera.
When programming these DLL modules, you’ll notice how much little details there are. Almost forgot… you need game rules right? Can your player jump or swim? How many times do you need Boss X in the balls before he dies? On which conditions does the “Game Over” screen appear? It all sounds pretty simple, as we have countless of games with comparable mechanics. Yet Tower22 isn't a shooter ala Half-life or Resident Evil 5. So, each detail requires smart thinking. I’m talking about paperwork. Milton Bradley (MB board games) weren't busy with sculpting Monopoly pieces or drawing board-textures. At least, the essence of their work was to write down brilliant ideas. Addictive play, innovative understandable rules, and how to make the perfect game to transform cozy family nights into a massive fight. So, what we did is starting a (private) Wiki to write down *everything* about the game. And, thanks to concept-artists, supported with visuals this time. As you all know, pictures say more than a thousand words. Hence, my busy guys don’t even read thousand words.
Hmmm, not a very nice shot of that livingroom right? But remember how the Radar Station transformed from boring concrete hollow boxes to something nice!
Ok, last example. I saw this movie
got jalous, and restarted The Never Ending Story on realtime G.I. Everyone who has spend time on this knows G.I. is extremely difficult to get it done with compelling results at reasonable speed. So, weeks (and also the coming vacation weeks) will spend on the matter, but don’t expect any visible results soon. All in all, you can’t say I’m doing nothing. It’s just that I can’t take a cool snapshot to show you!
So… no “visible progress”? Not really no, sorry. However, we’re making another demo movie. Which is actually a short part of the game, and focuses more on horror again. I planned to release that movie somewhere this summer (and hopefully attract more help again), but as you may have understand from the text, probably it will be late autumn again ;) Better late than never!
All right, got to catch a train to Poland now…. That sounded a bit weird.
Count the assets
If you have a team of artists with sufficient time, you can relative quickly step through an asset list and create some momentum. With that I mean, once you made a few rooms, you can start reusing objects, sounds or textures for a next room so the development speed will accelerate. But Tower22 feels like a tractor running on Kentucky fried gravy stuck in the mud on a slope. Usually only one to three persons have some time do things in a week, so if two assets arrive in the mailbox each week while the total asset count is 20 for a room, it will get a looong journey. But unfortunately, that is reality at the moment, as most artists are busy with work (got to earn money right?), girlfriends, moving over to another place, and so on. And I wouldn’t be surprised if some just don’t really like to spend too much time on T22. Hey, I can’t force anyone. All I can try is to motivate them, and keep things going with clear short-term goals. But in the end, it’s their decision what they do in their free hours of course.
Maybe that’s the price I’m paying for asking talented artists. Students or less skilled artists are likely going to have more time (and will) to help you on whatever 3D model, drawing or other related game content. They are already happy they can help on a real game anyway! Skilled boys and girls on the other hand usually have their hands full on similar (paid / freelance) work. If you spend the whole day making 3D objects for Resident Evil 12, you probably aren’t that motivated anymore to make some more for T22 once you get home. I can understand that, and I’m not the pushing kind of guy. But at the same time this “permissiveness” isn’t really boosting the development speed of course. Should I take a step back, accept the fact you just can’t expect people who are skilled AND have a lot of time, and allow less talented people to help on the project? Maybe. A lead-artist who can guide and train them would be very helpful then. But honestly, I just want to see and hear quality, nothing less. Rather finish something with lower quality than nothing at all? No. All or nothing baby.
Progressbar.Visible := false;
Programming progress then? Quite a lot, but again, mostly “invisible”. That’s because a particular technique often needs a lot of preparations first. Studying the matter, pouring it in a multi-useful, clear way into the engine, expanding your tools so you can make use of it. And then finally apply it in a room and take a snapshot to show it (visible progress). Let’s give some examples, so you’ll know what I’ve been doing last months. For one, I tried to improve the performance. Implemented Unified Buffer Objects, made the loading times a lot quicker by using pre-compiled shaders, squeezed the rendering pipeline, and started on “Deferred Tiled Rendering”. I’ll be back on that in detail in some day. Either how, before you can implement it, you first need to know more about how GPU’s work, and “Compute Shaders”. So, support for OpenCL has been added to the engine. Actual Deferred Tile Rendering doesn’t work yet though, because may laptop is too old to perform required atomic operations. Hopefully the laptop finally dies by per accidentally dropping it in a potato harvester so I can get a new one from work hehe. Anyhow, the point is, even if Deferred Tiled Rendering had been implemented, you wouldn’t see any difference other than higher framerates (hopefully).
No, we won't win the war with photograp and rusty can objects. Nevertheless, also the little ones matter.
Second little thingy. I implemented AVI video streaming support. Basically you’ll read decode movie frames each time, then convert it to an OpenGL texture and apply it as usual. Thanks to some standard Microsoft libraries, the whole decoding part is monkey peanuts actually. But integrating AVI support carefully in the engine and tools takes some extra work. The goal was to import and use AVI files in exact the same way as any other texture. So that means you can apply movies on everything in the game. Computer screens, lights projecting a movie on a wall, animated floors, Monsters with television heads playing Tellsell, et cetera. Well, it succeeded. Yet it’s still “invisible progress”, as we don’t have a finished movie file to use yet :|
Another thing. Gameplay! All that talk about graphics always. Wouldn’t it be nice, also for the artists, to actually walk around in our rooms? Run a bit, make a jump, open a door, shoot something. You know, game stuff. A lot of programming work has been done here as well, but no end-results such as flying around with Jetpacks, solving Myst puzzles, or shooting smart monsters yet. What I did is making a “framework”. It doesn’t do anything, but using this framework you can attach a custom “behavior DLL” (a program) to each object or monster, or the game in general. These DLL’s decide what to show in the main menu, how to operate your inventory, how monster X should act and think, how fast your player can run, and so on. Every specific game detail will be implemented in these modules. The engine itself is just a toolbox that offers these DLL modules a lot of functions to do things (an “API”). Render something, spawn an object, play a sound, check if monster A can see monster B, et cetera. It works like an event-response system. The engine detects something, for example, if a barrel falls down and hits the ground. The specific DLL behind that barrel will decide what to do, and calls the API. Spawn particles, decrease health, play a “Bang!” sound, et cetera.
When programming these DLL modules, you’ll notice how much little details there are. Almost forgot… you need game rules right? Can your player jump or swim? How many times do you need Boss X in the balls before he dies? On which conditions does the “Game Over” screen appear? It all sounds pretty simple, as we have countless of games with comparable mechanics. Yet Tower22 isn't a shooter ala Half-life or Resident Evil 5. So, each detail requires smart thinking. I’m talking about paperwork. Milton Bradley (MB board games) weren't busy with sculpting Monopoly pieces or drawing board-textures. At least, the essence of their work was to write down brilliant ideas. Addictive play, innovative understandable rules, and how to make the perfect game to transform cozy family nights into a massive fight. So, what we did is starting a (private) Wiki to write down *everything* about the game. And, thanks to concept-artists, supported with visuals this time. As you all know, pictures say more than a thousand words. Hence, my busy guys don’t even read thousand words.
Hmmm, not a very nice shot of that livingroom right? But remember how the Radar Station transformed from boring concrete hollow boxes to something nice!
Ok, last example. I saw this movie
got jalous, and restarted The Never Ending Story on realtime G.I. Everyone who has spend time on this knows G.I. is extremely difficult to get it done with compelling results at reasonable speed. So, weeks (and also the coming vacation weeks) will spend on the matter, but don’t expect any visible results soon. All in all, you can’t say I’m doing nothing. It’s just that I can’t take a cool snapshot to show you!
So… no “visible progress”? Not really no, sorry. However, we’re making another demo movie. Which is actually a short part of the game, and focuses more on horror again. I planned to release that movie somewhere this summer (and hopefully attract more help again), but as you may have understand from the text, probably it will be late autumn again ;) Better late than never!
All right, got to catch a train to Poland now…. That sounded a bit weird.
