CSI Profiler

Trying to complete all the items on the list with "things to-do before I die". I meant the list for the movie. But as usual with programming, such lists only grow instead of shrink. Let’s see... "Spawn object X after trigger Y". O, that’s simple. Wait... a few script functions are still missing. Graphical glitch here, graphical glitch there. Found a few new bugs. Don't like the spawn effect, want to morph it from object A to B...

And before you know it you spend another few evenings on what seemed to be a simple point. Well better fix them thoroughly instead of rushing and hacking in features. Making an engine for your game is like collecting stamps, you’ll keep adding items in that book.

Strange enough, I always ignored a particular nasty issue: performance. I don't have to tell you that a game should run fast enough to be playable. I always try to stay above the critical 30-frames-per-second zone. I once learned that our eyes can see about 30 frames per second, so the game framerate should definitely not drop below. I maintained that promise for quite a long time on my laptop. Not the fastest system ever built, but not slow either:
-Toshiba Qosmio 32 bit (Yes, the ugly flaming space station model with hyperdrive)
-4gig RAM, dual core
-and more important, nVidia 9800 M GTS

Blabla. It can run Crysis Warhead just about fast enough most of the time, that's what matters. Crysis is not really the same as my mostly indoor engine (ha, I wish), but it's an indication that beautiful things can be done on this computer, so no excuses. However, I don't care that much about performance yet. For one reason, if I ever finish this game, we'll be playing on a GeForce-27, Octa-Core, organic RAM computer with a stunning 60 inch floppy drive.

Figured this bed needed some clean sheets.

Fine and all, but the average FPS of my game is currently ~21. That's going to be a crappy ride when FRAPS is also running to capture that movie. A few months ago I upgraded the Cg(shader) DLL's from version 1.5 to 2.2. I needed it to realize Cascaded Lights, but as a reward my framerate dropped from ~50 to ~28. I searched like mad, asked the Cg forums, but couldn't find a cause. Well, I kind of ignored it, and in the meanwhile more effects plus more complex scenery were made as well.

Ignoring problems in software is always a bad idea. The longer you wait, the more difficult it gets to fix it. And worse, tracing problems is about the most boring part of programming if you ask me. After all, this is still a hobby, supposed to be fun you know… I’m not coming home after work to torture myself with pointer errors made by bad multi-threading (did that once a few weeks, and it sucked). Anyway, this engine has thousands of routines that influence the performance. Now where to look?

nVidia has several tools to monitor your graphical flow. However, I'm starting to pay the price for using older techniques as well. Delphi 7, and an older version of OpenGL. Not that I try to avoid newer techniques, but I simply don't want to start all over again. A next game/engine may be DirectX & C++, but let's try to finish something. Just for once.

So I made a "profiler" that simply checks the elapsed microseconds to perform subtasks. For example, how long does it take to render the SSAO effect? How many microsecs did it take to play the fart sound? Is the CPU having problems with throwing a wheelchair down the stairs? This allows to find some of the chokepoints between all those many routines.

The Hourglass model is used to measure the framerate. Got to be patient.

It still doesn’t really finds all problems though. It seems that the GPU doesn’t run 100% synchronized with the CPU. That means your program will proceed, thinking that rendering object X is already done, while in reality the video card is still busy. Nevertheless, it brought me to a piece of the HDR pipeline.

Coded years ago, I almost forgot that I was using glReadPixels to fetch the current screen luminance. A required component to do Tone Mapping (= adjusting the eye to the current brightness). This operation isn’t that slow on itself, but it interrupts the rendering process. Imagine driving 120 on the highway and suddenly you’ll have to hit the brakes because a police officer wants to test your alcohol BAC (or the screen luminance for that matter).

It came down to changing a few things so that the luminance would be passed by a tiny texture instead of letting the CPU intervene. Thus fully driven GPU HDR. While dealing with HDR, I decided to face another old problem as well; the pixel colors that came out the Tone Mapper.

The main colors here are white, blue and green... But I used to get bluish all over the place.

After all that scaling, stretching, messing, tossing and mixing, the overall colors would look a little bit washed out. Blue wasn't blue, green wasn't green, etcetera. Nice to make a particular atmosphere (bluish for example), but if I ask for a red sink, then I want a red sink dammit. Colorizing the whole scene is already possible as an post effect anyway.

After tweaking the Tone Mapping formula a little bit, I think the colors are better now, although an overall change like this one always messes up all the fine tuning you did before on the scenery. Really, some tiny little changes in the fog, brightness or colors can make it Hot or Not. Like I said, my list of things-to-do just increased a little bit again.

Ernst knows what's good for ya

Sigh. Another idiot that wants (violent) games to be forbidden. This time the fame goes to our own minister Ernst Hirsch Ballin. We Dutchman like to be known as progressive, open minded people. Legally smoke weed and space out with the hooters in Amsterdam, gay-power to the max, abortion, euthanasia, stuff yourself with mushrooms, free from religion, and so on. We used to laugh on America when we heard some petty discussions (drugs are bad mmkay, weapon shops ok, Michael Moore stuff). But while America is finally trying to scrap that famous f*BEEP*cking BEEP from their televisions, we start to forbid more and more. And for the wrong reasons.

To be more specific, our minister Ernst wants to fully forbid violent games because the 18+ labels do not work. Little kids still play Grand Theft Auto, and that is horribly wrong. Of course, everyone protests when his (bad) habits are questioned. Ask someone to quit smoking, drinking or playing bloody games, and you’ll get a defensive answer. So, are games really 100% innocent? I don’t think so. But guys like good old Ernst, Hillary Clinton or that moron Jack Thompson have to do their homework before yelling stupidity.

To clarify the mindsets of these people; Hillary was “shocked” by the Hot Coffee mod. That’s right, kids that are 16 or older still shouldn’t see 2 low-poly puppets having sex (with their underpants still on). Ernst tries to forbid anything that might hurt the Lords feelings, and instructed to arrest a cartoonist that made a silly joke (freedom of speech). And Jack stated that even The Sims is an adult game because little children can hack(year right) the game. I’ve seen the naked Sims indeed. They look like… a naked Barbie of my daughter. I’d better buy a chastity for Barbie before mr. Teddy Bear and Tyrannosaurus are on top. But ok, they still have a point.

Off topic (or on-topic, as this is a development blog), this week I was busy with the HUD. When picking up something, scripts can show dialog forms, play sounds, pause the game, or Sepia/blur the background. The challenge was to make it fully adjustable. If I want another dialog in the future, it should be possible without even touching the engine code.

I won’t play or watch something abusive when my little daughter is around. The reason is obvious, I don’t want her to have nightmares. And more important, she should not start thinking that beating up grandma’s, stealing cars, swearing or decapitating zombies is normal behavior. So, in essence these people are right when stating that (young) children should be protected. Though I’ll have to admit that I saw Jaws when I was about 5 years old, played Doom and Crusader No Remorse when I was 11/12. Never had any problems with aggression though. Same thing for most other people I know. My parents didn’t close my eyes when boobs showed on the TV, neither forbid me to play Carmageddon. All they did was simply keeping a close eye on me, and intervene when I would start showing “bad signals”.

As many other parents, they handled blood, sex, drugs and rock&roll on a stolid way. The right way. You all know what happens if you explicitly forbid girlfriends or alcohol; the more reason to try it out! Example, here in Holland where softdrugs are legal, we most probably use far less than our neighbors where drugs are still illegal. Then again, parents shouldn’t be laconic on the matter either. Children have to know what’s right and wrong. Same thing with games & internet. Pull out that internet cable if those kids are 24/7 online, simple as that. Like with most temptations in life, you have to moderate, taking the right doses.

Forbidding violent games is unnecessary, hypocrite, and on top, it won’t solve the real problems. As often with these subjective “researches”, causes and consequences are swapped. Many banana’s grow in the jungle because there are monkeys. I bet a Jack Thompson never even played a game, except Tiddly Winks maybe. In other words, conclusions made on a very wrong foundation. Everyone is free to have an opinion, but guys like Ernst or Hillary Clinton actually have the power to make policies, and that makes them dangerous(ly stupid). Well Ernst, I doubt if you read this filthy blog, but… Forbidding is:

Unnecessary:
Every incident inspired or otherwise related with games is one too many. But honestly, how many crimes came out of a game? We had a few psychopaths such as the Columbine boys, or wacko’s that kill each other because their virtual Goblin sword got stolen in World of Warcraft. But compare those numbers to all other criminals, rapers, Ted Bundy’s, pedophiles and other scum. You defineletly don’t need a game to get berserk. Typically, the most violent regions are usually places where they lack Wii’s and Xboxes (Somalia, Middle East, Ghetto’s, …). Also our own violent history moments such as WWII, throwing tar over each other, or crusades were written in gameless times. I doubt if Stalin, William Wallace or Alexander The Great had a Commodore 64. In short, gaming is not a significant causer of violent behavior. Maybe it makes kids anti-social, when playing too much. But that is still far away from hurting people.

Do not worry. This weapon fires confetti, no violence was used in my game

Hypocrite:
I’m not saying that games do not have any influence at all. But the same things can be said about movies, books, gangster rap or heavy metal. How about alcohol or football? These two things actually do cause quite a lot of violence, vandalism and family drama’s. Should we scrap them? Of course not. Because there are still millions of people that enjoy a football match or beer without getting crazy. Should those pay for the deeds of a “few” idiots? If we would banish alcohol and football, we’d better start to forbid about anything. Violent news items, boxing, nudity, radio, controvert art that might hurt the feelings of some... There is a name for systems like that: dictatorship. Just censor and forbid everything. Problems solved.

The funny thing is that guys like Ernst have a quite strict religious background. Erm… That’s fine with me, but if one thing caused millions of deaths and intolerance throughout the past, it is religion. That man wants to protect our children for games and other impure things, but it’s perfectly fine if they read about unbelievers burning in hell in the Bible, Quran or another religious book. Well, Southpark perfectly covers a lot of these issues. And again, people that feel offended by that series often don’t get the clue at all.


Not solving the true problems:
We can blame games, internet or Marilyn Manson. But why do we never look at ourselves? Was everything perfectly fine if the Columbine boys didn’t get a Nintendo? Of course not, their problems lied much deeper. Think about their environment, the way they got raised, problems at school, and so on. If it wasn’t the game that triggered them, something else would have done it.

Violence and lusts are in our nature. Therefore we look for ways to ventilate. Get drunk, go to a bondage club, beat your wife behind the curtains, go kickboxing or fitnessing, watch Predator on TV, or control yourself by strictly following a religion/lifestyle. Most peoply can do this very well luckily, others have little problems… There is no way to prevent this, other than trying to raise our kids the best we can. They have to learn how to deal with problems, desires and temptations. Taming the beast is an ever existing challenge, with or without games.

Forbidding everything is a way of shoving all the garbage under a carpet. If you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist. But what happens if the crap starts peeling out anyway? Typically people that never faced a certain problem or temptation will react frantic. Simply because they can’t place it. Religious or dictatorship systems try to control this with punishment (hell, captivity), but I rather lead my way based on sense instead of fear.

Just another pic of that room, including a test monster. I which I had more rooms to show, but I only have one pair of hands! About the floor reflection, a cubemap nearby the camera is updated each cycle, allowing realtime reflections on any surface. The cubemap is blurred and downscaled a few times so objects can pick a blurry reflection as well. I still have to implement mirroring for 100% accurate reflections though (for water and such).

Well I can write another thousand pages on subjects like these, but I think you get the point. I’d like to add though that they simply don’t have the right to decide for me what's good or bad. Games are just another form of art and demonstrate one of Westerns great goods; freedom of expression. If our leaders start messing with that, we’ll get ourselves bombarded back into the dark ages.

So Ernst, mind your own business. I know there are bad parents that let their kids play violent games all day without ever doing a check up, but I’m not the one to blame for that. Rather than restricting everybody, you’d better concentrate on bad upbringing. I’m not forcing you to play violent games or to watch porn, so please don’t force me to stop neither. Thank you.

Balls of steel

Apologies for the missing post yesterday. As you may guess, I had to watch the football grand finale, ... which we lost again. That damn octopus was right again. Honestly, Espanol was dominating the match most of the time and probably deserves the title, but their goal in the very last minutes was "discussable". Any other sport is using camera's and R2D2’s to prevent refugee mistakes, but FIFA knows better. Oh well, no hard feelings. Although someone else in our street decided to start shouting and arguing with his girl on the middle of the street at 00:00. After all, our loss was her fault of course.

We have to do it with a bittersweet second place. Maybe another time, we were patient the last 32 as well. Ah, at least we had a good time, and that's what matters. Another enjoyment for this week is a second Follower on this blog. I'm glad people are still reading. It's quite a job to create a story and some visuals each week, and I'll have to admit it even brings some stress sometimes on Sunday. "Come to bed honey". "Just 5 minutes, I'm finishing my story!". And before you know it's past 00:00 again. No one judges or gives me deadlines, but this works like doing a diet. As soon as you start skipping or finding excuses, the whole thing will collapse sooner or later. "Must-write-some-thing". So, it really encourages to see people are reading or giving feedback.


Made a (retarded)Smiley model for testing purposes. First it is rendered with default lighting (Lambert, Blinn). On the right side a "red clay" material is applied, inspired on those cool ZBrush shaders. So how did we give the clayish look?

Ok, so what happened last week? If you had a careful look at the monster from the previous post, you might notice it's skin doesn't really look... skinny. Of course, there are plenty of ways to improve that. Draw a better texture, use another (detail)normalMap, tweak some parameters, and so on. But also the lighting plays an important role here. If you ever wrote a shader, you probably know the basic formula's to calculate Diffuse and Specular lighting the "Lambertian" and "Phong"/"Blinn" way:

   diffuseTerm = dotProduct( lightVector, surfaceNormal )
   halfAngle = normalize( lightVector + eyeVector )
   specularTerm = pow( dot(halfAngle, surfaceNormal ) , shininess )

If those are hieroglyphics for you, try to think of it like this. When light hits an object, it can get scattered into all directions due a rough surface (on microscopic levels), or it reflects straightly. Very diffusive materials are concrete, chalk or sand. Specular materials on the other hand could be metal, plastic or a mirror (perfect specular).

The basic lighting formula can be tweaked to some extent by giving it less or more specular, but it lacks on rendering more specific materials such as brushed metal, satin, clay or flesh. There are plenty of demo's that use alternative techniques such as BRDF, anisotropic lighting, Oren Nayar, and so on. However, smoothly implementing them into an engine isn't so easy. Especially not if you are doing Deferred Lighting like I do. Deferred what?

I won't go into detail, but Deferred Lighting basically renders the material properties of each pixel into a few target textures. Later on, the volumes of lights that affect your screen are placed on top and will use the pixel properties to do their lighting.

Four funky textures used for the Deferred Lighting process. Ow, if you wonder how I do transparent surfaces; good old forward rendering

When rendering the light volumes, you won't know what kind of material you are affecting unless the textures have information about it. The problem is that the amount of values is limited with Deferred Lighting (16 scalars in my case), so you can't pass big formula's or image data. On top, the lighting shader shouldn't be branching ( IF THEN else ) too much. In the ideal situation, you use one uniform lighting method that can solve all types of materials.


To fix these problems, I decided to use a Material-Lookup-Texture. Within this 2D texture, I can define up to 63 materials. Wood, chalk, gold, metal, clay, velvet, slime, poop, whatever. Each material has a section inside that (atlas) texture where it's Diffuse, Specular, RIM and Fresnel settings are stored. Possibly more parameters to come. The lookup coordinates will depend on the results of the basic lighting formula and the materialID that is stored in the Deferred textures. This
ID simply shifts the coordinates into one of the 64 regions.

   // To the basic stuff
   diffuseTerm = dotProduct( lightVector, surfaceNormal )
   halfAngle = normalize( lightVector + eyeVector )
   specularTerm = pow( dot(halfAngle, surfaceNormal ) , shininess )

   // Instead of using the results above, override them by peeking in our material texture
   Texcoords.x = diffuseTerm * scaleX + materialID_shiftX;
   Texcoords.y = specularTerm * scaleY + materialID_shiftY;

   // Go Gadget go
   materialData = tex2D( materialTex, texcoords );
   newDiffuse.rgb  = materialData.rgb;
   newSpecular.rgb = newDiffuse.rgb * materialData.a;
   // Same thing for RIM and Fresnel

This allows to use alternate lighting without expensive shader techniques or scarifying many material parameters in the Deferred Rendering pipeline. Since the lookup textures contain 2D data, it's also possible to make "weird" specular highlights or colorize the diffuse lighting. Think about satin or rainbow effects on glass/CD's.

Basic metal material applied here. Much specular lighting, almost no diffuse lighting. The glossy reflection is made with a blurred cubeMap and high frequency normal disturbance. More important, the ugly greenish bathroom setting (not finished yet) is inspired on "google images: Soviet bathroom". Always price if you type "Soviet" in front.

The only remaining problem is... How in st.Beards name do we define those lookup textures? I have about two options:
A.- Buy or make myself a, Jesus Christ, gonioreflectometer. These devices will measure reflecting light on a piece of surface from all kinds of angles.
B.- Draw the (gradient) textures myself, physically based on absolutely nothing.

So I chose the second approach. Since my paintwork are just wild guesses, I made a few tools that will compose the Atlas lookup texture and renders the results for a quick review though. All in all I'm not 100% happy yet, and the specific lighting results are pretty much washed out after combining them with plenty of other tricks (texturing, ambient light, reflections, SSAO, screen filters, and so on). but at least alternate lighting is integrated into the (Deferred Lighting) engine pretty smoothly now, for a rather low cost.

My floating "Segway" kinda like monster again, with a slightly new jacket. More diffuse, less shadow. Furthermore, the red edges are the results of RIM lighting, which appears when a light is shining right behind an object. It may be overdone here, but it somewhat simulates the skin translucency. In the meanwhile, I'm making the big brother of this character for the movie... Let's hope it looks somewhat more frightening.

Make it clay baby

Another busy week. Had to jump on the bike 05:30 already. What kind of times are that for an office guy like me? My programming shifts usually go from 20:00 to 01:30 (with some girlfriend and Family Guy breaks), so I had a few short nights this week. Oh well, I don’t really have a nine-to-five job anyway, and I don’t mind swapping my stinky programming hole for a factory or the fields.

Either way, what a fantastic week it was. Beautiful weather, machine worked like a charm, one of our good friends got auntie again from a healthy baby, and of course… after many years the Dutchies finally taught the Brazilians a football lesson! I thought we were doomed after the first 10 horrible minutes, but all damage was fixed in the second half. And so was our spirit. Everybody went home half drunk after work (we watched the game there at a big screen) so then you know it must be good.

Tractor orgy. My little baby in front, harvesting bulbs. Our machine in front digs the earth and shakes off the sand by transporting everything with lots of violence to the unloadbelt at the rear. The second driving castle washes away the remaining earth (containers of sand aren't worth much), the tractor behind supplies water, and the other tractor on the side brings the stuff to a factory… or ‘45 warzones where they had bulbs for dinner. So next time when you give flowers to your girl, tell her how much work it was to get them. Romantic isn't it?

Even more good news comes from the creative corner. I can model a box or refrigerator in Lightwave, but I never understood how the Pro’s would create high-poly models. Working with curvy organic shapes is hard enough already, and how the hell do you deal with wireframes made of millions of polygons? Beats me. No doubt it’s possible with Lightwave or similar packages, but you really have to master your tools. And probably be very, very patient.

I still have to create another character for the movie though, so I had to come up with something. When I was younger, I spent quite some time claying with friends and my little brother. In fact, my first game attempt (sort of Final Fight / Double Dragon) was made with clay. Backgrounds and character sprites were made of clay and then photographed frame-by-frame. Lots of work, but also lots of fun. Too bad I don't have screenshots or source of it anymore. Anyway, wy isn’t there a modeling program that works in a same fashion?

Then I remembered a name… Brush this, ZBrush that, blabla. So I decided to have a quick look at the trial version. Didn't expect too much though. I'm like an old grandpa when it comes to new technologies. Back in the old days everything was better. See? I've been searching this crazy kids UI for hours just to create a cube. Dammit, how unlogic. Can't read those tiny letters. Who the hell is "metaball"?! Get off my lawn! I want to play Bingo. Where's my hat? I'm tired! There is Germans everywhere these days.

Wait a minute… It actually works! Sure, the completely different interface required a few training video’s (plenty of them on Youtube). But after ~5 hours I was already creating this “thing”.

Creating man-boobs was never so easy.

Haha. But seriously, after ~4 years Lightwave, I wouldn't even know where to start when I had to create an organic shape like this. ZBrush works radically different from Lightwave, Maya or Max. Instead of wrestling with polygons in the famous 4 viewports, you will be “sculpting”.

First you throw a basic shape to start with on your “placemat”. Can be compared with using primitives such as cubes or cylinders, except that the basic shapes here come with lots of polygons already. You won’t be looking at vertices and wireframes though. The next step is to pick a sculpting tool. It works like drawing in Photoshop & friends, but additionally you will be bumping, cutting, moving, bubbling and shifting the actual 3D geometry. By the way, at the same time you can draw colors as well, meaning you can create your textures at the very same time. Ideally when creating veins and such. Just draw a slightly bluish line and you have a bumpy vein.

The testing model in the engine. From ~2 million polygons to ~2800. To keep those grandma veins and nipples, a normalMap was baked.

I expected a long learning curve, teaching yourself a few hundred shortcut keys, and searching frustrated between dozens of tools. But I was ‘claying” pretty convenient results after a few hours already. Believe me, that is quite unique. All of this happens on super high-poly models, without you even realizing it. The nice thing about that is that you can downscale it later to game-model proportions and extract a high quality normalMap by comparing the differences between the low- and high poly version.

Making a game-model wasn’t so easy though, I ran out of memory a few times on my 4-gig 32 bit machine. In the end I still need to transfer the whole thing to Lightwave. Here I would make a few Level Of Detail variants for distant rendering, plus collision volumes for the physics. Too bad Lightwave chokes on huge OBJ (> million poly) models, so I had to downscale it first inside ZBrush. Plus I needed a way to create UV-maps as well. ZBrush satisfies these needs as well with two powerful plugins, Decimation Master and UV Master. These tools will let you downscale the model easily, and UV Master unwraps the model for you. In case you are afraid the seams being misplaced; you define the importance of regions simply by drawing on the model.

Just chilling on my (furry) carpet. Next step is to use a somewhat better skin shader, as I don't like the lighting here. But I already have a battle plan for next week...

Well, you have to try it for yourself. But what’s maybe even more important, I had a good time while sculpting. I like Lightwave, but I usually I get impatient after seeing boring wireframes for too long. ZBrush works in a fun way, with its intuitive controls and “what you see is what you get” approach. I probably never will be a very good digital modeler, but I think I can create a character or two with this. Got to hurry though, that trial doesn’t last forever!

As the world turns

Each time after posting another crappy story on Sunday, I'll have a smoke and think about what to do next week. The nice thing about having "small" targets such as the upcoming "movie" (sounds more promising than it probably is) is that you can make a listing of concrete tasks. So, what's for dinner this week? I'm still not really happy with the clothing, but at least there is a foundation and a very useful importer tool now. But there is more than clothing.

When talking about engines, the first word most people probably come up with = graphics. But there is much more of course. Physics, AI and sound for example. But also “less spectacular” aspects such as GUI, menu’s, full-screen support, inventories, scripting and game logic. You won’t impress the crowd by telling that your engine supports easy-to-configure triggers or a highly programmable HUD. But if you want to go further than fancy shader showcases, these are very important components. A game engine without proper support for such things is like a beautiful girl without brains.

Still had to do some visual treatment though. A stupid old chair…? Hold on, it has a fur shader on the green cushion! It's a little bit too rough here, as if it was made from rigid yak fur, but that can be solved easily by making the "hair" shorter, mip-maps and/or fading out as the distance towards the camera grows.

One of the not-so-typical things to do is making a railing system. You know, when Steven Spielberg is shooting a movie, camera's and dinosaurs are mounted on rails and synchronized by perfect timing. In games, predefined rails can be useful for cinematic events as well. Or how about lifts, trains, robotics or anything else that has to follow a fixed path?

The engine already had a "railing" module. This is basically a set of nodes that are connected with each other. Between nodes there are connections that tell how fast to move, acceleration specs, barrel rolls, looking directions, and so on. It's also possible to (randomly) switch when a node is connected to multiple other nodes. Think about setting up roads in a game like GTA, where the CPU can decide whether to go left or right.

Still there were two issues. 1.) Who, what, when and where to rail? 2.) Setting up that rail is a horrible job, especially if you have lots of curves or when the object has to follow it extremely tightly. Don't want to derail trains India style of course. As for the second problem, I chose to make an importer. It worked pretty well for cloth, so why not defining a rail-line in Lightwave as well, where the vertices would be nodes? The engine has buttons and function to move entities such as these nodes, but honestly, why trying to beat the controls from a professional package such as Lightwave, 3DS Max, Maya, Blender or whatever you're using? The target is to make a game, not a superb modeler. In other words, plotting that path goes a whole lot easier in Lightwave. I'm using weightMaps to define additional info for the nodes such as speed and curving. It can still be adjusted afterwards though.

2 polygons and not a single more. I liked the furry velvet look in Super Mario Galaxy. And if the Wii can do it… With all the respect, but Miyamoto should had put some more mushrooms in the Wii hardware. Anyway, no shells or transparent layers for this furry look. I’m using “Steep Parallax Mapping”. An enhanced way of doing normalMapping. I wasn’t really interested in making my brick walls looking bumpy though. Just needed a furry look for that chair. By chance I came across this paper.
Steep Parallax Mapping
Besides parallax mapping and fur, it can also be used for straight short grass. Just a tip…

The other issue is the trigger that puts something on a rail. Trains don’t just drive automatically (at least I hope so). A guy with a moustache first has to hit the pedal. Hence, the whole train first needs to be placed on that rail to begin with. We would call that “spawning” in game nerd terms. To make a long story shorter; game events need to be triggered somehow. For example, unlock a door after killing 20 goblins. Or play Sepultura when opening the toilet door in sector X.

Such events are usually very specific. They depend on the game, your condition, the environment, and so on. You could code all of this into the engine but… that’s exactly NOT the point of an engine. Try to make a strict distinction between general purpose and game specific tasks. Which is why most developers go for scripting languages. No exception here, game rules, AI decision making, object interface, cinematics, and sector events are using Python scripts to get your dirty things done. For example, I could put that stinky chair on a rail when entering sector X for the first time while having a shoe-horn in my inventory.


Again that chair? Sorry, I didn’t have much other furry friends to show so far. About the shader, the result of the marching loop is a height factor that can be used to give an offset to your texture coordinates. I’m using this height as a texture coordinate for a small lookup texture that gives a shade value (height ~0 = bottom = dark, or sand for grass. Height ~1 is tall = bright).

As for that movie, I need some scripted events as well. To make life easier, there is “Cinematic Script” in the engine. Basically this is a set of one or more timelines with scriptcode. Just like in all other scripts, we could use it to spawn objects, put shit on a rail, play sounds, and so on. But also interactive events like making the player bash a button to stop his head being chopped off by an angry chainsaw zombie. Cinematics does not necessarily mean that you lose control over the player. You are the puppeteer, script whatever you want.
- 02:40 Ridge comes in to tell Barbara that he was cheating with her dog.
- 03:10 Barbara cries and shouts "how could you, after all we went through together"?
- 03:13 Ridge tells it was Forester and Brooke who made him doing this
- 03:42 Barbara's dog comes home after work and decides to play open cards, he is pregnant.
- 03:43 Pregnant from Barbara's step-parrot
- 04:10 Claudia storms in to announce she will marry for the 7th time with Andy
- 04:46 The phone rings, Andy died in an ufo accident
- 05:00 Title screen "next time in As the turd turn"

Let the games begin

Yer all watching the game? Football I mean? I'm not a big football fan (or from any other sport), but I like the vibe a festivity like this brings. Good excuse to visit the bar on a normal working day, eating "bitterballen" with mustard, watching grown up men acting like idiots, and of course criticizing our football players while most of us are already tired after a 10 meter sprint. Luckily Holland is still in the game for the next rounds, so we don't have to miss the orange flags and silly collectors garbage from the supermarkets yet.

Kinda funny an event like this shakes up the whole planet. After all, it's just a game right? Oh well, guess we all like games. Why else would I try to program one? I used to play videogames quite a lot in the past, but lately I only start the console or PC sporadically. Probably because 75% of my free time goes into this project, but there is also something else going on. I bought Mario Galaxy 2 one week ago, which is a great game. But still, the magic is a little bit gone. I don't blame Nintendo, it's just my mindset. I'm getting old and boring, my fantasy is getting rusty, and I just can't get that fanatic anymore (which is why I wonder about grown up men fighting each other for a game of football).

Games just don't suck me in that much anymore. I really wish I could switch over to my younger years when playing Mario, GTA, Zelda or anything else. But hey, you can't stop that process. Let's water the flowers and knit a nice warm trouser for my grandson.

Proudly represented, or something

When I DO play games, it's typical that I prefer the older ones. Red Alert, Doom2, Farcry, or even Crusader no Remorse. For some reason, they have a higher "fun factor" if you ask me. Nostalgia plays a big role of course, because it’s reminding me to times where I really enjoyed that game. But maybe old games were actually more fun as well…? I don't know. But I must say there are some "shortcomings" when it comes to gameplay nowadays.

While old games were often difficult (and frustrating, tortured my SNES controllers many times), games these days are often short and simple.. -accessible-. In games like Metroid for the SNES you had to figure out everything yourself. But now you have a GPS navigator and a personal assistant that leads you through as if you were retarded. Clues to puzzles are more obvious, and especially the “quick-save & load” takes away lots of the suspense in my opinion. In Mario 1, you had to restart the entire f#cking game if you got hit by Bowsers fireball in level 8. No wonder these final boss battles were bloody tense and joysticks would fly around after failing (it was always the controllers fault, it didn’t jump). In Call of Duty, -supposed to be a tense and somewhat realistic game-, you can get killed 16 times per minute. Press a key to jump in the action again. It doesn’t matter if you snipe, throw grenades or kill that Taliban with your helmet. Just keep loading and you’ll pass sooner or later anyway.

Thanks to cheating cpu in Mario Kart, impossible jumps in Mario 3 and terrible games like Adventure Island I was patient enough to finally get that !@#$@# curtain working. Sort of...Normals aren't 100% correct.

I know why that is. Kids these days are being said to have a shorter attention span. Or do simple games like these actually make them impatient?? I'm a very patient person, almost never stressed... Maybe because I had to manage my anger and kept trying after Donkey Kong fell in the ravine 30 times in a row. Anyhow, not only the difficulty, but also other aspects of games seem a little bit too polished for me nowadays. Like Hollywood movies, everything is based on proven commercial ingredients. Make a juicy engine with good graphics, 10 hours gameplay, gas-masked opponents that chatter lots of bullshit instructions that makes them sound intelligent, bullet-time action. And as for the hero; a silent stubbled man that drinks black coffee while reloading his shotgun. By the way, his family got killed in an “accident”…

Not all games are like that, but still I think developers experimented more in the past. Resulting in a range from terrible products to unique jewels. I have a feeling that the average quality is better these days, but I'm missing the outliers. Almost as if they are ashamed to put in some new/unique/risky elements. Even the music in games is kind of bland(except GTA maybe). While we were rocking and bouncing in Castlevania, Carmageddon, Crusader, or Command & Conquor, games play it safe these days with classical ambient, mediate rock or jungle drums when the bullets start flying, or just plain silence to keep it serious.

This picture has nothing to do with this story, but I had to post something. Keep reading.

There is a reason for everything. Games have become a million dollar business. Selling rates have become more important than creating an unique product. A good example might be Resident Evil. Although I really like the last two releases, I'm missing the original style. RE1 was a scary and tactical game. 4 and 5 are just shooters that feel very comfortable. The reason why they switched over is obvious: 95% of the positional buyers probably doesn't like the difficult controls, fixed camera's, slow paced action, back-tracing, and difficult puzzles. Resident Evil 4 & 5 are excellent products, but how about the fans of the original? There is not really a substitute  a died out genre, because it didn’t sell.

I might be restricted by money, skills and time, but at least there are no deadlines or persons telling me what to do for this game. Rather than for the money, it’s the passion that drives to make this game. If it would ever see daylight, I doubt if it will be swallowed by the “mainstream” as well, as it’s going to be a pretty different game. Then again, movies like “Reservoir Dogs” or “No country for old man” were pretty different as well… Well, I should be already happy if I could even get near finishing this whole thing. Sorry I didn't produce much visual results this week, but there is definitely work in progress.

Clean sheets son? As for the technical portion this week, I chose to import the clothobjects from a Lightwave file, rather than building grids and defining attachment points in the editor. I can just make any shape in Lightwave, and call it “cloth”. Attachment points are defined with weightMaps.

Since arbitrary shapes are allowed now, I had to change a few things. The constraints with neighbor particles can vary for each vertex. So I pass the lookup coordinates and distances from the neighbor particles inside the vertex data.

Next step; attaching to dynamic bodies. If you wonder why I’m wasting so much time on those damn sheets… One of the characters in the movie doesn’t want to appear naked..

Stop! Dinnertime!

When I was writing about concept-art last week, I was searching my ass off for one particular picture that actually gives a slight idea how enemies may look like in Tower 22. Years ago, a friend (the same guy from the flat concept) made a clay model for "this" project. Well, the project was based on a totally different story and engine, but plans to make a horror game were already there. Luckily he had a back-up, so here it is:


Claymodel and sketch were done by my www.pixelridder.nl friend. Kinda feel like claying now…
Instead of brute, strong, muscular, bloody, angry, mechanical, hellish monsters, we were more aiming for...[looking for a proper word on a Dutch-to-English translator]...malformed humanoids. You don't really know whether to be scared or feel sorry for it. Well, Tower 22 should have somewhat similar foes. And not just because they're cool. They actually fit in the storyline. And no, this is not a result of biological experiments by evil doctors. Although the first ideas for the project where these pictures came from were actually a little bit based on cold war + abandon lab. But I realized that has been done dozens of times before, so the story and environment have become radically different. It's hard to tell what this new story exactly is, because it's the type of game where you start off with knowing nothing until you finish the game. Many of the why's and how's may already spoil the clue. I'll have to carefully pick my words about that.

Either way, guys like this one share the building with you. And since you don't have a BFG9000 or full automatic M60's to clear the path, you'd better watch your back while mobbing the corridor floors... That should give a slight idea of what the game should feel like.


But enough about that, I was aiming for a little movie right? I wasted almost 2 weeks on those stupid curtains (cloth FX, see 2 posts earlier). In my little test-app, it worked great, but in the engine the curtains would deform to a polygon massacre. First the UV coordinates were wrong again due a shader compiler option I inserted 3 years ago. Later on the gravity was basically pulling harder than the spring constraints that keep the material together --> making an infinite stretch. Couldn't figure out why, until I realized the relative low framerate(30..60) was causing this.

You know, physics don't like low framerates, especially not when they are varying as well. So I could do two things: do 100 iterations(corrections) to get it right. Or fake a fast framerate. I chose the second option. Don't want to give up too much performance for a stupid piece of cotton. The end result isn't even that bad. Instead of ultrafine cotton that slips through your fingers, the curtain now moves more like an old dusty patch that has been peed by 200 cats over the years. That's what I call realism. Still, I’ll have to fix some bugs and make a system to hang those curtains / cloth into the world in an user-friendly manner. A "Granny's Attlier" panel in the editor.


Got to fix the tablecloth shader. It's 100% cotton, but it looks more like a piece of rubber stolen from a SM dungeon somewhere...

But hey, what’s that? Thought cloth didn't work?! No, but LightWave does. What you’re looking at is a pre-baked model. For lazy (or bad) modelers like me, you can just create a subdivided plane and let it drop onto the table. Lightwave will do the whole simulation, and you’ll just lay back and watch. Once you're happy, save the result back into a model.
Lightwave Cloth Manual
Little youtube movie
Well that sounds easier than it was. I spend the whole weekend figuring out how it exactly worked, and adjusting parameters. Besides, the simulation runs f*cking slow. Hit the run button, wait 5 minutes, and then hopefully the tablecloth didn’t curl up or fall through the table. I doubt if my engine does it better, but deffinetly a lot faster.

Another problem was the polygon count. The tablecloth in the Lightwave simulation had about 100.000 polygons. That's a little bit too much for a (not-so-important) ingame object, don't you think? So I dug into some plugins to reduce the polygon count. And since I didn’t want to lose the small details from the high-poly tablecloth, I found another handy tool that generates normalMaps by looking at the differences between the high- and low detailed model.
Lightwave plugin to reduce polygon count (WITHOUT loosing UV coordinates!)
Lightwave plugin to generate a normalMap by comparing hi- and low-res model

Holy shit, are those REAL animated sprites on those candles?! Bet ye are. They even distort and blur the background (a little bit too much). After all those many effects, a simple animated flame wasn’t supported by the available shaders yet.

The result is a not so spectacular table, but at least we learned some new tricks and got hands on some crucial tools if you’re into LOD or bumpmapping with Lightwave. Furthermore I programmed some “motors” to make things move this week, but let’s keep that for another time. Yet, there is still one last thing I’d like to report; if your Wii is gathering dust, do yourself a favor and check out Mario Galaxy 2. Yahoo! Our daughter must be wondering what’s wrong with daddy, happy as an eight-year old.

Concept Art

Don't want to sound lazy, but I didn't produce much (visual) results again this week. I got home from work at 01:00 night a few days, and on top I'll had to draw a poster for my uncle who was celebrating his 60th birthday last Saturday. Drawing posters? Yeh, I'm not an artist but once in a while I'll draw a ‘famous’ head as a birthday present for friends. So far we had:
- Sadam Hussain --> In one of his better days
- Chuck Norris --> Worlds strongest man, end of discussion.
- Steven Seagal --> The man who breaks your arm 90 degrees
- Henry Rollins --> I am a liar!
- Terminator 1 --> On his motor with shotgun, but with a dog's head
- That goofy truck from the movie Cars (for my little nephew of course)
- Paul Teutul --> The old grumpy motor guy with hydraulic oiled muscles
- B.A. Baracus --> I ain’t get no plane fool!
- Micheal Jackson --> The zombie from Thriller
- Jan Peter Balkenende --> Our cool looking prime minister)
- David Hasselhoff --> Including lots of 80’s breast hair
- Peter North --> Admit it, you know what guy I'm talking about.
- Duke Nukem

And in the past I used to draw monsters and stuff sometimes. Visitor Kyle probably knows this Prey character. I liked the concept art, so I made a copy on paper with ink & pastel.

Pastel drawing. Original was concept art from Human Head Studio's, Prey

The dog of one of my friends used to drive around with a shotgun

Not that bad, isn't it? Shame my skills on a computer aren't that good. But it brings me to an interesting topic though; Concept Art. Most games start with a scratch somewhere. What the hell were they thinking when a fat mustached red plumber was drawn on paper?

Concept(art) is important. For fans, it's like the aperitif you'll get in a restaurant. For the developers themselves artwork helps them on their way. Instead of modeling an expensive 3D character right away, they first make 10 different sketches to see which one is the coolest. Or to discard the idea if none of the sketches really impresses. It's a common way to work for games, designs, movies, and so on.

So, how about "Tower 22 concept art"? Uhmm... I have that game-document I wrote about in an earlier post. And lot's of Soviet flat photographs. But except from schematics and maps, there aren't really pretty pics so far. Shame, come to think of it. But then again, making art takes time as well. And it's darn difficult to come up with good stuff. Horrific stuff in this case.

Original from a Quake 4 drawing contest. Can't recall the original creator

There are actually a few Tower 22 concept drawings. Here's one of the first quickies, made by a friend. It's not really Soviet, but it shows a huge ugly building nevertheless. Visit http://www.pixelridder.nl/ for better design work.

Sometimes concept-art kick's ass, but too often I'm looking at angry Orcs or double D bitches with blades bigger than themselves. World of Warcraft rip-offs. I'm trying to stay away from that. If I'll draw something, it better be good. To be honest, I’d rather wait for someone who really masters the pencil to draw characters or environments, otherwise I’ll might embarrass myself. The drawings above aren't that bad, but they're all copies of existing photo's/characters.

Anyhow, you haven't seen a monster yet (except that big ugly bag of polygons), but they should play a major role in Tower22. Unlike Doom3 where you kill complete Hellish battalions, there are only a few monsters that will return through the entire game; they will be the stars of the show. In other words, they’ll have to be really damn scary/bizarre and imposing. Otherwise it’ll be like watching Terminator with Jim Carrey as the T100.

Sometimes I'll let my fantasy on the loose just before falling asleep. As you go “hibernate modus”, bizarre creations sometimes might fly by. But usually it’s already too late to reach the sketchbook and put down your ideas into detail. Sweet dreams. What I need a sick fucking bastard that produces such images inside his head on the fly all day. Nevertheless, this might be one of the most difficult challenges as for the game design. There are plenty of fictional characters, but only a few have the X-factor. If you ask me…
- Mario & Luigi Simple.
- Mother Brain Super metroid. SNES. Epic end-boss battle.
- Mancubus & Cyberdemon Doom2. Did you know Cyberdemon can kill entire level 8?
- Tyrant Resident Evil Remake. Cool cinematics.
- Tank Quake 2. 100 tons of sluggish metal & servo’s.
- Duke Nukem Don’t have time to play with myself.
- Snake (the old one) Metal Gear Solid. Because he’s old, and he smokes.
- Sack boy Little Big Planet. Want to squeeze him.
- G-Man Halflife 2. But who is it?

And probably I forgot a few. Guess I like the monster design from iD software in particular. And what are your favorites?

Damn I'm looking good.