Game Gods

Old mcPhart

As if it was only a few years ago, I can clearly remember how my little brother and I joked and always called our dad "grandpa", to tease him. All people somewhere above 35 were called grandma or grandpa anyway. Old people who grew up with the Beatles in the black&white era, getting bold, without much fantasy anymore, reading a book or falling asleep instead of playing with Lego or Nintendo. Complaining about rules, school and "wait till you're a little bit older!". Yep, grandpa-symptoms all right.

My daughter is getting near the age we used to be when calling our parents old and crippled. And although I became a father relative young, I also passed the 30-years border a few days ago. It's just a stupid number and usually I couldn't care less, but at the same time you do realize that "fun-time is over". Not entirely true of course, but looking back, it's just statistically true that:

- aged 0..4: the "dark shit" ages
No explanation needed.

- aged 5..10: the magic ages
The world looks, feels, sounds and smells like magic. All very new. Sometimes scary, sometimes beautiful. But mostly pure, and without much care. That's why everybody still loves you.

- aged 10..18: the "experience" ages
Turbulent times. You develop your character. You know everything better and despite your parents telling smoking is bad, drugs are bad, alcohol is bad, and girls stink, you do it all anyway. Screw them. And if you can't win with arguments, you cry and yell like, exactly, a spoiled teenager. The world is about you.

- aged 18..30: the "getting mature" ages
My first job! My first school degree! My drivers license! First time getting a man with a woman in bed! First illegal house party! First vomit over your friends shoes! First keys from your first house! First baby... We had fun all right. But moreover, unless you screwed up really bad in the experience ages, the puzzle pieces should fall together now. Hey, you're growing up finally!

- aged 30+: the "getting older" ages
Yeah... what to do now? At this point, you probably experienced and learned most essential life lessons. You climbed to the top, watched over the landscape, smiled, and now decided to go back and settle. Stability is what you're looking for. You know who you are now, you know your limits, you know there won't be much more drastic changes or milestones to come. You start realizing "this is it".

- Aged 50+: the "complain" ages
Back in the days everything was better. People were more friendly, women less slutty, kids smarter, politicians more honest, cars more shiny, folks less greedy. You miss those days. And who to blame? Exactly. The youth of course. But maybe what really bothers you, is the inevitable fact that you're losing your skills, charms, looks and vitality. Quick, buy a sports-car or do a parachute jump while you still can.

- Aged 70+: the "wise mummy" ages
You had the privilege to reach this age, and hopefully you can watch over your little empire of ((great)grand)children. You're anything except like a teenager, apart from the fact you got stubborn again; people won't teach you or tell you what to do anymore. Been there, done that.

I'm quite good in making things sound a bit more dramatic than they actually are. But honestly, I'm a happy man blessed with friends, family, a good looking & caring woman, a healthy kid, a house, a job I don't mind doing extra hours for, and an environment that doesn't explode like you see on the news channels. It could have been a thousand times worse. I'm not a believer, but I should thank God anyway.

It's just that I'm aware that things won't get much better than this anymore. There is a difference between evolution and revolution. From now on, things evaluate, hopefully with a positive trend. But you can't get drunk for the first time anymore, or feel the same sick making love you experienced your girl X years ago. Your next house will be a step forward, but you already know how to wash your own underpants. And worst of all, a new video game under the Christmas tree won’t get you over-excited anymore…


Off topic, Julio made a poster we'll be putting on a nearby school (hopefully) soon. Let's see if we can catch a few talented students with that! Oh, and if you guys like this poster, I can post or send you a big-resolution version as well.


The "Getting older" ages
Speaking of games... Every boy born after 1980 has a list of favorite games. We grew up with Nintendo's, Sega's, Playstations, Amiga's or the PC otherwise. And if you don't have a list of favs because you dislike gaming, you’re probably not reading this anyway. Shoo! I make an exception for girls, as they may found serenity with games somewhat later in the timeline. Girls + games = not cool, at least that is a label designed by women themselves. But it seems more and more girls set aside their image and just learned to enjoy games. Unfortunately my girl missed the boat, but damn sure I will play Double Dragon with little Julia as soon she is ready! Her hands aren't big enough to hold a controller so far, but time and vegetables will heal that.

As explained, my listing of favorite games doesn't grow much anymore now that I reached an age we would call “grandpa” in the past. Though I was pleasantly surprised with the brilliant "Advance Wars" (GBA / NDS) series and Red Dead Redemption not long ago. But all in all, the lack of time and age are making it hard to get truly charmed by a game. When picking up a new Zelda for example, I can't help but thinking I've seen the same puzzles, items, characters, worlds, music and ideas (too) many times before. Stories change, but the core is still equal to the SNES and N64 versions I first played. GTA V was fun, but I naturally started comparing it with "San Andreas" (one of my favs), and concluded I'm not getting transformed in a wigger anymore, listening to nineties ghetto rap and spending the evenings with my little brother on the attic playing this game. The impact was much smaller.
Nostalgia is something you can't buy.

And there is (the lack of) time. During days, I can't play violent stuff with kids around. During the evenings, my girl steals the TV for Polish soaps and other excrement. During the nights, well, either I program or sleep then. So what happens with long and complex games such as GTA or Zelda, is that they get fragmented in small bits over week or months. Sounds more durable than paying 50$ and finishing the game two days later after 48 hours non-stop action. But with such random intervals, you continuously forget the story plot, what you were doing, and you won’t get "sucked in". I still play games, don't get me wrong, but usually I pick the older ones that are easy to boot up, play for 30 minutes, save & shut again. Like eating fastfood instead of reserving a whole evening in a star restaurant.

Last but not least, there is no-one to share the experience with. As a kid, you'll draw Yoshi with your classmates. Friends came over to see Command & Conquer on your brand new turbo Hertz 486 PC, and also on a later age, we used to play games like Resident Evil together, making jokes about zombies, ridiculizing the plot (and play tough to mask our fears). But those persons are gone, gave up gaming, or can’t join you on a regular interval anymore. My big girl doesn't like games, little girl is still too young, brother doesn't live in the same house anymore, and friends are busy as well. All the hope is on my daughter. But until then, let's try to keep the vibe by at least not forgetting all the good times we had in the past.


"That little guy almost moves like a real human!" my father said, astonished.


All-time-favorite Post Mortem Reviews
In the next months (or years?), I'd like to commit some topics on my all-time-favorite games. I know this blog should be about T22, and there are plenty of (classic)game websites already. Then again, there is less to post about T22 because either I already told you about it, and in some stadiums there is just not that much to share. Either the progress is slow, the content not very interesting, or the new work is classified "top secret". But moreover, in my case games influenced my "Magic" and "Experience" ages quite a lot, and that experience is also applied on Tower22. I didn't study programming to make boring databases obviously!

Besides, I always wanted to write a game review, so why not? Long before the stupid idea of becoming a "game programmer" settled in my head, I wanted to become a reviewer for a games-magazine. Hence, even now I still review games in my head when cycling to work. What else to think of those thirty minutes every day? So, just for the sake of finally executing this little-boys-fantasy, let me have it my way. Pleeeaase??

Good. To make the (post)reviews slightly different than the billion others out there, I'll try to give them a slight game-design twist, as I always looked very critically to games. I didn't just play & enjoy them, I saw them as competitors (imagining I'd be making my own games) and analyzed the good, bad and ugly of games. Though I missed most of the very early game stations (Commodore, Atari, NES), I also saw the evolution of games. Or revolution, when comparing the technical leaps between Tetris, Wolfenstein and Crysis. Sure, games and hardware still march forward these days, but not as spectacular as they did in the nineties and early 21th century. Man, I played “Air Borne Rangers” on a PC without a harddrive, California Games on a monochrome (green - black) screen, and stared with open mouth to the super smooth animations of Prince of Persia, which was displayed in a shop window somewhere during a cold Christmas in 1990.


8 bit eye-opener
Well, I won't review anything in this topic yet, but I'll finish further with my own history in games. Our first computer, a XT-something, arrived when I was six. Ironically, my father didn't know shit about computers yes, so my mother gave the great advice of buying a system without a hard-drive. Everything was on floppies anyway she said. Mom did a typing course somewhere in my Dark shit Ages, so she had all the experience. Well, the roles quickly changed, as mom never used a computer until recently (internet shopping, of course), and dad found a new hobby in it. I didn't -and still don't- understand what dad was screwing in the BIOS and such, but it sure looked interesting. The seeds of "doing something with computers for a profession" were planted.

However, this piece of hardware wasn't used as a game-computer yet. My interest was still in physical toys such as Lego or Minitrix trains. Hence, I barely knew you could play games on a computer. We used the XT for typing crazy commands, and learning what a computer IS basically. No, my eyes really opened one or two years later, when coffee-visiting a girlfriend of mom. Her daughter (what did I say about girls & games?!) was playing Super Mario Bros. On a Nintendo 8 bit. I remember seeing commercials of Zelda (had nightmares about a lion and a sleeping princess for some reason), but I never saw a Nintendo in action. Nor did I heard of the "Platform game" concept. It was totally new, and man... it was awesome. Everything about it. The colors on the TV, jumping a fat little red guy, the joysticks, the orange Zapper gun. As soon as we got home, I started to make my own Nintendo... made of the Minitrix train box with a transparent front, and a drawing of the 2D Mushroom Kingdom that could roll by inside this "TV". Making a jumping character turned out to be too difficult for this little boy though.

You can guess what “Sinterklaas” (our version of Santaclaus) red on my wish-list. Unfortunately, the finances didn't allow Sinterklaas to buy me a NES, nor the Sega equivalent. Strange enough that some other friends actually did get a NES. Sinterklaas can't love every kid equally of course. Anyhow, I picked up more and more bits of this thing called "games". I bought Nintendo magazines, and father also figured out how to play games (from diskette or Floppy) on our already dating XT computer. This is how we met California games, Jungle Book, Pac-Man, and Air Borne Rangers. Yet, those games didn't match what I saw the girl doing on the Television with Super Mario. Nintendo was the shit, and every kid in the street had one. Except us of course. History would repeat with Doom2 btw, when I had to wait more than a year before the PC was finally upgraded.

We did borrow a Nintendo for a week one time. Younger ones may not remember, but back in our days there were stores where you could borrow VHS (movies), games or even game-consoles for some days. So I finally had my temporary Nintendo, with the even more awesome Super Mario Bros 3, and some kids in the street also gave my some games to try. Still remember how "Boom Boom" flew out of the screen and didn't return, a classic SM3 glitch. Mom must have observed closely what happened to her son, before getting one of those addictive things in house.


Super Buy
To help Sinterklaas a bit, I started to collect "5 gulden" (~2$) coins that year. And hindsight, it was probably a good thing to skip the NES, because the commercials started bombarding us with the Super Nintendo (SNES), Super Mario World, and Super Street Fighter. Believe it or not, but we recorded these commercials on VHS so we could watch the movie of Mario passing those super sized ceiling-drills over and over again. Those gamepads had 4 colored buttons instead of the 2 red buttons on the NES! Imagine what you could do with that! My little brother and I were sick of jealousy when a woman had to pick prizes in "Wheel of fortune", and chose a SNES. Not for her, but for her nephews. Fuck, why didn't we have an aunt giving us a Super Nintendo? The world can be so unfair.


Forget all other toys. This box and its large grey "cassettes" stood for endless fun. Those who waited for a SNES, probably still get tinkles when seeing this.

But, after collecting coins and saving all birthday money for a year or so, Sinterklaas came again. In the early morning of 5 December 1992, a big box was waiting on the chair. Finally! A Super-... box of electrical heated mattress sheets?!?! What the hell did Sinterklaas do?! That kids, is how my mom made a priceless photo of her 8 year old son almost dying of misery that morning. Mom and dad had electrical mattress sheets, and I remember once saying I would like to have one too. I unpacked the few other small packages, but obviously this Sinterklaas-party was ruined.

"Did you already open the box, Rick", mom asked? No, of course not. But ok, I'll do... and then the 4 shiny red-green-yellow-blue buttons of a SNES gamepad showed up behind the cardboard. The bastards just packed the SNES + Super Mario World in an their old box. The next photo in the album shows a happy 8 year old. Now I played with power, super-power. And then the photo album ended because their son wasted the next 20 years behind a computer. Thinking about it, I wonder if I can ever make Julia THAT happy with a present. The little girl already has everything. I know, don't spoil your kids, but yet it happens.



All right, with that piece of history explained, it's obvious that I'm a "Nintendo" guy. Not a surprise that quite some games in my favorites-listing come from Nintendo. But not much later, the PC got a more prominent role in our house as well. It still took a while before the harddisc-less XT was replaced with a 286, but certainly when the holy CD-ROM came, the PC proved to be more than just a spreadsheet machine for nerds. I'll sure fall back to more exciting PC hardware stories in the upcoming reviews, but let's end this post with my global computer-timeline:


And as the games I'd like to write about somewhere in the next months/year, here my top 10 favorites plus a few more that are worth noticing. Note these aren't the releases dates, but when I approximately met these games

Light-shafts, take #3

Wasted another weekend on bloody light-shafts, aka volumetric lighting, aka volumetric fog, aka fake shit to pimp your scene. These effects have been in the engine for ages, but when it comes to graphics-programming, your code is always out-dated. Especially when you left it unfinished (and you know finishing things 101% in the programming world is near to impossible). Some pesky little errors remained, you were too lazy to fix them, and one year later you have no clue what is going on so you'll decide to just redo the whole dang thing.


This doesn't look too complicated, yet it's pretty hard to to draw a volumetric beam if you don't have any polygons that catch light.

Anyway. What's up with volumetric-stuff then? For those who don't know, even though we have 3D games for two decades now, we still suck at rendering *everything* in true 3D. Solid walls or octopus monsters no problem. Fine-particle-based things on the other hand... dust, clouds, farts, fog, mustard gas, smoke, you name it. The problem is that you can't really model those things. Unless your artists are willing to make micro/nano sized particle clouds, and your computer willing to handle huge quantities of tiny “points” in a physical correct way. Nope, the level of detail is way too big, so we fall back on simple hacks to fake such phenomena.

For example, if you look at a lantern during night, you probably see a halo around the lamp. Especially if it's foggy or rainy. God didn't place billboard sprites on street lanterns though. It’s just physics minding its own business. Light rays collide with (water) particles in the air, water breaks (refracts) the light, and you see halo's or even rainbows. If you took attention at physics class, it's not all that hard to understand. But teaching your computer correct physics... There is simply not enough firepower to render on such a fine detail, store all that info, or treat light as rays in general. So instead, we just draw a transparent halo texture and put it around a light. Fixed.

As I'm getting a bit older, I learned not to always pick the hardest and most ambitious paths. If it works, it works. Clients usually don't care how brilliant your code is, and in the end most stuff you see is getting more and more fake anyway. Movie actors spend more time in front of a green screens instead of making an actual stage, soon my 5 year old daughter will Photoshop herself to a 18 year old supermodel on Facebook, mcDonalds meat isn't really meat, and I learned the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park weren't actually real either. And game-graphics are everything except a correct physics lesson.


Some effects can be simulates pretty easy. Others are more complicated. Most modern games have scenes where the sun casts beams through a forest-roof, or where dust appears behind a window as light falls in. Hence that already happened in N64 games probably. Of course they didn't actually render microscopic dust particles. The 3D artist just made a transparent box-shaped volume behind a window. That trick wouldn't work well for a forest though, as you would need to model dozens and dozens of leave shaped "pipes" in your scene. And if the sun moves, all those pipes had to be adjusted as well.

Luckily we found yet another cheap trick to fix that. Wouldn't run on a N64, but a somewhat modern computer should handle it with ease. The idea is to render the sun and maybe a darkened version of the skybox into a (small) texture. Then next step is to draw a screen-filling quad, where each pixel fires a ray towards the sun (it's 2D screen coordinate). For each step towards the lightsource, accumulate the color from the texture made in the first step. Basically it's a reversed way of smearing out blur streaks from a bright spot on your 2D canvas. More details:
Volumetric light as post effect, nVidia GPU Gems 3



Works well for one or a few dominant lights in the background. Doesn't work too well if the lightsource isn't visible directly. Huh? If you walk through a corridor, you might see sunlight falling through the windows, but without seeing the actual sun itself. As soon as the lightsource gets occluded or when you turn your back to it, it won’t get rendered on the input-texture. Thus there is nothing to blur / smear out, and this no lightshafts either. For example, it wouldn’t work for the scene in the picture at the top of this article; the viewer can see the light beam, but not the light that casts it.

To fix that, yet another trick came by. Nothing new either, although games may still not use it on a wide scale because it's a beefy effect. The idea is that for each pixel on the screen, or at least for each pixel that overlaps a light volume, you send a ray forwards. This ray might intersect the light-volume at some point. If it does, you accumulate a color. To make the effect more impressive, you can test whether that particular point in space wouldn't be shaded by using a shadowMap. This is obviously the more advanced effect, but it takes a lot of sampling, and requires a shadowMap to become really cool.


A basic explanation. It seems more advanced, optimized versions (less sampling) have been made in the meanwhile by smart guys. I didn't read it yet myself, but:
Intel GTD Light Scattering

Well, problem solved, didn't we? Hmmm. I thought so a few years ago when making these effects for the first time, but I always had problems with performance and flexibility. In my screenshots, such effects usually look quite nice. But in reality, when moving around in the scene, the effect could become barely visible or way too visible. Since it's hard to predict how many samples will accumulate light for a certain point of view, the results can vary quite a lot. After some shader- tweaking it would usually look better, but blow up again in a different scene one month later. Or adjustable parameters were hard to understand and still didn't achieve the desired results.


On the bottom-left buffer it seems pretty cool. But in-game it looks as if a honey-bear took a dump in the chandelier. Balancing problem.

Maybe the real problem is that the techniques above are fakes that can only cover one particular effect. Whether to use them or not really depends on the situation. For example, the effect above works for making a color or dust particles INSIDE a lightbeam visible. But in my dusty T22 corridors, I basically need dust everywhere, thus also in area's that aren't directly lit. I would need to complement the effect described above with another one. For example by filling the whole area with dust-sprites that slowly fly around.

The point is, each situation differs and asks for different techniques. Sometimes advanced shaders, sometimes cheap tricks that your grandpa invented already. Being ambitious (and younger), I tried to make a single multi-functional shaders that would solve all my "volumetric needs", but that didn't work out. Way too much overhead, too little artistic control, and tweaking it was like Jenga. Insert a block to improve effect A, and it will screw up effect B as another block falls out on the other side. So, I decided to disassemble again into multiple, simpler effects again. Let the artist decide what is needed for scenario X. It feels a bit unnatural though. Game engines try to solve more and more graphical issues with realtime, dynamic, uniform "super-shaders" rather than giving a bunch of dirty tricks.


I wonder how modern engines like UDK or CryEngine deal with this. Does the artist just click a button to get instant-awesomeness (whether that is a volumetric fog field, nice lighting & G.I., or a reflective flooded scene), or does it also involve a lot of parameter tweaking, masking ugly corners, and messing around with multiple techniques to see what works best? It's easy to get fooled by screenshots or carefully scripted movies. Like I said, I've become Goebbels when it becomes to showing you the better looking parts of the game. And so are they.

Well, after the latest adjustments, I should be happy again with the volumetric effects for about 3 months. Then I probably get jealous again after seeing a picture or game that seems to do it in a better or smarter way. The graphics-programming lifecycle in a nutshell.

The art of being a 3D artist

Still here in 2014? Good. I had some difficulties finding a topic to write about. Not because nothing happened the last weeks, but I mainly wasted the free hours on modeling maps. Unless I was a very skilled environment modeler, I can't tell you too much about it. Or well, maybe I can.

To start todays story, I’m thinking about contacting a nearby school that provides a games-study (NHTV Breda). With the hopes to find some 2D or 3D students, or maybe other interesting contacts. I’m afraid I can’t offer a place for interns though. At least, you’re welcome to sit down in my house and drink coffee with my girlfriend, but I won’t be home to teach you things until night. Nor can I introduce you to the games-business. Nevertheless, I think beginning artists should grab any chance to learn and practice their skills. If you’re too lazy for that, then forget about your career as a game-developer. You will need to bleed to achieve something sonny boy.

I’m not too worried about finding enthusiast students (at least if the school cooperates a bit). I’m more worried about their skills. With some exceptions, you simply can’t expect too much of young people who just started to explore the wonderful 3D world. Especially not if you’re a cheap asshole like me that can’t pay them. But with some energy and investment, your student will develop & grow. But at the same time, there has to be at least some degree experience and skill before I can let you enter the ship.


The Idea-maker, the Brains, and the Muscle
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Last years, I've seen quite some models from various modelers. Obviously, there is a big difference between artists. And not just quality wise in their demo-reels. Like building a house, multiple professions must be combined. There is the idea-maker, the creative architect, whose job is to draw inspiring sketches and dares to think out of the box. We have the brains, who tests if the floating-block ideas won’t collapse due the laws of physics, and who can label dreams with a realistic price-tag. And of course there is the muscle, the construction worker who does the dirty job, carrying bricks through the mud, and masters his toolbox.

In 3D worlds, especially with games, these professions seem to overlap more. Although certainly not every 3D artist masters all the bits, unfortunately. I would consider myself as “the brains”. I know how to make a model that technically matches with the game engine. But I lack toolbox skills to make more advanced models, nor are my architecture skills very strong. I plan and work out most of the environments, meaning I draw floor-plans and decide the “flow” (player starts at A, goes to B, has to activate an elevator at C, shit happens at D). Usually I have a global theme, say the environment has to contain wood and an “moist orange” atmosphere. Which often comes from some random fragments I remember from dreams, a movie, or just from the streets. You see a floating copper ball, or accidentally hit a messed up photograph while Googling around. The grey matter stores it, and later on you decide it’s suitable for building a game-environment around that idea.

Only problem with me is… this happens too randomly, too fragmented. If someone asks me to squeeze out an idea, I can’t think of anything, like a dog can't shit on command. Plus I miss detailed background knowledge to form ideas. Starting artists often forget that having this “idea database” is crucial. Art isn’t only about knowing how to hold your brush. It’s the talent to throw up the right ideas at the right time. Absorbing details from stuff you see, hear and read in daily life, as well as studying things you wouldn’t normally see, is an important part of the job. You can’t be creative if your head is hollow.

Fortunately, the games industry has drawers or concept-artists for that. A 3D artist doesn’t necessarily have to come up with super ultra funky wacky crazy plans. Yet -and this is where you can separate artists quickly- you still need some ideas from yourself to fill up the small gritty details. A concept artist can’t draw each and every corner of your game. As the name sais, he or she makes a concept, brain-food, an idea to build further on. Not an exact “here-this-is-what-you-do” task list. The concept artist draws one or a few (main / vista) locations from a particular environment or area. A game however contains a dozen more rooms, corridors, or open spaces placed around those proposed vista’s.

This is where the 3D artists has to help himself, adding (small) details to keep the environment interesting. And to do so, you still need your idea-database, otherwise you’ll run out of variation soon, or fail to add a little extra touch to your environments. I experienced that 3D modelers often have the technical skills to make X or Y, but not the additional Z; they need steering from drawings or comments. That’s ok, although it works faster and better if you have those ideas locked and loaded yourself of course.

The canvas content only has to look good once. The rest of the corridor around it has to keep looking good for a much longer time, as it fills the game environment.

Unlike static artworks that can be finished with a single powerful picture, games have to repeat themselves a lot to reach X hours of gameplay. Tower22 has old plastered corridors and apartment rooms all over the skyscraper. Doom has sci-fi corridors, hanging cables + pipes and engine rooms all over Mars. Far-cry has palm trees and shacks all over the jungle. GTA has asphalt, houses, flats and factories all over the fictional city. Last of Us (nice game btw, bought it for Christmas) has decayed buildings and apocalyptic alleys all over the devastated world. Whatever your setting is, expect to make the same stuff an annoying amount of times. If you don’t really know how a tropical rainforest looks like, you quickly start failing to keep your Far-cry jungle interesting or "real". If you never paid attention to wallpapers, ornaments, woodcraft, concrete cracks and dusty wooden furniture in Victorian style houses, you won’t be able to make a whole package of Tower22 (or Last of us) corridors.

I’ll try to pay attention, but my problem is that the grey matter does a bad thing storing things. Lots of Access Violations and broken SQL queries when I try to remember something. At the same time, being creative and “out of the box” also means you can make less obvious links. If I say “old house”, you and me think about damaged walls, glass and wood splinters on the floor, dark attics, That 70s Show furniture, and blinded windows. Of course, that’s how we learned to categorize things. But it’s too obvious and simple to surprise another. An artist may think about pink elephants, boobs, Bill Cosby, or Russian submarines when I say “old house”. Something went wrong in their database search, and most ideas probably lead nowhere. But 1 “Eureka!” can be enough to give your otherwise boring environment an unique taste. It’s a (weird) skill some people have, and most don’t.



As for the technical part, this is where 3D modelers won't always pass the test too. Especially not if they don’t have experience with making game-content. Fortunately this skill is relative easy to learn, although it strokes the technical/logical Beta side of the brains, that creative Alpha guys often miss a bit. Making a 3D scene in Max, Maya, or whatever package, provides you a lot of freedom. It doesn’t have to obey polycount limits, or provide playable space, meaning it works with the game-physics or A.I. And in the end, you only have to care about your final screenshot. What happens behind the scenes, behind the camera, or from another perspective in the same scene, isn’t important. People are gonna judge the final picture, nothing else.

Quite a culture shock when moving over to games. Suddenly you’ll be told that the doorknob has way too many polygons. The way how the UV-coordinates are made can’t be imported in the game. All the vertices have to be nicely welded to avoid thin gaps or holes in the scene. The stairs are too steep to climb in the game, and the passage too narrow to let the monsters pass. All the tiny electrical wire models have to be replaced with decals. The floor mesh has to be divided in smaller quads to enable Vertex Painting or other per-vertex shading techniques you never heard of. And prepare yourself to make normalMaps instead of adding polygonal details.

Yeah...old wallpaper...? Don't be fooled, it's quite a technical mixture between poly-friendly modeling techniques to create holes, and Vertex-painting to mix several layers of diffuse/specular and normalMaps to avoid the same wallpaper repeating over and over again in those long boring corridors.

As said, the professions overlap more. A good 3D artist has to be able to come up with ideas (certainly in T22 where we don’t have an army of concept drawers and repeat a lot). The artist has to use his modeling skills, but also approach the task from a technical perspective; how to keep the polycount within limits? Can we repeat assets to reduce the amount of work? Which available techniques can be used to make the scene look good from all possible player perspectives? The 3D artist has to be both the creative one, and the brains.

And in the end also the muscle of course. Making ideas is one thing, executing and finishing them is another. I always get bored of the model after some hours. Probably because I’m not a real modeler, but finishing stuff is just a hard thing to do in general. As a kid, how many things did you started? Lego cities, comic books, tree houses, decks of magical cards, music tracks, rabbit cages, pimped cars? And how many of those projects did you actually finish? Exactly.


Patience and discipline to finish your task is yet another skill a 3D artist needs. All in all, quite some requirements. Making ideas, knowing the technical (engine)rules, being able to draw textures, absorbing ideas and studying work of others, mastering your 3D packages. If you have the right attitude, most of those things can be learned by practice I think, but it will take time and devotion.

To come back at the “acquiring students” topic, I wonder what they could offer. I’ve seen young guys that lack experience, but quickly catch up because of their talent and will. But I’ve also seen guys that, despite years of 3D package experience, just couldn’t come up with good ideas, add a bit extra love in their work, or had the ability to make a technical correct model. As said, I can’t expect too much in my position, but if I’ll have to explain and correct every task someone does, it only slows down the project. Plus it’s frustrating for both in the end. Ah, good artists. I wish you could grow them in your garden, but that’s not how it works. Got to keep my eyes and ears open to find them, and help myself with making models for the time being.

In the year 2014

Merry Christmas assholes, and of course, a healthy & productive 2014! Build a house, find a job, finish school, realize dreams, loose 30 pounds of Cheeseburger fat, merry your woman, finally paint that fucking shed, buy a new car, play less & program more, don't always want to have the last word, learn how to play a guitar, invite your family, start writing that novel, raise your kids, help the poor, be a better man. Whatever you do, do something, and do it with your heart.

As for flaky good promises, here some from the T22 department:

* Finish the official demo movie early 2014
* Finish another little bonus movie early 2014
* Push demo to (Dutch) games magazine & recruit
* Make it possible for artists to earn a bit with their work
* Possibly start a crowd-funding campaign
* Start making a Playable Demo - yes, something you can download

The next official demo should have been finished already, but you know, I'm not a God that can turn things the way he prefers. The good news is that all 3D maps, props and textures have been made. Audio still has to be done, but usually the guys are very quick with that. The biggest obstacle is animating. We have some real animated stuff here, rather than breathing blobs or programmer-"art" Milkshape animations. Besides needing time to produce the animations, it also takes some programming work to handle the incoming files. Let's just say FBX & Collada aren’t very cooperative when it comes to skeletons & rigs.

The other "bonus" is a little experiment I'm doing in the meanwhile. Don't expect too much of it, and it might disappear soon from the internet again because of some reasons, but nevertheless, it should be fun. Below a little taste. It should be finished pretty soon because I'm doing all the maps myself. Yup, programmer-art again, but at least I'm pretty fast once I got my teeth in it. And to make it look a bit nice, we have several textures & props we can reuse by now. Having a library of "stuff" can truly boost the development speed!


What could it be?


The future of T22
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Far more crucial for 2014, is how we continue this project. As pointed out above, progress isn't exactly... fast. Honestly, it's way too slow to achieve a "product". Something finished, something that can be sold. Of course the goal is not to make a 30 hour game that beats the shit out of all other AA-titles. Not that I don't have enough story and ideas to create a true full game, but the marathon would be of epical Duke Nukem Fornever proportions. I wish it was different, and three years ago, I honestly thought it would go a bit different, but the bottom-line is that you just can't create a full game with a handful of hobbyists / part-time artists. At least not with the ambitions and quality requirements Tower22 has.

I'm a dreamer, but not stupid. Something has to change, otherwise you'll be reading the same kind of Blog updates, watching some random screenshots, and having a little demo-movie once in a while for the next 20 years. As stated above, the next demo(s) are used to attract new talent. As usual, we'll need guys that can produce 3D environments, props, and draw textures. We also need a few concept artists, and someone who's going to make that damn UI finally. But practice from the last three years taught me that getting people that are A: talented, B: want to commit for free, and C: have plenty of time, is an almost impossible combi. You won't get a full bottle of super quality 100 year old whiskey for free either.

But moreover, if you are lucky enough to find talented people, it seems to be even harder to keep them, or at least have them so much motivated that they are willing to spend a sufficient amount of their time on your project. They simply have other things to do. Usually in the beginning they are motivated, but Tower22 isn't the kind of product you can finish within a month or half a year. It will take years. Of course you can chop it up in smaller milestones or targets, like the movies we have. But even a seemingly simple movie can swallow a year if you don't have the whole team working on it in second gear. I'll spend somewhere between 12 to 25 hours a week on T22. But the sum of hours the rest (~10 men) spends, varies between 0 and 15 hours. Sure there are peaks, but by default, everyone is occupied with study, work, family, personnel issues, freelancing, or just chilling out. If I'm lucky, one or two persons "wake up" for a week, and produce something. Usually they do a very good job, but the pace is too unpredictable to plan anything. It makes the progress slow, and it demotivates another to force themselves spending time on the project even when they're not 100% in the mood.


That sucks, but it happens to pretty much any "hobby" project. Whether it's producing a game, or making music with your super awesome gothic garage band. People need short term satisfaction. Very natural. The reward could be dumping a cool movie on Youtube and getting nice reactions, it could be mastering a new technique and feel proud about it, it could be meeting up with friends and having a nice day practicing your hobby. And obviously, it could also be a cash reward. Hey, you don't wake up every day for work just because you like it so awfully much, do you? Don't worry, 99% doesn't. I like my job quite a lot, yet I still need to be forced to be there every morning, every day, and night if needed. Salary, compliments, challenge, satisfaction, but also a "penalty" when not doing what you’ll have to do, are the well known tools to achieve that.

Components like salary and penalties are often missing in hobby projects. Challenge and satisfaction might be there, but don't underestimate that repeating the same thing over and over again, like making 10 different corridors, isn't exactly a challenge or satisfaction anymore. Even the coolest movie- or game projects are made of hundreds/thousands smaller, repetitive, boring tasks. But at least those employers pay a salary to compensate.




Nobody on the dancefloor
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Well, you get the point. Just making another demo-movie and initially attracting 6 new artists, is still no guarantee for future success. In practice, 75% will walk away sooner or later, and/or just doesn't have the talent or dedication you hoped for. You'll be blessed with the remaining 25% (or whatever number), but don't put your tools in a dusty box, rusting away. Making a big project like this, is a team effort. Everyone needs to help & stimulate everyone. Easier said than done, because in pretty much all cases, a newcomer doesn't know any of the existing team members. Duh, that happens at regular work too. Yeah, but at least there you meet your colleagues every day, you speak the same language, and if your boss is a wise man/lady, he organizes events with alcohol a few times. Team-building. I'm a shy guy, so I won't bother anyone with questions or personnel stories. But... if you know you each other longer and they remember you dancing the Macarena, losing your balance and falling flat-out on the floor during that Christmas party, things will go “smoother” from then on. You broke the ice. Literally maybe.

You don't have that luxury with the average hobby project organized via internet. Although half of the T22 members lives in Spain, and a few actually met each other, it’s just very rare that people have a real bond in this context. I wish I could invite them here for a Christmas party and dance the Macarena, but it's just not possible. And making jokes or get drunk together via Skype is... meh, not my cup of tea either. As a result, we don't really work as a team. I'm sure efforts can be done to boost that, using the internet. But me myself isn't much of a very open, social creature, neither do I like Skype, Facebook, Twitter or Social Media in general. Thus, I'm not the best type of glue holding them together.


Social Glue
----------------------------------------------
Right right right. Plenty of issues. We all get it why the Tower22 development is slow and hard. But it wouldn't be Christmas & (almost) 2014 if we couldn't bring a positive message, filled with Hope and light! As for the social contact thingie, I will focus the upcoming demo-movie on Holland. Not that outsiders aren't welcome anymore, but I truly hope to find at least a few persons somewhere nearby. Someone I can drink beer with, invite for a weekend to work on T22, and speak his or her own language if there are difficulties (or jokes to make). A group of friends is capable of doing more than a group of scattered individuals. And hopefully groups of friends can be a fundament for the rest of individuals as well. If you get a new job, you usually try to join a sub-group within the company that feels most comfortable, don't you?

Unfortunately, the Netherlands doesn't exactly have a booming games-business. The only big company I can name, is Guerrilla (makers of Killzone). But I refuse to believe we aren't creative with 3D tools. So I'm hoping a lot of Dutch are just waiting for a fun, nearby project they can hop on. I tried to find Dutch game-dev communities, but either I didn't search hard enough, or they just don't really exists. But, pretty close to my living place, you can follow a game-study since 8 years or something, and we also have a popular games-magazine (also known in Belgium). So, if we can contact them, they hopefully promote us a bit, waking up the regional hobbyists. And if that works out, we could try to do the same in Spain, or other places. Making local clusters, each with a team/beer captain.


Money money money, it’s so funny.
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Getting good people is one thing, keeping them (working) is another sport. As said, we lack reward & penalties. Of course I can’t kick someone’s ass because he decided to play FIFA14 instead of making a box with 3D banana’s. But what we can do, is introducing a reward, and “punish” by not giving a reward or the nicer jobs to those who aren’t productive.

Only problem is that I didn’t born in an oil-well. Neither did we win the lottery, or did I chose to be a banker for a living. So how to reward in the first place? It will be hard indeed, but not impossible. There are some ways to create a (small) budget for this project:

• Be patient, be super lucky, and get in touch with a big investor
• Start a Crowd-Funding campaign (for example, “Kickstarter”)
• Open a “Donate” box on this blog and/or the website
• Invest yourself
• Allow artists to sell some of their work made for T22

The first option might be possible if you have a truly nice showcase. But in order to generate that showcase, you still need to produce something first. When it comes to actually realizing a full game, it might the only real option, but it’s long-term stuff. Not something we should count or hope on for 2014.


The Asset Catalog
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The other money-making-tactics are easier. The last one for example is something we can start with today. Artist makes something (3D object, texture, audio sample, …), and then puts it for sale on a website such as Unity. The income isn’t meant for T22, it would be too much of a hassle to make deals. For now, I just hope it will boost the artist to get things done properly & ASAP. If he makes 200 extra dollars with a rusty metal barrel, good for him. I’m just happy he made that barrel in the first place. If the summation of assets really generates a big income for artists (which I doubt), we can always re-evaluate this strategy and look for a system where T22 promotes their assets and catches X% of the income. But let’s start simple.

Of course, an artist can’t just sell any object made for T22. Some are real specific eye-catchers or game-items. So what I did, is setting up a big listing of assets in “Asana”, a (free) web-application you can use together for planning and describing tasks. For each asset, I’ll tell whether its sellable or not. If the artist actually wants to sell the asset is up to him. The only thing he has to do is asking permission, and put a T22 logo/link with the asset (which hopefully generates a bit of additional traffic).


Too much liquor filled chocolates this Christmas

Pay-per-Asset system
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Asides from telling whether an asset is sellable or not, I also attached a bounty price on each. Wanted, a stinky cowboy hat. Reward 8$. That kind of stuff. The idea is that, IF we have a budget, each asset will be produced for a small reward. If all goes as planned, something like a table or chair object would gain you 16 or 20$. The more complicated or rare objects (or drawings, or sounds, or rigs, or …) come at a slightly higher reward. Nope, you won’t get rich of it (unless you are a robot producing assets 24/7), but it’s always better than nothing. Hey, if you produce one or two asset per week (instead of a small, random amount per few months like now), it would give you a nice little monthly bonus. And maybe even more if you manage to sell the same item as well. Do the math.

The most important aspect, is that people get boosted to keep going. Even on the slightly boring tasks. If 8 artists make 3 assets per month average –which is very reasonable- it would mean 24 assets per month are made. If the total amount of assets to-do is 400, it would theoretically take 17 months to get all the work done. Look, now we can plan something. And I’m convinced that once a couple of artists are really steaming, it’s far more easier for others to get sucked into that flow.

One thing I like in particular about this system, is the simplicity. The artist either accepts or denies the offer. Then in the end, I’ll accept the result. Or not. It’s all on my terms. That makes me sound like Saddam Hussein or Stalin, but the last thing I want is arguing. You know, money “enables”, but also makes people dirty. I can’t verify if an artist spend 10 minutes or 10 hours on an object. I can’t judge how much sweat it took to curve a nurb in Maya. If we had to discuss the reward for each asset, it would become chaos. My way or the Highway (hush, I’m a very reasonable guy).




Go go Kickstart rangers
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Nice, but now the real question. How to get that budget? Based on a Playable Demo, I wrote down pretty much all assets in Asana. Each with a reward, a bit of information, whether it can be sold or not, et cetera. Based on the numbers (+ some extra margins), I came to a conclusion that 7.000 to 7.500 USD would be sufficient to get all those assets made. That excludes my programming work btw, since that is very hard to classify in small tasks. I can make a particular technique, but usually it’s never really finished. Anyhow, now that we know some numbers, we can start accepting donations.

I never really liked the idea of asking for money. I see, smell, drunken hobo’s begging for a dime so they can buy liquor and poop their pants comfortably. But, several people here suggested to accept donations nevertheless. I explained my objections, basically telling I don’t want to steal someone’s money on something I can’t 100% guarantee. The most beautiful reaction I got on that, was somebody saying I stole their chances to invest on a product they like to see happening. Touché.

Opening a donation box shouldn’t be too difficult, plus I can donate on a monthly basis myself. As shown above, we don’t need ten-thousands of dollars. Yet, I’m not quite convinced that this will bring us a budget of 7.500 USD. And notice we may need a bit more for web-hosting a 1 or 2 gig demo, or whatever expenses I forgot about.

One popular way to collect a certain amount of money, is using a Crowd-Funding website such as Kickstarter. Our target would probably be 11 or 12 thousand USD. I believe about 2k disappears again into the pockets of the website, so we’ll keep 8 or 9k. 7 or 7.5k is used for asset production, the remaining budget for God knows what.

Getting 11 or 12K doesn’t sound like a bridge too far. I tried to keep it relative low to increase our chances (it’s all or nothing with Kickstarter, you only get your money if the target was reached). The only technical difficulties might be taxes, and the fact that I can’t use Kickstarter as Dutchman in the first place. Oh shit. But I’m sure there is a workaround.


Promises, promises: The Playable Demo
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But maybe more important, no one will spend money on vague promises. Tower twenty six? What the hell is that? Obviously we need our demo movies more than ever this time, because without recent stunning visual materials and vivid discussions on the webs, you’ll be doomed. Second, you’ll need to win trust. T22 delivering nothing but a few short clips the past 3 years doesn’t sound like a very wise idea to spend your Bitcoints on. Maybe a few über-hardcore horror fans will do (hello), but we probably need a bit more than that to reach the target.

We need to be open & transparent about our goals. We need to be able to produce something concrete, in a reasonable amount of time. For that, I thought about a Playable Demo. Something you and I can download, for free. A real piece of the Tower22 game. A small piece, say about 15 minutes of gameplay. But a piece nevertheless. Something that will make you hungry for more, and hopefully unlocks bigger opportunities for collecting a budget to produce an actual 1st Episode.

The truth is, we can make that demo in ~1.5 years, IF there is a budget & a bunch of motivated artists. Probably it won’t run like a charm on any computer. You won’t get the best graphics or super intuitive physics. But you should get an interesting little journey through a part of the Tower, including some puzzles, filthy gore, and not so nice entities that keep you running (or hidden under bed). A teaser.



Well kids, once we actually get to the Crowd-Funding phase, we’ll sure notify you again. With a shorter, more powerful text. And with fresh screenshots, drawings, and one or even two demo movies. You as a loyal reader has the right to know what we’re up to. And yeah, we are up to something. We are just as slow as Halflife Episode 3, but at least we try to show you or even get you playing in the meanwhile. But first, enjoy these days. Sometimes, there are more important things than making video-games! Good wishes.

Upskirt

I want to ask you something awkward; How about using fixed-camera views in this horror game?


Just draw or photograph the background, no poly penalties, need for impossible shaders, light limitations or other nonsense. Everything was better back then.

Fixed-what? It's not unlikely that some of you younger readers that grew up with almost photorealistic graphics, Virtual Reality and Cybersex don't know that ugly word. Retired readers on the other hand probably vaguely remember old games such Alone in the Dark, Metal Gear Solid or the first Resident Evil games. It wasn't uncommon for early 3D games (and also “2D” adventure games such as Monkey Island, Phantasmagoria or Myst) to put the camera on fixed spots within the environment. Depending on the player position, the game would pick a pre-assigned camera (usually the closest or "best" point of view).

Now why the heck would you want that? Well, on old hardware, it makes sense. A fixed camera only sees a (small) fixed, predictable part of the geometry. No complicated culling algorithms are needed to keep the rest of the environment hidden, out-of-sight lamps deactivated, or prevent off-sight textures to eat (back then extremely scarce) video memory. This gain of performance usually allowed the creators to spend a bit more detail on the fixed scenes. Meaning bigger textures, higher poly characters, or better quality lighting/shadows. Hence, if the environment was really static, they could even take a snapshot, Photoshop it, and project it back in the game as a semi-3D environment. High-end graphics, low pricing.

Despite the static nature, the Resident Evil Remake was certainly one of the better looking games for the Gamecube. Being semi-3D, time and sweat that would normally be wasted on getting the requirements for rendering this as good as possible in realtime, could now be spend on some photoshopping / tuning of each individual snapshot.

Not sure how they did it, but probably they baked the static scene into an image with a high-quality offline renderer. In the game itself, a (simplified?) 3D mesh is rendered with this high quality image pasted on top. Being still 3D, the environment can cull the player if he walks around a corner, or catch shadows. Being very simple, more resources are left available for super-ultra-awesome(back then) techniques such as the water reflections, or the relative high poly character.

Of course, fixed camera views don't work very well for 1st person shooters or quick action games in general. You would get sick of the ever changing point of view while rushing through the stage. Another thing, using fixed-camera's sounds like cheating. Powerhouse graphical engines do their best to show as much real-time capabilities as possible (see my silly hunt for real-time G.I.). And in the year 2014, erh, 2013, they seem to be quite capable of doing that. But it’s not just high-res textures and fancy lighting that steals the show nowadays. Dynamics such as destructible buildings, rotating fans with volumetric lighting, or large rolling water waves are the eye-catchers these days. Motion, my friend. Fixed camera's therefore got dated. Probably it still exists here and there, but "Resident Evil Zero" on the Gamecube was one of the last games I played using them, and that was more than 10 years ago.

And before we forget, people weren't exactly charmed by the fixed camera. In RE, shooting a sluggish zombie should be an easy job. But as you often couldn't see the enemy coming from a certain point of view, those slow assholes were still able to catch you. Not fair! Aiming a gun was hard, spotting enemies was hard, and NOT walking like a drunk 600 year old statue was even harder, as the joystick directions change each time the camera changes.


And then there was Resident Evil 4. Third person view, fluent aiming system with a nifty laser pointers on your gun, a slick & agile Leon Kennedy that could roundhouse kick doors, and... shoot, it wasn't scary anymore. Leon's new super-abilities made killing zombies childsplay. To prevent the game from getting pathetically easy, they swapped the slow zombies with hordes of somewhat smarter, and especially faster, "angry farmers". The tactic of Surprise (Boo! a zombie in the closet!) was replaced with the tactic of Overwhelming. Murdering a single “Cabron” was still easy, but having fifteen of them chasing you with burning torches and rusty manure forks could be risky if you let them pin you down in a corner. Mobility & making fast decisions was the new name of the game, and changed Resident Evil in a radical way.

Don't get me wrong, RE4 was/is an extremely addictive, fun, action game. One of the few games I finished multiple times in a row. But scary... meh. An adrenaline rush yes, but not the type of game that makes you want to hit the "Power Off" button because you aren't in the mood for nightmares. Ironically, some of the people that complained about fixed camera's and stupid door scenes, now complained about RE not being so scary anymore. No shit Sherlock.


The typical top-down camera's, close to the player, didn't really help to get an overview of the situation. Zombies could be anywhere. Behind you, uhm, under your feet. Oh, and in closets of course.

Not saying that it's impossible to create a scary game without door(loading time)sequences and fixed camera's, but I think a lot of people missed the fact that RE was scary partially BECAUSE of that damned camera. Zombies were slow, doors opened slow, the game was slow. You could hear them moaning, but couldn't tell if or from which direction they exactly would come, as the fixed camera rarely gave an overview of the entire room. That made cowardly sniping your foes down from a safe distance, almost impossible. You had to wait if/when they entered your TV screen, then quickly shoot them. Slow & cheesy terror, but yet it worked. Basically, the camera just made the game hard enough to be scary.

Having first-person-view powers on the other hand would make you a God, running through the house like The Running Man, shooting or avoiding everything in your way, finishing the game within 30 minutes. It's the reason why modern zombie games like "Left 4 Dead" use gigantic flocks of upgraded super-zombies. If they didn't, the game wouldn't be a challenge, and thus not fun at all. But as described in my previous post, a continuous flood of raging monsters and blood usually doesn't make a game scary. The classical Resident Evil ghost mansion atmosphere is gone (and even if they attempted to re-create the old feel, the story has become so absurd and stupid with the 20 sequels, that it can't be saved).


Another reason to chose fixed camera's (or at least partially fixed, it doesn't mean the camera is always frozen on a single point) is to boost the production. Hmmm? Making an engine that renders potential big environments, is tricky. You have to cull invisible objects, fall back to lower LOD's for distance stuff, decide which lights are used for casting shadows, make sure everything in the background is loaded before you can see it, be careful with resolutions and object counts, et cetera. Well, I like that challenge, but we have to be realistic as well: we don't have billions of people, hours, resources and money to create a big-ass game.

Asides from technical issues, picking fixed camera views allows to cheat as well. Usually I have a pretty good idea how an environment should roughly look. But in a setting that repeats itself a lot (flat = apartments, corridors, apartments, corridors, app…) it's hard to make each corridor unique. The more square meters you have to decorate with planks, wallpapers, blood decals, paintings, cracks, flowers, or whatsoever, the harder it gets. And everything you make, has to look good from all possible camera-angles. Shadows, specular highlights, lamp halo’s, volumetric shafts, lens-flares or reflections can create an interesting scene. But view the same scene from the other side, and the result might be dull because those elements didn't quite work out from that particular position. You can’t just snap an World-Press photo from any angle either.

With a fixed camera, you can for example keep the ceiling invisible (I hate figuring out how each ceiling should look different). If you chose to render a certain wall or object from a distance only, you don't have to produce a super detailed mesh or normalMap for that object either. If the lighting doesn't work out fully for angle-X, you pick angle-Y instead rather than tweaking parameters forever that enhances one scene and screws up another. Hey, you'll do that all the time. Each time when I take a screenshot for this blog, I'll try to pick a point of view that looks the best.


Like a photographer tries to find the best spots and angles, Camera's can be placed to serve the scene in a certain way. Same door, but the top one looks more threatening due its size, as the camera was placed in "Dwarve perspective".

Again, I'm not saying Tower22 will suddenly change the camera. I always had this game in mind with a First-Person-View, so I'll try to make it that way. But the advantages mentioned above -some extra difficulty/fear + easier technology + less assets to produce in huge detail- sound very attractive. Think of it this way, would you rather have a finished game that cheats with camera's, or no game at all because it was too much work for a group of hobbyists? You know most FPS games either look mediocre, or had a super-budget and a very experienced team making it. If a fixed-camera can help us, we shouldn't just drop it because it sounds old fashioned and people complained about it (and then complained RE4/5/6 weren't scary anymore).

Anyhow, to you, the Fixed-Cam would be:

* Still have no clue what is
* No,no! NO! NOOOO!
* Don't like it, but if it helps the production of this game...
* Don't care, I'll play anything
* Fuck yeah, I missed them ever since

Bloody hell

Horror game, blood. That matches like meat & barbeque, gunpowder & boom, baby & poop, Japanese & Hentai, or Eurosong festival & shit music. And T22 is no exception, although I believe buckets of blood don't necessarily make a scary setting. In contrary, overdo it, and it becomes an ordinary chocolate-cake throwing fight. Some of the more bloody movies I know, where more humorous than scary. While the real messed up movies weren’t that gory at all usually. Though The Shining had a few short bloody scenes (the flooding corridor & slashed kids), the major fear effect came from an overall, slowly evolving madness in that hotel. We all know the twins, but to me, the particular scene depicted below, was the most disturbing. I still have no idea what the hell I’m looking at here. And it isn’t just the picture that’s absurd, the way how the bear/dog/whatever costume guy(?) slowly bows back, is just freaking unreal. Bad dream, bad dream!

Speaking of The Shining, I picked up “dr. Sleep” a few weeks ago, Stephen Kings official successor to The Shining. Little Danny becomes a big drunk Danny –like daddy-, and tries to make something useful of its life and unfortunate gift to see dead people. In the meanwhile, a cult of vampire like “human” is cruis’n through USA, feeding themselves. With paranormal kids.

About halfway the book now, and all in all it’s an amusing read. But scary… maybe I’m too lazy to get myself scared, but it just didn’t really happen so far. Dan’s fight against his visions and alcoholism is very convincing. The vampire family on the other hand may have been better in another book. Twilight or something.

Anyhow. Back to blood and intestines. One thing that annoys me in quite a lot of movies and games, is that –despite modern technology- they don’t always draw it in a convincing way. And I’m not talking about German games (in Germany, all organisms have green blood). You shoot a zombie, and instead of old dried brown chunky guts, it sprays pink juices. You blow up a bunch of soldiers, and all you get is some flying ragdolls and orange sticky “Gak!” flying around. You chainsaw a bear in half, and 4 seconds later the room looks clean again as all the mess was cleaned up by invisible Mexicans. If the blood doesn’t look disgusting, the whole “eeeww gross!” effect will be ruined in a split second.

Mortal kombat
Bicycle-kicking someone in the face would spawn some greyish sweat-stuff in MK1. Something with censoring. The second MK on the other hand opened Pandora’s box. A single uppercut could spawn three ears, six eyeballs, and more liters of blood than a human can actually carry. Excellent!

Three heads?! I'm not kidding, the very first shot I found on MK.

As I said, a movie or game doesn’t necessarily need blood to be scary, but if we do it, we’d better do it good. I liked how Doom3 or Silent Hill did it for example. Silent Hill didn’t forgot to hire invisible Mexican cleaners, the entire SH world looks like if God took a gigantic crap on it. Thin bloody splatter diarrhea to be more precise. Blood doesn’t automatically generate a scary setting, but in Silent Hill everything is so dark, foggy and dirty, that you almost can’t breathe. Literally. Discovering a clean, “normal” room in SH feels like a relief. The continuous overwhelming “filth” brings the player in an unreal, nightmarish, uncomfortable setting. Doom3 wasn’t that much of a shithole, but I found it really interesting to study the shiny specular lighting (quite new at that time) on the bloodpools and slimy intestines that penetrate the Mars base. Then looking at a modern game like Crysis 2 again, the blood effects look like Play-Doh.

Tower22 will become quite bloody here and there, though the focus is not on gore. Most of the environments won’t be decorated with pig stomachs, and neither will you decapitate a whole lot of monsters. But if the red magical fluid makes an appearance, we’ll do our best to make it look like Hell. Easier said than done though. And this is where the post becomes slightly more technical. Since realtime fluid dynamics are still far away from games, most blood effects are based on decals and flying particles. If not done carefully, particles quickly become like a simplistic MS-Paint Spraybrush of red pixels.

Decals might be a bit easier, but also have some special features. Like most liquids, blood is reflective. But not for too long, as it gets soaked by the surface, resulting in a dried, dark-red / brownish spot. To simulate such characteristics a bit, you’ll need to pick a good blending method. Standard transparency methods may result in a red pool that doesn’t blend very well with its underground. Multiplying seems to work much better, but I found the resulting colors still too reddish and bright in my test cases. So, I implemented a “Color Burn” blend method. It doesn’t always work out either, but on the majority of somewhat darker undergrounds in T22, you get a nasty, dark & rich fluid.



Another effect you rarely see (last time for me was in Duke Nukem 3D), are the fluid dynamics itself. Once a decal splats on a wall, it sticks there as if you shot a red paintball pellet. If the surface is smooth, the fluid would likely pour down though. Or how about shooting someone wearing a nice blue sweater? If games support decals on characters at all, they often show you a big reddish hole straight away. In reality, you may not see anything for a moment, then a darkish circle starts appearing and growing on that nice blue sweater. Not very relevant for T22 monsters, as most of them will be naked likely. But the point is, if engines would put just 0,1% of all their graphical artillery into making a bit more creative blood effects, the world would be a redder, uhm better, place. Since the majority of super-heavy-weight engines is made for shooters, it’s quite weird that they stick with 10 year old cheap tricks for gun wounds. Or maybe that has more to do with keeping the age limit below 18 for sales…


Used ingredients here: a projective decal with lots of red, some reflections, and a burn-blend modus. Bon apetit!

The Business Traveler

No games, nor programming today. Instead, I wanted to put down my first trip to the States, goddamn 'Murica, Stars and Stripes and bold Eagles. Everyone has an opinion about our infamous cowboy friends. Varying from an example of freedom, technology and overall Coolness, to arrogance, war-seeking and financial crisis causers. Whatever you think, the overall trend hasn’t been a positive one in general.

With a bit of common sense, you can understand the average American isn’t directly responsible for big shot bankers screwing up, or its blood thirsty policymakers with double agenda’s. Just like the average Iranian isn’t responsible for its malicious regime, or average Russian for their corrupt not-so-Gay leaders. Of course, we vote for such leaders and people sometimes say “A nation gets what it deserves”. Western greediness reflects in its policy, narrow mindedness will bring scary leaders, and overall lack of IQ didn’t do much good in this world either. But what I’m trying to say is, it isn’t all black & white. Europe having a bunch of greedy crooks in Bruxelles doesn’t mean the average European supports them. Hence we didn’t even democratically vote for them.


Moon Shiners
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But when I think about America, the words “Dumbness”, “Overdramatic” and “Shallowness” come to my mind. And not just “thanks” to MTV shows such as Jersey Shore or Supersweet 16. Man, I truly hate MTV. A few millennia ago you could watch nice music clips on that channel, but nowadays only the stupidest of the stupidest show their stupidity on MTV, compiled for ADHD children with a maximum concentration span of 4 seconds. But not just MTV, even Discovery or National Geographic turned from informative into nonsense documentaries. I don’t give a crap about crap talking crab fishers. What exactly is informative about a bunch of guys buying garage junk? If you aim a camera at some Dutch folks in an office, they will nervously giggle and hide for the camera, not knowing how to behave. But in America it seems as if everyone was born on (sex)tape. Shameless arguing all the time instead of just working, and sharing their deepest emotions with the camera. It’s as if the average American person could switch their emotional state from “I’m like soooo happy” to “Oh my God, Oh my God, oh my God!” to “I hate you, I want to die” in a split second. What a ridiculous show.

Right. These kind of TV shows imply a shallow, instable American character. Add Hollywood on top where action hero’s jump of buildings on a daily basis or music stars inspiring our kids while walking half naked on the stage. All in all, a weird bonanza, and you understand the rest of the world has kind of a weird image(mainly caused by Americans themselves) of the USA. The scary part is that, despite its dumbness, we (European) still swallow and copy this “lifestyle” regardless.

Well, time to visit America and see if it’s really all about hamburgers, big mouths, crying pregnant teenagers, and Duck Dynasty.


As you may know, I program harvesters for a living. This lady comes from our American partners. For a change not a million times bigger than its European counterpart, but big-ass nevertheless.


The “Yank Tank”
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If I had to book a vacation to America, I would probably visit a big city, visit touristic spots, and still don’t really know what America is all really about afterwards. Well, I definitely want to make a Hangover road trip with friends one day, but basically the expensive flight tickets stopped us from doing that so far. Fortunately, you don’t have this cost consideration when such a trip is work-related. And neither will you see much of the touristic spots. 99% of the American landscape is filled with wild nature, farms, and widely scattered tiny villages. Cities like New York or L.A. are definitely important as an American “export product”, but we easily forget about the rest.
For work, we were visiting a partner company (Oxbo). You might have seen their machinery on cornfields for example. So, you can probably guess that these meetings didn’t take place in a big city. Swap the Devil Advocate skyscrapers for Countryside & construction plants in the middle of nowhere. Well, almost nowhere. Minnesota doesn’t have a dense population, but small cities or Minneapolis were still within reach with only 45 to 90 minutes driving… Which sounds like an infinity for a typical Dutch guy like me. If you drive for an hour in Holland, chances are very big you crossed a border and speak a different language.

We often make jokes about Americans and their obsession for oversized cars plus additional oil thirst. We wooden-clog-cheese-windmills know everything better; we pick the bicycle. Good for the environment, good for our health. But we tend to forget that the Netherlands is a miniature compared to most other countries in the world. In contrary to Holland, most of the American infrastructure wasn’t designed for cyclists. Hence not even for walking. But even if it was, I don’t see you carrying shopping bags for more than a mile, or going to work if you had to bike for more than 40 minutes. Cities or larger villages might be different, but the country side is really a far stretched version of what we are used to. And probably due the low population density, facilities like shopping malls or schools are combined as big buildings somewhere on a central location. Whereas we have lots of small shops and little schools spread all over the place. In other words, you won’t be anywhere without a car in America. At least not if you prefer to arrive in time on your job and rely on goods from a shop.

The size of the cars on the other hand might be a bit ridiculous. Not just the landscape is stretched, everything is stretched. The very first thing I noticed in America when leaving the airplane was the toilet. It was made for a Brachiosaurus. Then we rented a car. I was just explaining my colleagues I was looking for a car after many years of being carless. Not too big, not too small. Volkswagen Polo or something. Well, that would look like a joke in America. Every single car in that airport garage was at least twice as big. I can imagine a pick-up car is useful on the countryside, but c’mon. Also the automatically opening/closing doors and Kingkong sized cupholders (not one but two) in the car doors confirmed my prejudice about ordinary “bigger better fatter”. Even though the majority of the population is still sort of religious, Modesty is difficult to find sometimes.

Where we say “enough is enough”, they aren’t ashamed to step further.
Don’t hold on back on comfort.

Speaking of big vehicles, games, and our work. Received a nice email about a game called “Landwirtschaftssimulator” (agricultural-machine-simulator). Seems that a company called “Giants Software” made this game in 2008, and also used some of our Ploeger machines. The German guy who mailed was busy upgrading the 3D models of our machines in Blender. I don’t expect this game to beat GTA V, but it fills me with proud to see your work back on the field, Youtube, or even in games by enthusiasts. Maybe I should stop T22 and start helping them hehe.


Pork-stuffed Fries with crusty lard please
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BUT! We drove quite some days before we had to refill the tank. So for such a beast, it wasn’t that consuming. And as for fat… I may have to watch my mouth. Because from all people I have seen there, I was probably one of the fattest myself. And no, I’m not THAT large either (big boned, you know) so the average person just wasn’t really obese. At least not where I visited.

Yet America is dangerous when it comes to easily gaining those pounds. As you saw, we take the car for pretty much everything. And although these area’s weren’t crowded with homo sapiens, the letter M occurred more than just once. It seems to me, that "having a good time" is really about stuffing yourself here. In (North) Europe, kids gather in narrow streets filled with bars to get themselves drunk (and get annoying). In America kids gather in plaza’s filled with restaurants to stuff themselves (and get fat). Again, this subtle cultural difference probably has to do with factors such as population density, norms, or a 21 age limit for alcohol.

Anyhow, the food wasn’t automatically hamburgers only. Actually, I had tasty & creative meals most of the time. And you can grab an orange with your breakfast, eat a banana at work, have lettuces with diner, or order water instead of Cola. But the problem is the temptation. I had a normal breakfast with juice and cornflakes. And… an extra doughnut or syrup wafer. Just a little one, but still. Lettuces have a fattish dressing, and the extra cheese on an otherwise healthy pasta doesn’t help either. On top, the proportions are fairly big. In Europe you pay a goddamn fortune for 2 thin sauce stripes on an empty plate. In America you get more than you can eat for a fair price. Same with the drinks. They really seem to love Cola. A guy next to me in the airplane ordered a Diet Coke. Sounds ok. But you can skip the word “Diet” if you order another 6 in a row like he did.

All in all, the extra yummy calories are everywhere, and since ordering food or going to a restaurant is so normal here, you can quickly fall in bad habits. You don’t have to, but it requires some discipline. So, it kinda surprised me to see the average person not being chubby in this region.

Bone apetit. Barf.

Land of the Free
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“Fat” isn’t the right word here, but “Big” applies very well when talking about pretty much anything else. Obviously, there is space enough on this continent so why don’t make the roads wider, the parking spaces bigger, the buildings larger, the ceilings higher, and the toilets bulkier? At least it fits with the landscape, which is impressive. Of course I only saw a tiny, rural portion of America. It wasn’t very hilly, but the large cornfields, dusty roads, forest patches and rivers running behind the houses deliver a much more adventurous landscape compared to the boring Dutch one.

Don’t get me wrong, I can really enjoy seeing our cows graze in the green grass on a foggy morning. But it’s all tiny, and very “man-made”. Holland is absolutely flat, and tiled in a systematic way. Every square inch is used for something, and it’s nearly impossible to find a random point where you can’t see another house, road or lantern. We adapted the landscape to our needs. Truly a specialty of the Dutch, and very efficient. But at the same time, not very exciting to explore. Hard to find some wild nature here in the first place. America on the other hand adapted to the nature, and that gives some spectacular sights now and then.

What I liked is the variety of houses in America. Not a single one looked the same. Most made of wood and a bit old fashioned maybe, but I like that. In Holland we have qualitative good stone houses that can survive a storm. But they all look exactly the same, and the tiny fenced gardens aren’t exactly what the Americans would call “freedom”. It’s a bit ironic when we are accusing the Americans for playing Big Brother and spying the world. While we are being watched every single day. Maybe not by shady agencies, but by our very own neighbors, in our silly little gardens. If I give a party or fire an air rifle, the neighbors could complain and call the police. Which is why we have dozens of, sometimes absurd, rules to regulate everything. No campfires, no fireworks, no noise after 22:00, can’t paint your house in any color, can’t just plant a tree in your garden or make a shed that raises above the fence, no this, no that, argh.

And then I hear an American guy in the car talking about he bought gunpowder or likes to shoot with a real gun in his garden. Not a problem, because he can’t even see his neighbor houses. Now who is free really? Of course rules differ in the cities, and every pro has its con. Freedom isn’t for everybody. But I understand more and more why Americans are keen on their privacy, and patriotic about their forefathers who made this all possible in the first place. When talking about the Weapons Act, it’s quite obvious that there is a correlation between the quantity of guns and accidents. Obviously, one shouldn’t have access to a gun when he or she is in an emotional state of mind. But at the same time, it’s a deep rooted American principle to be “Minding my own business.“. He should be able to whatever he Goddamn pleases to do, whether that is owning a gun or making a rocket launcher in the shed.

We European want freedom like anyone else, but at the same time we don’t resist while one after another prohibition gets added to the book. Really, we, and especially Dutch, are tame sissies compared to the American in some of these aspects. Think whatever you want about war, but saying I’m ready to fight and die for my country –believing in its principles- really is something. Sure there is hypocrisy and stupidity about quite a lot of things in America, and their foreign policy hasn’t been honest I think. But we European shouldn’t forget that our wealth and privileges didn’t came from nice talks either. Rakes, fire, wars, exploration, colonies, protecting our believes. Pacifists can be pacifists because blood was shed to make a foundation first. Americans might be a bit too dramatic, we on the other hand might be too naïve.

Working all day and having early sunsets, it was hard to capture a "real American" scene. But basically this shot could have been taken anywhere in Europe just as well... Except in the Netherlands then, where you'll find a house or pig-shed otherwise every square meter.


Average Joe
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Hamburgers, big cars, patriotism, a little bit more comfort requirements than really needed. But more important, how is the average American? Well, on our meeting I met Americans from West, East and mid-north America. Way too little people for making up reliable statistics, but nevertheless. I didn’t recognize any Snooki, George Bush, Hulk Hogan or Honey Boo Boo behavior at all. Which is a good thing. Well, not a surprise really, but they were all just normal guys. No emotional shouting and hugging at work, just capable people devoted to their work. Most are open, and have a good sense of humor. Neither did I found them shallow. The guys who I met before remembered a lot of what I told them in earlier conversations about family, hobbies, et cetera. “How is Tower22 going?” for example. Just a signal that they were actually listening and also the new faces I met were genuinely interested.

The funny part is that these guys were talking about shows like Duck Dynasty or MTV Cribs with the same kind of disbelief / amazement I have. In other words, those TV shows really don’t represent an average American. Although, at least that was what one of the guys told me, it can vary quite when going to the cities. They considered the Las Vegas people for example “crazy”. Course, every country has differences between provinces, rural and urban, or layers of society. And in America those differences might be a bit more extreme. But don’t forget the country is huge as well. I think an East coast American is a lot more similar to a West coast American than a Western Europe Frenchman compared to a Eastern Europe Bulgarian. Cultural differences are a lot bigger in Europe really.


Another detail I noticed was the company hierarchy. In Holland it’s not uncommon to have the CEO eating sandwiches with the warehouse guy. Hence I’m not really high in the company hierarchy (though I’m the only programmer in Holland so I’m in sort of an exceptional situation), but I can walk in the director’s office any time and make a joke. Which is quite different than neighbor countries such as Belgium or Germany, where (as far as I know) the hierarchy is far more strict. I expected the same from our American partners, but it really wasn’t. Big chief shaking hands with the intern boys, remembering my name and have a chat, et cetera. Obviously, I like that. Although I believe in respect for the higher ranks, and discipline is sometimes dangerously low in some (Dutch) companies, people feel more involved and thus more productive when being embraced by the “big guys”.

Quite different from what I can remember from the movies, although one of the guys I talked with again confirmed differences between urban and rural companies. What we see on TV is often based on the cities, a different cup of tea. Anyhow, the point is, I didn’t feel like an Alien or “Englishman in New York” as Sting would say. We could laugh at each other’s jokes, have a nice talk with everyone, and learn from each other.



All in all, America isn’t a bad place to live. And neither is Europe (or at least the places I have been). Probably my body weight would quadruple when living in America, and I sure think they can be hypocrite or over-reactive on certain things. But sometimes I also wonder what the hell I’m doing here in a small boxed in house while I could have some serious “get off my lawn! + shotgun” property in America for the exact same price. Anyway. We shouldn’t complain. Neither should we found our judgment on movies and all of those stupid TV shows. We American and Europe have a lot in common (hell, most Americans came from Europe, didn’t they?). Too bad our leaders and other big shots sometimes almost remove the worldwide-relation-grenade pin when screwing up with needless conflicts, Financial crisis or other dumb policy. But at the bottom line, we can get along I’d say, so let’s keep it that way.