Old discussion and screenshots thread

[Verdite]

I'll be posting Rathmor screenshots here as i go along. Theres a few here to get started on.
Feel free to post your screenshots when you have the game.

Produce! The screenshot isnt 100% clear as its a jpg.


Look around for stems in the ground...



... They may yield mighty treasures!

[dmpdesign]

Thats pretty cool...I really like it.

I wonder, looking at your shots, your lighting seems to come from the bottom and the tops of the objects look shaded, how do you have your lighting directions set and what numbers are you using on your light sources?

[Verdite]

I havent got round to lighting yet, though i have your guidance on the matter in picture form... Still, i toyed around with lighting earlier, and set additional light source 2 as 255red, x 90 y 90, just to test but i didnt notice much difference.

Also, the font display's gone gray for some strange reason!    No good.

What do you think of the grass texture? I feel happy with it.

[Verdite]

Heres another already!

This one looks quite nostalgic. Its from development though.

[Holy_Diver]

The produce look really great. I've personally never liked games with that kind of grass. It looks beaten down / not grass like at all.

I have to caution against using the trees with all those leaves like that. We really need trees that move more in the direction ML was working on.

I hope you "re-skin" the boy so he matches his vegetables texture wise. Please consider customizing the menus too. That sword icon I don't recommend using if only for all the compression artifacts in it.

I've been thinking a bit about the skyline lately. It's a real problem I think the way it's visible even indoors / slices thru the landscape. I recommend making sure your draw distance is always at least as far as the furthest horizon on the map if you're using a sky. Afaik this is a requirement for all games with a skybox type setup.

I've added an option to Ex that decouples the fog from the draw distance, so you can pull the fog closer while keeping a further draw distance. I'm also going to setup a test to see if something is completely in fog so it can be drawn with a very basic shader that just sets the colour to the maximum fog colour. That way you can cap off the sky. And I will add another option to skip drawing non map piece objects altogether when in fog... but if you enable that for your game you want to make sure the skyline is defined by map pieces and not objects/monsters etc. Also consider, if you want a horde-like enemy type. Try to avoid using a soft animation monster, because I reckon Som recomputes the entire mesh of the soft animated models every frame, which can be cpu intensive... especially if their are a ton way off in the distance. Also I suggest keeping soft animated stuff pretty simple / only use complex soft models in boss setups.

In the future I think there will be an option to use very crude models and have Ex replace them with very detailed stuff before they get to the display adapter. Including replacing hard animation monsters with more modern vertex weighted models. Of course your game would not use the crude models by default. Ex would trick it into looking into an alternate directory for the models. And that way Som will never end up being a CPU bottleneck.

[dmpdesign]

I personally think the texture looks cool for the grass....it makes it look like a foggy cold morning where grass has a little bit of dew/frost on it still. 

The only recommendation I might have is adding a bit of darkness to certain sides of your models.  I was not great at doing this, but if youre using something like metasequoia, what i would do is copy the texture and add some darkness to the UV itself.

For example the boxes that hold your veggies, they look good and im sure its one single texture wrapped around the box.  You could duplicate the texture, darken it by making it more black or whatever in the UV itself and reapply it to one side of the box to give the effect of baked in lighting a bit more.

[Holy_Diver]

I'd be careful about "baking" in light. I'm not sure if by "UV itself" Todd means editing the texture, or "vertex painting" ... I thought BTW before that Som used per vertex colours to do transparency and shading in the objects, which would've been interesting. But it seems that material properties are used instead, which are pretty much uniform across a mesh / submesh.

When adding shadows directly to a texture in general you only want to do it (if at all) inside crevices / places which receive less light from all directions. If you shadow one side of the object that makes it useless in any kind of lighting scenario. Som's assets all follow "dirt mapping" rules, ie. the places which would tend to gather dirt (are less accessible) are shaded darker. Edited: I actually don't know if it's called dirt because it's the regions where it's harder to get dirt out, or the regions where dust would more likely collect. I feel stupid saying it anyway. And another thing to consider is textures are not always applied to the same area of a mesh, so baking in light can limit the applicability of a texture as well.

In a nice lighting setup you'd have an extra texture that would have info like specular / albedo / "dirt" I think. Specular says what part of the textures are "metalic", eg. produce a specular reflection. Albedo says what is the diffuse reflectivity of the texel. And dirt is basically how many photons are likely to gather in this area. So like on a suit of armor the metal areas would be more specular. The leather area's would have less albedo. And the arm pits say would have more (or less??) "dirt". So then even with vertex lighting you'd see per pixel lighting qualities without paying for per pixel lighting (I will definitely be working on some tech that will make this possible over the next few months, though it's not why I'm actually doing that work)

PS: The reason that kind of grass looks so bad is it's just trampled down flat. It always looks really bad in a game. I think most games are just content to make the ground vaguely green. Even the best games I can think of. I may actually do a review of some games / see how they do grass. Unfortunately grass is not something easy to do. Without any kind of LOD framework it's best just to go green I think, which the occasional tufts here/there.

[Holy_Diver]

I looked at KF4 and SOTC and they both used vaguely green/brown blotchy textures for grass areas... I really think that's the way to go.

I uh, btw, got to try out some Sony component cables I'd purchased for the PS3 (but could not use because they looked like garbage compared to the HDMI output) with the PS2 and was kind of surprised. Somehow it's nearly in widescreen for KFIV and SOTC and doesn't look stretched out. I'm guessing some kind of PAL mode is being used, because I'd be shocked to know that the PS2 was originally designed with 13:9 in mind, though later models may've been. The KFIV lettering/menus had a lot of artifacts suggesting From' had not expected it to be played that way. SOTC looked better. It was definitely clear that the blur effect experienced while turning in KFIV was indeed an effect and not just an optical illusion. In fact with component cables it was so exaggerated it is basically unplayable. I wonder if it some how masked the frame rate dropping or interlacing artifacts. Either way, should probably have never been used without analog controls.

[Verdite]

It does look trampled... Its for a farm so i kinda needed that.

I'm really pleased with the wood texture.. Looks faded and used, though you are right about shading and its crap without shadows, which essentially give greater perspective to objects...

The boy behind the produce :) is just temp. I dont know if ill reskin npcs for the demo... It'l take a while. I may just reskin the clothing, i dont fancy messing with the faces.

Well, i think you are right about the aspect ratio, i play ps2 games on my ps3 and theres an option for the original / full screen... The original looks definately 13:9 or thereabouts.

One more thing about the grass... I stuck on tes oblivion and checked out the grass texture on that... It looks terrible, theres huge central non-merging blobs on each duplicate grass piece... Anyone making a map set (and cant be bothered sharing it) try to make sure the texture lines up next to a duplicate and merges nicely with it.

[Holy_Diver]

I haven't really noticed what the aspect is for PS2 games on the PS3. For PSOne games there is just original or whatever, or fullscreen (stretches to your tv whatever it is)

I always play PS2 games on my PS2 with a harddrive. Doesn't complain about regions/rips, loading is much faster, and requires no fussing with discs

I've never seen grass that lies flat like that. And I'm guessing it would soon die if it was so trampled. People generally use that kind of texture to try to trick the eye into thinking it's more detailed, but in the end it just looks horribly not grass like. I live on a farm/ranch... I'm guessing a city park gets more foot traffic. Grass is something that is just hard to do graphically. It's like hair, only it's everywhere. I want to review MGS4's grass later (I think I meant to do that before... though too bad I deleted it off my harddrive the other day... might try Snake Eater first)

Fortunately because our games are likely to be very simple visuals wise. Doing stuff like realistic grass is actually more within our budget than it would be for games with different priorities. I think ML was going the right route by baking individual blades into the map tiles. But to have really large fields of it, you'd want to combine that with a LOD framework (which may be possible at some point)

As long as you don't mind that the grass would not interact with the monster or whatever walking on it, that would probably be pretty good. Some wind blowing the grass would also be a pretty simple effect to achieve.