I think you will like today's video, direct from the art hub we call Mark, and a massive reveal about just how capable the Reloaded enemy characters are going to be compared to the classic character. Rather than twitter on, the video does a great job of giving you a thorough overview:
As you can see, amazing animation and when coupled with some really intense AI control you will be hard pressed to even find these guys let alone shoot one. As I say, can't wait to get started but priorities place my firmly in level engine land.
Level Engine Land
I am hotting up to the idea of deferred rendering (and cascade shadows for the outside) which of course leaves the issue of shadows on the inside. One of the links provided to me from the comments section called DeepDeferred made use of what I suspect was geometry shader based shadow volumes to cast shadows based on a single point light in the scene. It was quite dramatic and reminded me of the updated Doom 3 when it first came out.
The advantage of baked lights is that you can have fifty shadows cast and crossing all over the place to create a really rich detailed scene. As much as lights contribute to a scene, it's really the shadows that make everything pop, and as some users quite rightly pointed out, deferred rendering does not mean shader rendering, just surface lighting. Shadows is a whole new thought process, so we will leave that particular item alone for a while and let it brew!
Signing Off
I am now at the stage of adding my first deferred rendering attempt to the instance stamp engine prototype, and although I have a grasp of the theory it's not until you code and run do you get a sense for what it is. I will warn the world in advance that the assets used will be legacy artwork, and not the final Reloaded segment and entity art. It sounds like the majority of you want to see deferred rendering go in, and who am I to fly in the face of what the customer wants, so deferred it is. Now you can argue among yourself exactly how we handle those fifty real-time shadows ;)
Animations look great, well done to Mark.
ReplyDeleteI had a good look through all 12 pages of those Humus links and even though some of them are 10 years old they still look good.
http://www.humus.name/index.php?page=3D&ID=76
http://www.humus.name/index.php?page=3D&ID=62
http://www.humus.name/index.php?page=3D&ID=51
http://www.humus.name/index.php?page=3D&ID=42
http://www.humus.name/index.php?page=3D&ID=38
I don't know how far into them you looked, but some of those effects would go down a storm if they were implemented into FPSCR.
One other thing I'd like to see out of the lighting system is some way to get all shadows cast onto the player and other dynamic objects (particularly NPCs). I think one of the things that adds the most atmosphere to a game is sneaking out of the shadows and watching your weapon and hands have shadows cast on them.
Animations look great in that video. I am concerned a bit about how the AI will play out. But only time will tell.
ReplyDeleteI am absolutely struggling to get my models to run on decent AI with the current FPSC. Kinda sucks because i LOVE scripting but i feel in some way limited. Hopefully we'll have some cool new AI commands :D
We could use some input from Dark Goblin on the real time shadows in FPSC. He created LRMod which has dynamic shadows but it could not be extended into a general purpose mod for creating games due to performance issues I think.
ReplyDeleteNow Lee has done so much optimisation in the engine perhaps this will be a valid direction especially with Evolved's latest advanced lighting which is more optimised.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtk5JB5rkOM
We really need to start planning for this now otherwise it may be a problem to add later on after the deferred rendering system is implemented.