[Warhammer Dark Omen Forum]

Warhammer Dark Omen Forum

The last week has been spent mostly playing Assassins Creed III on the new PC and then a bought of quite demoralising illness brought on by the depths of winter, so no progress was made on my part.  The artist has been busy making a sci-fi character for some other project so he hasn't got back to me about the animations either, so all in all a week of no progress.

However I did just try the game out with 3DTV Play, the nVidia solution for making any game into 3D.

Now I don't know if this is just my setup, or if it is a problem with 3DTV Play in general, but I had the same issue in Assassins Creed where the 3DTV Play cannot handle shadows.  It struggles when two shadows overlap, and it gets the intensity of shadows completely wrong, and it utterly breaks the scene.

Aside from that true 3D doesn't add very much to this project, unless you get right down to unit level.  Watching over the heads of my soldiers as a unit of skeleton infantry charged them in true 3D was actually quite breathtaking!

None-the-less, it's not a game mode I am going to focus on in this project, i'll be using it in my next one for sure - infact designing that game for 3D from day 1, but for now I am going to ignore it as it really doesn't do much for the gameplay of this game.

One of the disappointing things I have found is that performance on the new PC hasn't risen very much which suggests I have a thread locking issue, I suspect I am locking something on the main thread which is pausing all the supposedly concurrent code, I shouldn't have - the only time I lock anything is when a mouse button is held down - but the behaviour suggests I've cocked up.

So performance, and archery logic, are things I can be getting on with for now.  At the moment though I have to focus on getting myself better, so progress isn't about to pick back up just yet.

I just wanted to post an update because I've been quiet for a few days, and that's so not like me!

I did do a bit of tinkering on the archery logic but it's not quite right yet, there's a few glitches in the logic that still need to be resolved.

The distraction has actually been because I have received a lot of art assets.  About 20 or so characters, each built up by components so I can swap their clothing out and mix and match.  I've now completed an importer to assemble them but I am still waiting on some animation data.

Whilst they aren't specifically intended for this project, I will be able to use them to render off a few more sprites.  Specifically some archers and the much awaited cavalry , plus a few more mages and the like and possibly even a peasant unit.

I need to get them some weapons as I've not got much in my media library that's suitable, but we're very close to getting a complete set of units for the game.

The models are actually intended for a future project which I will start once I have all of the required media (still lots more to go).

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aye I'm quite excited.

I dont much fancy the work of building it but doing so does save a few hundred quid - and yes, for that kind of money I do get out of bed

What this means is after some build and tinker time and maybe a 3D game of some kind to test it out, I can begin work on the multiplayer! YAY.

I'm taking the night off tonight, I'm coded out, so it's going to be a quiet week - but I should be getting the new art assets tomorrow (it wouldnt be the first missed promise).  I'm really looking forward nervously to seeing the cavalry in the game because I am not sure if they are too big to work as sprites or not.  I'm a bit worried about that, because a large unit of 3D cavalry just isnt going to be possible technically, I would have to commission some low poly versions and that's expensive.

Aside from the yet to arrive art assets, the siege engines (which I must come up with a plan for media-wise) and the hydra, pretty much all of the core work is done although I know i'll be doing a few AI tweaks when I work on the gameplay - which I'll be doing soon.  The hydra also, will be a fair few days work.

Well... are you looking for a desktop or a laptop ? How will you use it ? Games, Video encoding... ?
How much money would you put in this computer ?

All those things are variable, depending upon my mood - but what I have done is put together a self build which comes in at £454 including OS and delivery and is pretty kick ass for the cost.  I have a few SATA hard drives to extend the storage so that wasn't an issue.  I dont care that they aren't SATA III because the OS and browsers etc will be on an SSD.

It's capable of true 3D and meets my requirements of 2gb graphics ram, 8gb ram, and quad core - actually a stunning 4.2ghz per core which I was quite surprised about, but given it's AMD I would not be surprised if it's actually nearer 2.8 .  But the benchmark tests compared it reasonably well to a good i7, and way better on bang per buck.

Kitlist:
AMD Bulldozer FX-4170 4.2GHz Quad Core Processor
2xTranscend Jet Ram 4GB Memory Module PC3-10600 1333MHz DDR3 SDRAM
Gigabyte GA-78LMT-USB3 Motherboard Phenom II AMD Athlon II Socket AM3 AMD 760G Micro ATX RAID Gigabit Ethernet (rev. 4.1)
64GB Crucial v4 2.5" Solid State Drive
ZOTAC GeForce GTX 650 (2GB) Graphics Card
Ace 650W BR Black PSU
Microsoft Windows 8 (64-bit) English International (DVD) OEM
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro Quiet (Rev 2)
Samsung 24x Internal DVD Writer
CiT Saturn Midi Tower Case

Now I just need some pliers or a hexdrive for the motherboard mounts... And I think i'll pickup a wireless keyboard and mouse (I hate them, but where its going it'll be more useful with wireless) if I've still got money at the end of the month.

I could have gotten away with an old case, but for £20 the new one looks a lot nicer and as it's going to sit next to my TV in the lounge so I'd rather spend the £20.  Unfortunately my old DVD drive as IDE which is just too old hat now.  With these specs it will probably take over as my main development machine and relegate my laptop to the role it should be in - that of a laptop!

Well I almost found one, reasonable in all regards except cores - but when you put in an i5 for the quad-coriness suddenly you see where the savings are made
http://www.saveonlaptops.co.uk/Packard_Bell_iMedia_S_1216201.html

I've been looking at system builds to get another PC so I can code the multiplayer easier, and it seems to me that I can get a laptop of comparable spec to what I have (marginally slightly better owing to the passage of time) for about £450, so I figured surely I could get a desktop for much less.  Especially as for my next project I want to use my 3D telly so I don't need a monitor.

Yet for some reason by the time I put 2gb graphics RAM and four cores of CPU into it then the cost goes up to about £600 or so.  I can't fathom it out, are laptops really cheaper nowadays?

I really must sort out a proper video codec, but in the meantime, here's some action

Archers versus Undead + Dragon	powered by Aeva

I got the archery AI in today, I still need a few more archer sprites and cavalry but the only thing outstanding on the battle engine after that is the Hydra, siege engines (which I dont have models for atm), user interface, loading optimisations and figuring out some way of getting the units to walk around buildings.

EDIT: Oh yeah, and multi-player (which is what is most likely to break the epic scale of the battles atm!)

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There are 4 types of guivre, they're all the same size and have the same stats but are unique by their attack type: Poison; Fire; Electricity; and Acid.  Each guivre is immune to its own attack type too, making them immune to some spell effects.

Feeding time at the zoo!

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Several varieties of bat and raptor now exist.  There isn't much difference between them except that different colours are larger with better stats.  The raptors cast an imposing presence on the battlefield, and a unit of 10 can easily take out 200 skeletons, but is likely to fall quickly when overwhelmed by multiple units.  Bats are fast and can occupy a Dragon for long periods whilst you take the Dragon down with archers, but otherwise are much weaker than raptors as units go.

Raptors are essentially the equivalent of heavy infantry, but bats being flying units would be weaker against archers once I code that in because against arrows they would not get their altitude bonus.

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Such an electric shot!

Green Dragon is done, it fires balls of acid that bounce and break up into smaller balls.  No screenshot though because it is the most minimal of the breath weapons visually, and you have to see it moving to understand the effect.

I'm just working on an ultra-rare secret Dragon that you'll have to discover in game - and then it's time for the Gold Dragon whome i'm going to give the lightning zap to, I'm not going to do a white dragon so blue is staying as cold.

What is currently a blue dragon, but will probably be the breath weapon of a white dragon once I've created a texture for it, breathes a cold blast down on a unit of Amazonian warrior women, freezing them on the spot.

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Yeah that's pretty cool, although the effect isnt as obvious as it was in Dark Omen because of the scale - but it's cool anyway.  I was worried that neither the AI or the particle emiter system would cope, but with some small tweaks to the emiters it just worked so I was very happy with that.  It's nice when something works and doesn't cause mutex related crashes!

The only downside is that the effect creates quite a lot of particles onscreen and these render quite slow, so the frame rate can drop for a couple of seconds when the fire breath impacts on a large unit.

Some more red dragon shots

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