[Warhammer Dark Omen Forum]

Warhammer Dark Omen Forum

well I've tracked down my shader bug - but fixing it is going to be a real challenge.

It's to do with resizing, when I  load the meshes they are around 30-100 times too big for the scale of my game, so I resize them but there is something in the shader code which does not like this process.

I've only written 1 shader myself before and don't consider myself an expert in the hlsl language or it's use!  And unlike other languages which is just a matter of learning a new syntax for existing concepts - hlsl deal with different concepts to conventional programming.  So this is going to be pain.

So I suppose I better crack on with it then.
 

hehe, yeah i'm kinda excited by the prospect of playing it myself.

Currently I am working on the 3d units.  I plan to use sprites for the troops still but feature units like Dragons (yes, there will be Dragons - in a variety of colours) I want to keep in 3D.

Because they are feature units I am applying a shader to them to make them look nice, nothing special just bump and specular maps to bring them up to the spec you see in modern games.  Unfortunately that process isn't going well, I have had this issue before and fixed it - but today its driving me insane, my meshes are invisible! Highlighted only by their shadows!

[attachment=1]

The bump + specular effect should result in a model more like this...

[attachment=2]

Here's the same model in an earlier project without the effect (although really nice lighting)



Although the first Dragon picture above has no mood lighting going on, the way the model reacts to the light is vastly superior, with individual scales being picked out and highlighted.  This is the effect of bump and specular mapping, the picture below looks flat by comparison, especially when the light or the Dragon moves.

Well that was a frustrating glitch, but I think I have a handle on it now.

I've shaved memory from all over the place, one of the key impacts is that I have turned mip mapping off which gives the map a sort of dithered quality, so I might go the whole hog and turn on hardware dithering, or see if I can correct it on powerful computers by use of anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing.

The sprites now are 8 directional rather than 16, which is a perfectly acceptable sacrifice as 16 was smoother than needed.  I have managed to keep 8 frames of animation by doing this, I've also got rid of the idle animation and now just have a single cell for that, and there are less combat animations.

I've also lowered the quality of some of the scenery textures, but actually one could argue they are still too high and I could save some more there.

This should allow me to squeeze in quite a few different troop types, so here's a picture of all the ones I have done so far taken during an animation test.

[attachment=1]

I'm starting to run into issues with memory allocation, in an effort to make this a 32 bit program for maximum compatibility - and also on account of the fact that I have no tools that can handle 64 bit, I've simply run out of memory.  So now I am culling the flowers (a small landscaping detail I hadn't shown you) and reducing terrain detail a little - because I would rather compromise on the landscape than on the unit quantity and variety.

Here's the heavy infantry.

Now I just need to sort out archers, and then figure out what i'm going to do for cavalry.

[attachment=1]

A wizard stands ahead of 250 light troops, and 150 armoured men.

[attachment=1]

Time for one more update before sleep

I sorted out the animations on the sprites, and made a few other changes.  The men needed to be bigger for scale and I decided that required a higher texture resolution.

[attachment=1]

I'm quite surprised and happy at the speed the engine is moving with that many sprites onscreen and pleased that I managed to get shadows casting from a surface with alpha.

Soon I will add a few more unit types and then i'm going to get them moving and fighting.

1000 Men casting shadows, animating, and turning with the camera

[attachment=1]

I think I will knock it down to 16 directional rather than 32 and double the animation frames to 8 per action - because at the moment the directional facing is really smooth but the animation looks a bit shabby.

More importantly, Misfits is on telly in 30 minutes and I have to sort out my satellite receiver, so this is probably the last update today.

Probably.

I've some work to do on the shadows - they're not meant to be cast from sprites but I'm using an old 80's technique, which I think will require me to break the sprite sheet up into individual texture files, but I might do that after loading rather than have 4000 odd images per unit type.

Here is a test with a unit of 1000 men - although there is no game logic.  FPS isn't great but this is after all a laptop running maximum detail settings.  In the final game I think the units will be somewhere around 50-150 or so, and each army will have 5 or so units at the campaign map level - but battles can take place with multiple armies for a theoretically unlimited number of troops in the battle - performance dependent of course.

It would be really cool if my laptop could run 20000-a-side battles with the graphics reduced.  I'd love to see a Dragon reigning fire down on a massed battle like that

[attachment=1]

I've knocked up a sprite sheet generator which renders off 3D models to a sprite sheet.

This may change but currently it's 32 directional, with 8 animations each having 4 cells each.

So here it is, the first sprite sheet.  This one is a light infantry unit, the file is a png so I've linked it to my own server as its quite big

Light Infantry Sprite Sheet

I've nearly finished working on the trees now

[attachment=1]

Of course option 3 for grass would be preferable, which is to come up with some kind of shader.  I am quite new to shaders myself, and I ruled it out for this project as that would be a lot of work for a trivial thing like grass to an RTS.

I wasn't however happy with the above, so I worked some more on it and this is the result.

[attachment=1]

Yeah alpha channels are a bit of a git on modern graphics engines to be frank, but you kinda have to lump it and get on with it.  In the case of the grass i've kept it quite small as the men will be small on the map so actually I havn't had to do anything special - but I suspect the trees will change that.

[attachment=1]

Here's a shot of the undead city with some grass.  I'm not sure I'll keep the grass in the final game - it will at least be optional.

There are two approaches to doing grass in a game, you either have truly dynamic grass and focus it around the camera, or you decorate the map and just leave it there.  The second method is faster in runtime but the first method allows for denser grass in the near view.  Because this is a strategy game I felt the second option was best, it's also quick to implement.

The downside is that it makes generating the game level take longer - although I save the resulting 3D mesh out as an fbx model so that the next time the map is played I can just load the fbx again.  However if details on the map have changed, eg: The buildings have changed, then it would need regenerating so that grass doesnt grow through the buildings because the insides of many of them are visible.

I've finished my work on optimising the scene geometry, I created the map below with quite a high content - probably more than would be on a single map in the final game - and my laptop is running it quite well.

In honesty though, my laptop is higher specced than what I want this game to run on, so I probably wont have this many buildings on a map in the final game as I want to give over more processing to the actual units than to the backdrop.

Now that I've done this optimisation I am going to begin work on flora.  I am adding these last because they need to have an alpha channel.  This is quite complex to get working with the water which also uses alpha and when you have multiple alpha surfaces the 3D engine does not know what order to draw things in, so i'm going to begin work and see if we end up with individual trees and forests we can fight inside of like in Total War, or whether they will be more of a solid mass like Dark Omen forests.  I am hoping for the former.

Anyway, on to the screen shots from today scene.

[attachment=1][attachment=2][attachment=3][attachment=4]

Unfortunately I cannot take much credit for the models, pretty much all you can see in these is the talent of Steve Finney of Arteria3D.  I've got a lifetime subscription to use all of his 3D models which I paid for - so I can use his media in my own releases as long as I credit him.

I've adjusted the ground shader a little to increase the detail as per Ghabry's feedback.  Although it may not look brilliant when at ground level the camera in the final game probably wont go that low and if it does then I will replace the textures that the ground shader uses with something else.  I've been adding new settlement types tonight, a new town type,  an Undead city (which needs more work), and an as yet unallocated city in a Roman style because I had the media...

I've now turned my attention to performance and am rebuilding the scene to lower DIP calls ( basically a DIP call is needed for each 3d surface rendered and has a big impact on performance ).  I am currently getting the code to rebuild the scene geometry and textures of all the static scenery from the result of the fractal render to reduce the number of surfaces and consequently the number of DIP calls.  As a result, I cant show you anything tonight because I have no visible geometry.

Instead, here's a screenshot of the undead city rendered by 3D Studio Max.

[attachment=1]

The city is in a Mayan style which I think works really well for Undead heroes, whilst ruins and dungeons are great for encountering roaming undead, I think the style of the Mayan buildings suites an Empire building megalomaniac Necromancer well and I can imagine him going up those steps to performing summoning rituals to build his armies.  With each temple focusing a different kind of magic for different troop types.