Hobby game development

[[p.e.g]]

One of my hobbies is making trance, love doing it and will continue on for a long time to come. My other major hobby is writing a 3D space combat/trading/exploration game on PC. I've finally started up a blog describing the devlopment of my game, you can read about it here http://pegwars.blogspot.com/ if you want! It contains heaps of screenshots, and in-depth details of my 3D engine and the many, many steps along the way to making a full 3D game.

What hobbies do you have? What do you do when you're not working, or listening to or making music?

[Fledz]

That sounds really cool Phil!
I experimented with a bit of game design when I was younger but never really gave it enough time. If you need any help and/or feedback with ideas for the game, just let me know. Would be happy to help, especially since the type of game you're making sounds like it's right up my alley.

[tingles]

Hey mate!
Awesome, someone else ( aside from Scottie ) who does some 3D
Can your engine support normal maps ? I would recommend building the hi res, then re projecting int onto the lower geo, get some great looking normal maps, then go to town on the texturing after spitting out an AO map.
Your Occlusion is a bit noisy, can you tighten your settings up ? What software are you using ?
The texture maps on the first screenshot of the cockpit look nice man, hand painted i assume ?
You look like you know what your doing with the coding side of things ... i don't have the correct brain in order to comprehend code :p
Got any other 3Ds to show ?

[Pendulum]

Nice one Phill!

This sounds/looks awesome!

What are the capabilities of your rendering engine? Is it DX11? What sort of shader effects and rendering effects can you use?

[[p.e.g]]

That sounds really cool Phil!
I experimented with a bit of game design when I was younger but never really gave it enough time. If you need any help and/or feedback with ideas for the game, just let me know. Would be happy to help, especially since the type of game you're making sounds like it's right up my alley.

Cheers mate! I'd love some input on ideas, it's really a vacuous concept as its basically as ambitious as can possibly be. The concept goes like this :

You start with a spaceship and an amount of credits. You can travel to anywhere in the universe and visit any space port or planet and buy/sell goods to make some profit. Your ship(s) are completely modular and as you build up your assets you can outfit your ship with better cargo holds, guns, shields, whatever. Better and bigger ships are available for upgrade, which have more slots to hold cargo, armament etc.

When your ship is more capable you can start exploring more dangerous, anarchic systems that provide better return on goods but also hold the prospect of lawless pirates out there to destroy you and steal whatever cargo you hold.

Destroying other ships gets you not only a bounty paid for by the galactic police but also whatever goods they were carrying in their cargo holds at the time.

Illegal goods, such as narcotics, earn a premium price, but also earn the wrath of the police and lawmakers at the more civilised planets. If you get a bounty on your head then watch out!

After a period of earning your first millions and upgrading to kick-ass ships and trading capabilities, you can start building and buying factories, mines and even take over entire planets to run and tax to your hearts content.

The game design currently sits prettly squarely on Elite's shoulders, such was the profound greatness of that 20 year old game.

Pegwars v5. got pretty close to fulfilling this concept but fell by the wayside by a couple of years and I'm determined to get the next one finished

[[p.e.g]]

Hey mate!
Awesome, someone else ( aside from Scottie ) who does some 3D
Can your engine support normal maps ? I would recommend building the hi res, then re projecting int onto the lower geo, get some great looking normal maps, then go to town on the texturing after spitting out an AO map.
Your Occlusion is a bit noisy, can you tighten your settings up ? What software are you using ?
The texture maps on the first screenshot of the cockpit look nice man, hand painted i assume ?
You look like you know what your doing with the coding side of things ... i don't have the correct brain in order to comprehend code :p
Got any other 3Ds to show ?

My engine can support normal maps although I haven't got around to implementing binormal/tangent exporting from 3dsMAX yet. It's such a powerful thing and it is something I will need to do.

I think most people in the industry do build high-res geometry and create normal maps for lower res geometry from that, because A it's doable and B it provides assets for high-quality cutscenes etc. It's easier to build high-res assets and downscale them than to build lo-res ones and somehow eek out something better looking. Have you ever seen ZBrush? It's an amazing 3D sculpting tool that the artists at my company love using to carve out really high-detail geometry and bake it into varying levels of detail.

My AO is definitely just at the experimental stage, have to work on it more. I've been having a few issues with reverse-projection of pixels to world coordinates, I think it's due to the non-linearity of the z-buffer but in the end it should just take a bit of work to get looking nice.

The artwork for the cockpit was created a few years back by our lead artist at BigWorld, he's an amazingly talented artist and yeah I'm pretty sure all the texture work was hand-made. The rest of the graphics are terribly poor programmer-art on my behalf Except for the f-22 looking spaceship, that's in progress by the current tech artist at work I'll be trying to get him to do as much as possible to replace my crappy prog-art.

I've got heaps more 3D to show but they'll have to wait as I move forward with the engine. Will take a while but there's heaps more progress to come..

[[p.e.g]]

Nice one Phill!

This sounds/looks awesome!

What are the capabilities of your rendering engine? Is it DX11? What sort of shader effects and rendering effects can you use?

The rendering engine is pretty flexible at the moment, I'm going for a pretty high-level architecture and not worrying too much about the details right now (like normal map support, or which API it uses). The engine supports any HLSL shaders but right now it's in a DirectX9 shell, which I will have to upgrade at some point but that's just the details. When I lock down what I'm really going to go for, hopefully the architecture will support it...

In terms of rendering, I'm definitely going to configure it to use a deferred shading pipeline, I think that will provide the best compromise for lighting, materials and scalability. There's so much you can do these days with GPUs it's just mindboggling...

One of the cool things I have right now is the scene is split into 3 pieces - the far scene, immediate area, and the cockpit. The far scene is rendered to a cube map; this cube map is then used to shine onto all models in the immediate area. This place all 3D models into the environment in a realistic way, it sits them in their environment. It's really obvious to the human eye when the subtleties of lighting don't quite add up; the ambient term can really make a big difference here.

[marcusus]

MMO or standalone? Or is that perhaps a little too far afield of the current state of it?

[[p.e.g]]

standalone! although this kind of game really suits MMO, I'm not crazy enough to attempt it. Although my company BigWorld has now got Indie licenses of its MMO tech, could get some kick-ass servers pretty cheap..

[marcusus]

So potentially stand alone with patches for new missions etc?

[tingles]

Great stuff dude!
Yeah the normal map projection technique is the easiest way to get the best results i would say. 3D Studio MAX's 'Render To Texture' function makes it really easy to get a great looking projection onto a low res piece of geo.
So what is your process for AO ? I assume your baking out an AO map for each object and overlaying it over the color map?
Of course i use Zbrush man, almost everyday at work:)! Great program!

[[p.e.g]]

So what is your process for AO ? I assume your baking out an AO map for each object and overlaying it over the color map?

Hey cheers! You do 3D art, who do you work for??

The AO is a dynamic : instead of using baked-in-maps, i use post-process effect, people call it SSAO or screen-space ambient occlusion. What I'm actually doing is an extension to SSAO called screen-space directional occlusion.

With SSAO you render the scene's depth+normals to a texture. Then for every pixel, a shader calculates how many points around that pixel are visible - just checking really if the pixel on the surface is in a concave area or not, ie. a valley not a hill. If it's in a concave area, then you get less ambient lighting - thus the AO term. This doesn't look as good as baked-in maps because obviously you can't use as high quality algorithms in real-time. The benefit though is it's all dynamic, so works on animating objects, objects moving past one another, and objects sitting on other surfaces.

The SSDO extension, goes along the same lines, but since you're already testing all these points around each pixel to see if the pixel can 'see the environment', it then uses the direction between the surface, the tested visible point and the environment, and accumulates colour from that direction in the environment. Basically you get a better looking ambient term, it will have coloured shadows for example, instead of being just a greyscale AO term used to modulate the ambient lighting. Can't really see it my screenshots coz i haven't done the work to polish it up yet.

Reason it's so cool using dynamic techniques is in my game you'll be flying from space, through planetary atmospheres at all times-of-day etc. So the background environment will constantly be changing colour and it's really nice to be able to shine these changing backgrounds properly onto the models.

It really is crazy what you can do in realtime these days, this is just the tip of the iceberg... The next step in the algorithm is then doing a single bounce of the ambient light to get coloured interreflections between surfaces. You can see this is beginning to approach full global illumination in realtime.. You then use this kind of technique in your lighting / shadow maps too, and thus you have real time GI for both ambient and diffuse lighting... all fully dynamic, realtime running in a game. Nuts!