Kaftan's development thread of doom

[Kaftan Barlast]

We actually have completely random art directionsince none of us is good enough to make anything like a real concept artist would, so we use kind of say " ok, its going to be like 16th century spain" and we try to get it right. Alot of times we have to change stuff because it looks wrong. The only guy we know who can make concepts we need, like this:

 

 

charges like a million trillion euros an hour. I can only draw weird people, and Ive did that.

[mkreku]

Holy crap, I looked at the picture first and thought "WTF KAFTAN HAS TALENT! THAT'S AWESOME!!". Then I read the text and all the flying pigs fell down to earth again.

[Noceur]

I like the use of non-straight lines, dude! :D

 

In reply to previous post: Lightwave has its issues, although I certainly wouldn't say that the modeller is the weak spot... it's more the Layout part (i.e animation, especially the graph editor).

It's rather cheap though at 650 EUR (which is one of the reasons we use it here at the office, aside from FPrime, the ease of use of the modeller etc.)

I've tried to use it for simple modding and the plug-in support for games is pretty useless (at least "back then", haven't checked with LW9+).

 

The price tag definately matters for a small studio, and since we're not making games the quality of the product vs price is well worth it for us. The price tag on XSi, for example, is just a tad too high for us.

The boss-man is talking about going over to Modo if the animation-part comes out good. Massive used it for modelling in World In Conflict. Personally, the paint and sculpt features combined with the UV tools is what makes my hands itch for it. Painting bump maps and stuff on the model (with OpenGL feedback) is a real time-boost.

 

Anyway, I just wanted to give you a heads up about a versitile 3D software.

You should download the demo and give it a try... it's supposed to integrate well with other software, like 3DS max (read "supposed to"... I'd really like to hear how well it fits into a pipeline in reality).

[Kaftan Barlast]

Sorry I havent kept this up to date the last weeks, Ive been busy doing mostly nothing. The game is comming along nicely although we have set our priorities wrong, one guy has almost completed the GUI but no one has even touched actually shooting stuff yet and so on.

 

 

We have tried Modo actually, one of the lads have been using it on and off for a year now. I havent had much time to try it out, but I have done some texturing work(it works alot like Maxon Bodypaint except a bit more complex). It seems like a very intuitive and user-friendly program with alot of cool features.

 

We're starting to get sick of our software setup. Max is a very old piece of software with alot of annyoing quirks and lacks alot of convenient functions newer software like XSI or Modo has. Im also going to kick out Zbrush3 in favor of Mudbox, because its just so much easier to work and live with. Zbrush is like a crapload of features thrown in a big random unstable pile, completely devoid of logic. I exaggerate, but alot of time it like trying to fit a square peg into an oval hole.

[Kaftan Barlast]

Sunday April 27th

 

 

Today I had to make an emergency hangover trip to the office because a programmer desperately needed a collision mesh to a character, only, it turns out we already had one and there is no need whatsoever for me to be here. Yay!

[theslug]

Sorry Kaftan. :'(

 

At least this thread doesn't fail from inactivity anymore.

[theslug]

Sorry Kaftan. :'(

 

At least this thread doesn't fail from inactivity anymore.

I retract this statement.

[@\NightandtheShape/@]

*pokes thread* HELLO YOU DEAD!

[Kaftan Barlast]

Im terribly sorry, Ive just become a bit too lazy the last few weeks. We're now about two weeks away from the pre-alpha we're going to be presenting at the convention, and its not going entirely as we had imagined it. Design-wise, we did the bad sort of compromising that means no one is really happy about anything. I cant say for sure why, but I think it has something to do with the team comming from different "schools" of gaming. When you take a PC fellow like me, and put him in the same room as a nintendo-gamer and tell them to agree on a game design plan, then you will have problems.

 

 

But on the fun side, its beginning to look really good. Our programmers managed, to us artist-types great delight, to write a real HDR-lighting system so now we can have all kinds of cool lighting stuff. We also have some fun and cool bugs:

 

1) "ooh, look at that weird mirror!" - through some magic miscoding, we have really cool water with reflections and so on, but the game world ended up on the wrong side of it, so what you see in the reflections is what the world is supposed to look like.. and whats above the surface is what should be in the water. heh.

 

2) "I left my eyes over there" - you can switch view from 3rd person to 1st to improve aiming, but since that view is linked to the gun, switching over to that view when your not holding the gun results in you seeing whatever the gun is pointed at when its lying on the ground or in a box or whatever. If you run in 1st person view, and suddenly drop the gun, you will see yourself running past. its awesome.

[samm]

2) "I left my eyes over there" - you can switch view from 3rd person to 1st to improve aiming, but since that view is linked to the gun, switching over to that view when your not holding the gun results in you seeing whatever the gun is pointed at when its lying on the ground or in a box or whatever. If you run in 1st person view, and suddenly drop the gun, you will see yourself running past. its awesome.

Does that mean you're still rendering the character when in 1st person? Isn't that a bit wasteful?

[Kaftan Barlast]

I dont know if we would actually save any performance by hiding the player char when you switch cameras, but its definently something that will be looked into later. Right now we have so much stuff to fix that we dont have time to optimize, we use the old trick of having a behemoth of a demo computer instead

 

 

But the game is definently no resource hog, even with late night "accidents" like putting a water shader in the mainloop, or loading 500mb of random junkfiles into the RAM, the debug build still does around 75fps on a lowly ATi x800 card. We fixed those problems obviously, so its faster now. And thats with polycounts of about 10,000 for every character and large 2048x2048 textures (we have relatively efficient culling)

Edited May 24, 2008 by Kaftan Barlast

[WILL THE ALMIGHTY]

Bugs can be seriously awesome..

 

Just a quick question: what the heck is the game about anyway? Do you have a story set up?

Edited May 24, 2008 by WILL THE ALMIGHTY

[samm]

I dont know if we would actually save any performance by hiding the player char when you switch cameras, but its definently something that will be looked into later. Right now we have so much stuff to fix that we dont have time to optimize, we use the old trick of having a behemoth of a demo computer instead

 

 

But the game is definently no resource hog, even with late night "accidents" like putting a water shader in the mainloop, or loading 500mb of random junkfiles into the RAM, the debug build still does around 75fps on a lowly ATi x800 card. We fixed those problems obviously, so its faster now. And thats with polycounts of about 10,000 for every character and large 2048x2048 textures (we have relatively efficient culling)

Ah, I see. Sounds like a pretty fast engine to me, making the monstrous demo computer producing 1000fps or something

Btw, using an x800 means that S.M. 2.0 cards are within range still? Nice! And: good to hear something again

[Xard]

Bugs can be seriously awesome..

 

Just a quick question: what the heck is the game about anyway? Do you have a story set up?

 

Considering it is swedish and Kaftan's working on it game will propably be something like

as he absolutely loves stuff like that Edited May 24, 2008 by Xard

[Xard]

Might as well post "serious" answer

 

Are you able to disclose what sort of game this is going to be? Story and genre wise?

 

It's a quirky third-person action/adventure game for PC and perhaps Xbox 360. It has the PC leaping between different classic litterary works that have been corrupted by a very naughty person, thwarting enemies and solving neat physics-based puzzles on the way

 

[Kaftan Barlast]

For the pre-alpha/vertical slice/demo build there are no story elements. But the game is a comedy about a young librarian, who becomes invovled with an mysterious old order working within the library. In a metaphysical accident, the fabric of reality breaks and the collective imagination of mankind opens into the real world, allowing characters and creatures from the books in the library to travel freely from one "bookworld" into another using our world as a bridge.

Now, the problem is that certain enterprising and rather naughty characters from famous litterature begin to travel from book to book, causing all sorts of mayhem in their wake. So, our hero is equipped with various esoteric gadgets and sent across the border to unreality to sort things out.

 

 

Considering it is swedish and Kaftan's working on it game will propably be something like

as he absolutely loves stuff like that

 

 

Hee hee! A friend of mine actually did this version here http://share.ulfben.com/apkaramell.swf just to mock me. Im the guy in black and the other one is one of the programmers.

[Xard]

For the pre-alpha/vertical slice/demo build there are no story elements. But the game is a comedy about a young librarian, who becomes invovled with an mysterious old order working within the library. In a metaphysical accident, the fabric of reality breaks and the collective imagination of mankind opens into the real world, allowing characters and creatures from the books in the library to travel freely from one "bookworld" into another using our world as a bridge.

Now, the problem is that certain enterprising and rather naughty characters from famous litterature begin to travel from book to book, causing all sorts of mayhem in their wake. So, our hero is equipped with various esoteric gadgets and sent across the border to unreality to sort things out.

 

 

Considering it is swedish and Kaftan's working on it game will propably be something like

as he absolutely loves stuff like that

 

 

Hee hee! A friend of mine actually did this version here http://share.ulfben.com/apkaramell.swf just to mock me. Im the guy in black and the other one is one of the programmers.

 

Premise for your game sounds awesome. Hope it has same madness in it as original Ape Espace (for psone) had (dunno if you've played it )

 

Ahahahaha, that's awesome

[Kaftan Barlast]

Now we've done it again. We are a little more than a week from the convention and the graphics are f*cked up. The programmers tried to make it seem less of a crisis than it is, but we lost all specular(what normal people would call shininess or glossiness) in the game and noone knows why. It doesnt work if we use old code or new one, its dead. So everything in the game that dosnt run on a special dedicated shader like the water, is now matte and dull and very ugly and our flashy HDR lighting doesnt work properly if it doesnt have any specular highlights to work with.

 

The clues we have to go on thus far is that any attempts to use DDS textures result in 0% specular, while TGA textures results in ~100% specular. Our specular data is stored in the alpha channel of said maps. That could indicate that the engine somehow fails to read the alpha channel correctly, OR that the specular code in the renderer is broken somehow. Unfortunatly, the latter seems more likely at the moment.

[@\NightandtheShape/@]

Heh.... Yep sounds like someone broke the renderer. The answer is fairly simple, nobody sleeps till its fixed, pizza and red bull for all!

[Gorth]

Heh.... Yep sounds like someone broke the renderer. The answer is fairly simple, nobody sleeps till its fixed, pizza and red bull for all!

No project room should be without a coffee machine and a microwave

[Kaftan Barlast]

Well, despite the presence of both, it looks like there will be no specular for the convention build, which has to be finished by tomorrow. The programmers are still working (its 00:30 here) but us graphics lads went home, my computer is being used to render ambient occlusion maps on right now.

 

 

But despite less-than-ideal visuals, the game does work and is very stable on our test machines. It does sting a bit though, as an artist, not to be able to show off your game in its full glory.

[@\NightandtheShape/@]

Well, despite the presence of both, it looks like there will be no specular for the convention build, which has to be finished by tomorrow. The programmers are still working (its 00:30 here) but us graphics lads went home, my computer is being used to render ambient occlusion maps on right now.

 

 

But despite less-than-ideal visuals, the game does work and is very stable on our test machines. It does sting a bit though, as an artist, not to be able to show off your game in its full glory.

 

It's a pre-alpha build, don't expect too much eh? Heck it shouldn't look really pretty until Beta anyways.

[Kaftan Barlast]

Ive been gone a while but here's the story: we got everything working fine for the convention without that much trouble. We actually had probably THE most stable demo in the hall, not even this crazy QA lad we know from starbreeze could break it. We also got a tiny award that came with complimentary tshirts, random abuse and as much bananas as we could eat.

 

PHOTOS!!

http://gallery.ulfben.com/2008/06/The-Exhibit/

http://gallery.ulfben.com/2008/06/The-Awards/

http://gallery.ulfben.com/2008/06/The-Party/

 

 

Currently, we're just resting and taking a break. But now that we've tried out at a small convention, we will be going to the real deal GDC in Leipzig august 18-20th to promote the university and fish for a publisher.

[theslug]

http://gallery.ulfben.com/2008/06/The-Party/DSC02803.JPG

 

This was one of those "When you see it, you'll **** bricks."

 

 

http://gallery.ulfben.com/2008/06/The-Party/DSC02770.JPG

 

And this one is like one of those awkward moments of "Hey I run a day care and appear suspiciously gay but I'm going to rape you regardless."

 

Looked fun. Congrats.

[@\NightandtheShape/@]

Well done Kaftan! Glad you guys got your build working.

 

I thought you guys already had a publisher...? I'm a mite bit confused, regardless, good luck.