Fatewind screens

[cairnswm]

I saw those screen shots on OnGameDev and they looked absolutly stunning. I think youve got the common problem of trying to do too much in your game. Take the time to simplify it and you'll find you can get it completed.

Change the structure of the game to being level based. Each level you need to fly over the idlands and shoot down some enemies.

Forget about landing on the islands, make a single landing point at the end of the level where you get your next 'mission' and have the chance to upgrade/buy new weapons etc.

Believe me - learning to simplify your game to a basic set of requirements is the best way to get to make complete games.

[czar]

@traveler Those tutorials show off some nice terrain.

Which reminds me...

I wrote a 3d terrain editor program using Omega. I have since gone on and populated my pseudo 3d world with pre-rendered 3d images. (reiner's gfx) The problem is you quickly chew up the graphics memory so I was thinking.

1. Would it be possible to render a 3d model to an offscreen buffer and then slap that rendered image onto the screen? That way it would use much less memory and the upside is that very little would have to change in these types of pseudo 3d programs.

2. Would it be possible to actually render a 3d image directly to the screen.

I can see either of these two possibilties working nicely but I have no idea how to go about loading and animating a 3d model. Are there any good tutorials that show how to load simple .X files or .3ds files and then animate them? In delphi...

[lief]

there was too much to get it completed in 2 weeks yes. but that is how far I got in 2 weeks, which I am very pleased with.

I do cut back on game features to be able to complete a game, but doing it as levels and landing once does not make it any easier (or i don't see why) to program. I have already implemented landing on islands and a dummy shop loop, just nutting out a gui system on paper.

when making a game by myself, apart from the standard docs, make a list in notepad of all the things needed to be coded or drawn or whatever, a fairly detailed list. prioritize those things taking into account their interdependencies and knock them off the list one by one. What I also do, is move all optional stuff to the end of the list. I can finish the game about halfway through my list...

will: yes, i wrote a poly hit tester in preparation. did you mean actual textured poly islands as well?
traveller: thanks for tutorials. i'll post my tile-set-in-progress tomorrow.
czar: 3d I would LOVE to do with this. in a perfect world i would do this. in a perfect world i would know how to do this. would i make a model for each island? the whole darn map? how do you make water go halfway up an island?

thanks for your support everyone...

[lief]

well... i'm going 3d. i've got a water plane working, and some crappy islands which actually look like mangled cubes (hey, they are!). I can move the camera around as needed, now i just have to model some proper islands and get the water looking how i want it.
it will be cool in the fact that it will have proper lighting for the time of day as i planned, with a moving sun and all and colored lighting.
it will not be cool in the fact that it has to work on a 5+ year old laptop, as that is what i have at home. So no multitextures, no shader effects, blah blah
I'll have to try and figure out a way to incorporate my experience with 2d effects & textures in to cover over the imperfections.

going to give zpaint a go tonight... see what i can do with it for the islands.

screenshot soon!

ps. thanks to lifepower for all help with asphyre and 3d stuff...

[Traveler]

Somehow zpaint sounded familiar, but I had to check it out to be sure.

Here's the link if anyone else wants to have a look : http://www.steffengerlach...

Good luck with your 3d endeavour
Looking forward to future screenshots!

[lief]

no not quite?? i have zpaint2 which is a 2/2.5/3 dimensional painting tool, even rivalling ps in its control of brushes etc, with some really high performance, high poly count modelling stuff. i'll find a link and post it...

[lief]

hmmm can't seem to find a link... anyways its pretty high tech.

ok question anyway... if i was to make a day/night cycle (sounds hypothetical but its actually already in progress), what do you suggest for "time of day" icon... will be a little 64 x 64 icon picture eg. Sunrise, Day, Evening, Night

Should I

a - Make it real. Make a sun go up and down, with little dynamic clouds etc with modelled (read morphing gradients, not real) skies

b - Draw 4 icons and just switch between them, with blending overlays if needed to add a bit of realism (eg. Sunset overlayed with nightsky, one fades in, one fades out as time goes past, just to stop sudden flick)

I'm thinking people will not actually notice the transition, unless they are actually watching it change.

I love building atmosphere in a game... doing gameplay aint my thing however

ill have new screens soon.

[cairnswm]

I'd just make them flick over. The other option is to have the sun move in a circle for day amd the moon for night. Grade the background based on time of day/night. Adding clouds and cool sunset/sunrise images would make it really nice

[Traveler]

Well you could do what Blizzard did in W3, where the icon is moving from night to day. Its a nice effect and very clear to the user.

An effect like in WoW is also very nice, where night/day is like in the real world. If you play in the evening, its slowly becoming night. Very cool

[Sly]

This was cool. It gave me something else to think about for a while.

I had seen this effect in some other game. Cannot remember which one though. So I had to make some sample images to show you what I mean. Gotta love Google Images.

Using these two textures



Draw the top half of the sun/moon texture onto a quad (128x64). Now draw the metallic frame (I suck at drawing metallic frames) over the top. Ok, so that gets you a sun. To change the time of day, use a texture matrix to rotate the sun/moon texture. This will give you a rotating texture within the quad, for example:



Hope that helps.