Game Update: Dual scene feature working!

Hi,

One of our most important mechanics is now finally working! It's the smartphone camera that can see a different world/dimension. By using the phone's built-in camera the player can uncover hidden objects and hints throughout the world. In addition, the camera can see ghostly appearances that are invisible to the naked eye. You can see why it's a big part of our game. So I'm glad that we got it working today!

The phone will see some things that the player normally can't. A player might wonder why a certain light isn't working, if he pulls out his camera he will soon find out that the wires have been cut, which is only visible on his phone's screen. This is just an example of the differences between the two worlds. With the current implementation the scenes can use different models and textures we can use this to keep the player engaged and wondering what has happened and how he can get out...(story will be explained later on)

For the time being I rendered the camera footage to a spritebatch (for debugging), but it's already working on a 3d mesh (as texture) You can clearly notice that the phone (topleft) can see something that the player can't normally see with his own eyes.

Somethings can only be seen with your own eyes...

All objects visible while in Editmode to place objects and debug a lot easier.

Update: Game & Engine features

It's time for another update. Got a lot of work done yesterday, and I'd like to share it with you guys. First off, the Gizmo finally got the features it deserved. Rotation/Scale feature are now working properly (images below)

Next up is a long overdue issue that wasn't bothering the frame-rate at all so I post-pone'ed it for quite a while. When loading a scene and reading all object-data stored inside Xml, a copy was hidden and maintained in the background (while it shouldn't even exist) In a case of 500 objects/components this would mean another 500 hidden in the background. I redesigned the loading/saving of Xml data and will no longer keep unwanted objects in the background.

Game Update

As I mentioned earlier, we're working on a new project called "Over Night". My role is Engine programmer, so I make sure everything we need for our game is there for the Game programmer to work with. A few features that I added last week are listed below and are shown in the video...

- Character (movement etc, thanks to BEPU for their base character class)

- Scene switching

- Monitor (ingame security camera footage shown on a TV monitor)

- Story notes (story driven notes and hints on the wall, helping the player with solving the story puzzle)

Game Update: Scenes & 3D Audio

Finally some (two) screenshots of the scenes. Shown below are the storage and security room both part of our upcoming game. In the meanwhile I've implemented 3D audio for positional sound effects throughout the scenes, screenshot included.

On The Horizon: "Over Night"

We've started our new project this week. It's going to be a horror game. And like last time, I took on the role of programmer. Luckily I now have a fellow programmer in my team, so we can split most of the programming load. My role will consist primarily of Engine programming and profiling to optimize the game's performance, he will take care of the game programming for the next 8 weeks. Like last time I'll try to post regular updates about the game/engine. Mostly programming related of course, with some images & video as usual.

A short summary of the roadmap:

- Managers, single purpose managers for tasks like physics, audio, content etc.

- Multi-threading, a low-priority task. Will only be implemented if the need for more processer power arises.

- Additional Editor features. The current editor is pretty basic, and I'll be adding some additional features to aid rapid development.

- Destruction. Although it's not a feature for our current project, I do have some plans for creating a basic destruction engine in the near future.

- XML Tweaking, a feature currently in the fridge. It might proof very useful for quick tweaking of values.

Of course, this is not all I'll be doing over the next 8 weeks. We have some pretty ambitious plans for this project, and I'm afraid I'll be spending a lot of time profiling and optimizing our game to make it run on an acceptable framerate...

SgMotion v1.1 released last week. Most notable change is the Deferred modelprocessor. Download link and more info can be found at the Community Blogpost I've made over at SynapseGaming.com.