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.

Game Update: Deadline Today! Final Screenshots & Video

We've finally reached the project deadline. We've presented our game to the teachers and fellow students today. We can be pleased with the results :) As a (probably) last update of this game for now, I've included some additional screenshots for your viewing pleasure. A video will be compiled and added later on...(Update: As promised, the video can be found at the bottom)

Update: Video Added!

Game Update: Bedroom + Reflection!

Another game update. Not much to say, just watch... :)

updated models and diffuse added. Normal + specular available soon ;) The lights use emmissive coloring.

Closet used for one of our story events...

Reflection! It won't be used for any gameplay/storytelling aspects. It's really just a graphical gimmick...it caused no performance issues so far (game running on 40 fps on laptop)

That's it for now. We still have till Friday to complete this project. Maybe I can compile a short video of gameplay somewhere this week.

Game Update: Apartment Textures!

The artist did a great job with the apartment textures. They look pretty sweet... :)

We have till Friday to deliver a good 'Serious Game'. We have a very busy week ahead of us, I'll try to update the Blog with screenshots & videos when new assets/mechanics are completed.

Currently my laptop can run the game with 30-50 FPS (1024x576, AAx2) but has the tendency to overheat (100c+) when running GPU intense applications...So final recordings will have to take place on my PC.

Game Update: Models

The models arrived about an hour ago :) They look pretty cool. Quickly imported them into the scene and setup some basic lighting. Textures should be ready by the end of the week...

Recorded some footage of our game intro. The video is on the bottom of this post. On a side note, most of the voice acting is completed (thanks to Dutchtraveller for his voice-acting work as "The junkie")

Images:

The white text is part of the intro and is not visible once the game is actually playing.

Video: