Texturing vs 3D details

I wasn't very involved the past days weeks. I had to work on another game project and also do things i never did before. And everything new to you is very tiring... The new routines are on the road. There is still a lot of work to do but it will be usefull for Alone in Space in the future so... That's not a time waste!

As I could enhance my 3D skills recently, I was adding more and more details to my 3D models. More and more faces for better rendering. Things like my last spaceship. But hey, I have to create 3D models for buildings, and there will be a lot of them. So If I continue to add details, the game will be unplayable because of big lags due to excessive details.

So I though about how I could get betters visuals without adding details. The answer is simple : textures and shaders. Up to now, I was using plain textures on faces. That's nice but huh... May be too much simplistic. Working on textures is the first step.

The guinea pig for this experimentation was the Command Center. I restarted something weeks ago but that was crappy. I started from 0 and here is the model without textures :

That's really simple. There is a lot of faces as it is a half sphere like shape, but the overall structure is quite simple. From this, I worked on texturing it to add details. Here is the result :

That's very interesting and also satisfying : not a lot of polygon, but still a nice looking structure. I'll have to gather more detail textures so this will be quite hard (I only use free textures for now).

Hard but not impossible.

Research panel is comming

Now that the conference is over, i could get back to work on Alone in Space. For now, I'm creating a custom window management to handle the game panels (Research, Freight, ...). For this purpose I'm using some viewport tricks but the input is not well handled yet.

The idea of using a viewport is to ease the construction of the panels and also their management. Yna allows to use game states as full screen of as popups. That's what I need : some kind of popups on top of the current Vision.

When the panel system will be operational, I'll be able to start working on the research tree and also the other panels later.

The research panel will give informations about the player's discovered technologies. On this panel, the player will also manage research programs with a (I hope) realistic approach. Technologies will be shown as a big tree. I want to create a really big one so it won't fit on screen. Here are some things I want to do about it :

• Drag the tree to show hidden parts.
• Scroll to zoom in / out and show more or less tree nodes
• Use colors and symbols to distinguish researched, available for research and not available nodes

No screenshot for now.

3D management

Managing 3D models is not as easy as it seams. 3D editors use different measuring unities and even space coordinates... In Alone in Space, structures need to be placed on a invisible grid. That means they must not get too big. But they also need to fill as much space as possible.

To handle this problem, our saviour is the ratio! You can display a 3D object with a given ratio to get it bigger or smaller. However, this is still a problem as each model needs a custom ratio.

So I made a tool inside the game to play with models ratio and define the best for each one:

That's not intended to be usable in the final game but this could be handy for modding...

Tough week

Gah...

After a tough weekend previously, that's going to be a whole week! My night planning is almost full.

• On Mondays I usually take piano lessons
• Tonight I meet team members of my association to do a debrief about the last game jam
• Tomorrow, I meet other members of my association to talk about the conference I'll give on january about amateur game projects
• On Thursday, I meet friends to finalize the event on Guild Wars 2 we're going to perform for our community next day
• On Friday I perform the event

When am I supposed to work on Alone in Space?!

Coding this week will be hard but I still have time to think about the gameplay and making some project management.

Stop complaining and keep moving forward

A day away from my week-end adventures, there is a note to myself i want to share :

Stop complaining and keep moving forward

I'm not a 3D artist, however i'm good at industrial design (i've done a lot during my studies). That's why i'm in search of a 3D software based on industrial design. Something like the Unreal Ed (love it, even with it's bugs) :

In my mind, the 3D representation is the result of the 2D designs. I'm used to. And that's so freaking difficult to get rid of that! I feel lost with only a 3D representation!

With help from a Blender pro, i managed to set up my worskapce with familiar view. Now, i feel better. Home sweet home!

Here we go then, i'll use Blender!