Guild of Writers

Here's a little video of what I was able to get done in 2 days. Need to work on the lighting still and some of the textures. Sounds only half done (Sounds are one thing that are a pain to do in this SDK). I love the light blooms on the lights, and those are all done in the materials on the light covers themselves, not the actual lights. The Waveset has a feature that automatically puts the "foam" on the water when it comes in contact with non-water objects.

So here's the link. I think I'm going to start working on something that is "Outside" next:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AS_e54KB9o

Andy, it is truly amazing what you already achieved after 2 days.

But in general I wonder if anyone has ever tried to simply use the Blender game engine.
It seems more logical to me because it fits a lot better to what many of us have learned over the past two years.
Its free available and the code is open.
It probably has no network code yet , but i asume that's only a matter of time.
When using the blender engine, all those features, like bump mapping, real time shadow,they are all available within the same working space.
Today there are some caracter animation samples on Blender.org. ( i think the game engine used there is not Blender, but i am not sure)
http://www.blendernation.com/2011/08/26/overgrowth-game-uses-blender-for-character-animation/
I was impressed by seeing that, i am thinking about trying to build a small age in it.
As you do, just to explore how it works, and how it looks.

I'd say go for it then!

There is nothing wrong with expanding your knowledge and learning how to do things in other systems. It can only enhance what you already know. In the past 2 days, I've learned some tips and tricks that would work for Plasma that I had never thought of before, but saw ways to do it while working with CryEngine.

Unreal SDK showed me some very, very cool ways to manipulate textures that I didn't know about (and can't do in Plasma right now, but you can do it in Blender).

I'm stuck with Ahnonay's Linking room right now, as there is a problem with the Vis Area that is suppose to keep the sun and moon light out, but it's still influencing my materials. Others have noticed this and the Dev's at CryTek promised to look into it.
So since I can't block the sun out as well as I should, I'm moving on to an outside scene, and I'll use the sun! hehe

So begins a new chapter for Gahreesen

It looks so barren without the trees! It gives it such a very different feeling.

Sure does. Trees and other plants will be going back in....but not the billboards we are so used to. Instead, I'll be using the Plant Tool that comes with the SDK.

Lighting has a big effect too. Here's a shot at 7:16 AM, Gahreesen time:



And what I'm trying to work on right now: the rivers (using the River Tool) and the waterfalls (Which is using a particle package). I'm about halfway done on this one:

awww that first picture is so great.. Just add a bit of glow and some light shafts and it looks like a whole different game...

Whew! Okay, just about got the Training Building finished. I couldn't believe how detailed they made the top....which is strange since you can't get up there normally (When we can, you are not really here, but in another "age"):

Looks really nice.. This is starting to take shape.
Have you yet looked at the animation systems in there? That building won't be complete without a small rotation.

Aloys wrote:Looks really nice.. This is starting to take shape.
Have you yet looked at the animation systems in there? That building won't be complete without a small rotation.

Heh......yah, I'm sort of dreading that. The Unreal SDK has something called Matinee that you do your animations in. CryEngine is set up mainly so that people create their assets in other programs like Max, Maya and XSI (I think that's what it's called).
I was having a issue today with the bridges. In Max, they look like this of course:



When I got them into the scene in CryEngine, they looked like this:



I was tearing my hair out. Turns out, the pivot point was too far away. Right now for all the objects, once I have them in the scene and scale them to the correct scaled (32.8083 is the factor since there is 3.28083 feet to a meter), I have to move them and the coordinates were: 1024, 1024, -3101. That last one, the Z coordinates was too far away for the bridges. One of the CryTek Devs gave me a heads up as to why:

This come from a huge optimization that was made to run time meshes.
We now convert meshes using 16bit FP whereas before it was 32bit FP. This gains a good deal of performance as the engine no longer has to convert them at run-time, and all it requires is a bit of asset manipulation to rectify.

This happens with non-optimized meshes typically that have been exported with their pivots (or origins) far away from the render mesh.
You can solve this quite easily by adjusting your pivots on objects to make for a much smaller overall bounding box.

Usually you will only see this happen on huge meshes or when you have multiple objects using a similar pivot in max.

The file for Gahreesen has everything spread out all over the place. This is because of the different areas we can explore: the "Well Room" area, the Exterior area, and inside the training building. Well everything in the exterior area is located at 10085 feet 9.867 inches from 0 in height (almost 2 miles, hehehe). So I had to go in and change the bridges piviot points so that they have a common one that was closer. It fixed the problem:



However I wasted about 5 hours on this. so much more I could have gotten done today (but it's the weekend so I can stay up late).

Anyways, while I was trouble shooting, I was looking at the exporter in Max and noticed that it has different things for Animated Meshes.............I groaned at this, as I think I'm going to set up the Animation of the buildings in Max and THEN export them all over again.
But that's okay, I already have fixed a lot of stuff. Since I don't have Gahreesen's actual Max file from Cyan, I had to import, and when you do that, there are issues (double verticies that have to be removed, and then when you FBX export to Max, that opens up other issues, such as having to re-apply smoothing groups, etc, etc).

So now I'm off to read the manual (yah, they actual have a manual for this: http://freesdk.crydev.net/display/SDKDOC2/Home ) and see what it says about animations. Hehehe.

All these screenshots are wonderful Andy ! The lighting is great.

Unfortunately I guess this kind of engine works only on good computers (or at least not too old ones ?).

Have fun !

EDIT:

andylegate wrote:I couldn't believe how detailed they made the top....which is strange since you can't get up there normally (When we can, you are not really here, but in another "age"):

Well, the top area is rather another place in the same Age.
What about melting both ? This way when you explore the top area you would really be at the top of the building !