AtKm: first peek

Allrighty... I'm doing a FPS game, and here is (very) little something from it, for the first time ever. [to celebrate the grand re-opening of the forums :)]

Obviously it's a monster of somekind, in a base pose... I tried to achieve "energy entity" type of surface (think "Final Fantasy: The Spirit Within") and although this here is not the final version it will be looking roughly like this.

Model is made by me, format is .B3D, and screenshots were taken with 4xAA on using GeForce3. I have not resized or adjusted the shots anyway other than converted the saved .BMPs to full quality .JPGs with ACDSee.

...And of course it looks a LOT better and much more menacing when it's moving and placed in the real enviroment with special effects and SFX!

Now that is cool!

very, very nice.

Why no shot in the gallery? :-P

That's bloody ace!

looks like a cross between *the* alien and them daft things with the scythes for arms in 40k - very nice, though if i'm honest, it looked better when the jpgs were only half loaded (sort of fuzzy and not so sharp) but thumbs up mate =]

Will the model appear transparent ingame? With some sort of motion blur? Or even perhaps the 'preditor effect'? Look forward to a (tech) demo ^^

It looks very nice.

as usual from the 3D Mark master - some excellent work :-)

Im Thinking Alien 6 : Ultimate battle....

Because it's just a test... I think that gallery should be reserved for "game/app screenshots" which at least look like it's from a "finished game". When I have something that shows this buddy, level and guns etc hud stuff I will post a screenie there too :)



It is... I just loooove the alien and tyranids were cool too!



:) It's like those shaky, blurred game preview videos that are shot with a handheld cameras - like all the DOOMIII stuff... looked much cooler in those crappy "leaked" videos!



Yup.



Hopefully, those just need bit rendering oomph... but yes, I have few ideas, it REALLY needs something to make it really look like it should. Glow is one thing I'm going to try. If any of you have good ideas or code, I'm all ears :)



Nope - it's supposed to be "concentrated energy", it's not a camouflage effect.



Me too! :) But I want some level stuff on that too, and maybe simple AI or something.



Aliens are wuzzies compared to these, because th%(af?g)#..b

*** signal lost ***

Neat...So what does AtKm stand for? Attack-terminate-Kill-mame? Aliens-that-Kill-men? Anti-terrorist-Kangaroo-mice? Another-terrible-Karate-movie? Alien-tourists-Killed-me?

Fredborg

LoL@Fredborg...

Very impressive looking Mustang!

AtKm: I'm going to pronounce this Attack 'Em!

That alien looks great

:)

These are all very fine names for a game, but sadly it will be something with bit more elegance in it... ;)

What I'm trying to do here is (although it is quite straight forward FPS basically) something more mature than a game with MachoBS name and where you teleport/spawn constantly to frag ppl with MachoBS weapons.

Take best elements from the "Max Payne", "Metal Gear Solid" & "Aliens"... put them together, stir them well, and you'll end up with something like AtKm - if I can make it right!

Is there any information anywhere as to the 'cost' of different rendering modes on different video cards? I would be very interested.

What the hell is a Type?

My understanding of it is that it is what you do with keyboards.

Keyboard?

My god, you're so ignorant: http://www.blitzbasic.co.nz/b3ddocs/command.php?name=Type&ref=2d_cat

;)

Looks cool, and a very clever use of spherical environment mapping. Before I saw your explanation I was about to ask how you achieve that effect. I'd be concerned how visible that thing will be in the game but if you place him in dark areas it should be perfectly visible.

I worried about that too, but it will be visible... I'm not aiming for "really dark levels" but the lighting on my game (lightmaps) will be such that those buggers will be seen clearly. And there will be additional effects on it too - this is just a test version screenshot.

Of course those monsters will be wandering all over the place and will eventually be also on more brightly lit areas, but there will be no outside locations in my game, meaning "earthly terrains and sunshine". All the action happens in space and it's quite dark there...

looks scary. Also looks like an alien from aliens ;D

Well I've seen the pictures, and I've read the explanation, and I still don't a blind clue how to reproduce this effect. But it looks amazing, and the model is fantastic ( obviously. )

As I understand it (and have tried myself:)

Create an image of an orange background with a blurry edged black circle in the middle (the circle should be large enough to almost touch the sides)

Apply this to your model as a spherical environment map

Set the model to "add" blend mode, 2 sided/no backface culling, and fullbright.

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.. I didn't have the environment map quite right. I'd make the circle wayyy too small. Thanks Joe.

Oooooooo. Moody. I like it!

Here's the exact map I used in this test, use it freely in your own experiments/games:



Try messing with PhotoShops custom Gradient colors and draw "Radial Gradient" from the center to the top. I also start with 255*255 map because it actually HAS a center pixel... and after drawing the gradient I scale the sucker to 256*256 (Yup, I know, but I like to be *precise* :) )

...Also the map could be downscaled to 128*128 without any noticeable loss of quality since it's a spherical map... but since it was this big in the test, I also posted it such.

Gents, thanks a mil for the how-to on this. Absolutely brilliant effect!

That looks amazing, its a great effect. I don't know much about spherical maps and such, how do you apply them to models?

If you have B3D Tweak you can actually set the texture reference in the b3d model to spherical environment mapping. To do it in code you use flag 64 when loading the texture, and then apply the texture to your model.

Mustang, now that you've gotten me thinking about this effect I can see all sorts of possibilities with it. For example, it would make a really cool simulation of a scanning electron micrograph for a game set in the human body or something.

This also looks really cool as a layer over a model's main texture. For example, multitexturing this effect over a normal human character gives him a shimmery otherworldly look.

Well I used Lightwave for doing the model and set the options directly in it because I use TeraBits "Convertor" for the .B3D conversion, and "Converter" can read those tags from the model-file directly and set them right in the generated .B3D. Then I just load the sucker and it displays correctly. I don't do much "in code" texture setting at all (which is good and nice).

See the online docs about "textures" and "texturefilters" how to do this process "manually".



Yup! :) X-ray scanners, whatever... this is neat and multi-use effect. And the best thing about is that it's all basic DX7 stuff, no need for cubemaps or anything. I guess you could code a cool PixelShader to do this too, but why bother... ppl just want the new stuff and don't really bother to experiment with old stuff used in a new way. Shame really.



Yup! :) That's why I said above [few post up] that I might use my "free" second UV-layer for some other texturing stuff too... like I said, this is early test, and I'm NOT going to give away my best tricks just yet... ;)

thats an excellent point musty, as we discussed in email, their is alot of potential in DX7 that hasn't been unlocked, people tend to use more advanced forms of shaders and such like without trying to emulate and hence result in speed increase in most cases...

AtKm = "All the King's men"? :)

Nice model Mustang.

lovely stuff :) btw another use of sphere mapping is with my planet glow thing in code archives. As for special effects, surely cube mapping will make a foray into this game? :)

You bet it will be there!

"AtKm" will feature all the best (tech) stuff Blitz has, and hopefully few that are not even there yet... well with the exception of MultiPlayer, story is not really suited to that and the project is enough huge & complex already. Maybe the sequel will have MP then :)

Cube reflectons (especially "water effects") are nice of course, but where I REALLY would like to use them is lighting. If possible I'd like to use true dynamic lights as little as possible and cubemaps would make this possible... without cubemaps you need at least 3-light setup to achieve smooth multi-angle lighting and it will be coarse even then compared to the cubemap lighting.

Bumps would be nice too, not necessarily for this creature but for something I'm going to show later...

Mustang, excellent work my friend. Looks like with my current project and others like yours. Blitz will really be pushed to it's upper limits.

Thanks Dev!



Hopefully... I think that most ppl don't even realize how much you can get out of Blitz, technically. It's maturing fast, and with full DX7 capabilities (like cubemaps) it will be a serious kick-ass tool for game making... Blitz is still young of course, and we'll have to wait bit longer to see more complex and ambitious projects finished... but it's only a matter of time.

Yes!, this is really kewl, and you have opened my eyes as to what is possible with Blitz's current abilities, loading a texture, modifying it, lighting it, adding fx, then applying it to a model, this has got to be the kewlest thing I have seen thus far.. Great Job Mustang.

AtKm = Asymmetric Telekinetic Killer Monkeys?

I read it as "At the K-mart: first peek".

Wow, too bad I didn't see this last year! Very cool looking ;)

It does look like a genestealer don't it? Very nice.

'Amazing Terrorising, Kaleidoscopic Mongooses'
_______________________________________________


Oooh!!!! cant wait now!!!


That's really impressive. Not only does it 'open the door' for 'energy beings', (also 'elemental creatures', some nice non-sprite-based particle thingies maybe, but I am also thinking of, say 'Shield' effects, 'invisible mode', or a way of dealing with preventing character from obscuring 3rd person camera view, all manner of special effects really....

Wow, I never realised Spherical Environment Maps could be whipped into serious use like this. Until now, they just add a "sheen" to my models. Good work, fella.

very nice Mustang ! :)

nice work..look forward to seeing it with movement

verrrrrry coooooool....

nice, imaginative work...


--Mike