I have completed the alien model, with rigging and a weapon, which now gives me enough assets to actually begin the process of coding the game. I designed the CORTech engine to be very modular, so it’s pretty easy to go in and remove the Frenzy game code and replace it with Saucermen code with only minor tweaks to the renderer. Most of these tweaks will just be additions to it, or setting changes, since the engine was primarily designed as an underwater scene renderer. I’m pretty excited to see how this looks in the game renderer with all of the CORTech effects like depth-of-field, and especially in the Oculus!
Meanwhile, here is the first weapon, the Alien Blaster.
To get an idea of the overall look and the palette, here is a Blender Render of the scene that I will create in the CORTech engine.
I got around to doing animation, and now without engine limitations, I was able to create some pretty awesome standing, walking, and run animations. What a huge difference in comparison to Alien Arena! I quickly got the engine and game code tweaked to have an AI alien in a tiny test map and was able to start working on getting the AI for the bots going. Before long I had an alien walking and running, and attacking me. There is no question that coding the bot AI will be one of the hardest tasks going forward, but I really enjoy this task.
I also had noticed in setting up the little scene that there were some actual problems in the renderer with lighting. Some of this was do to how the Y and Z axis are swapped(since in OpenGL Z is depth, rather than height). I will need to go back and fix this for Frenzy as well, and I’d really like to merge the codebases, so I will very likely set up my dev environment to do just that, keeping the rendering side up to date automatically. This does mean that some settings in the engine are going to need to be added, but that is pretty trivial. There were some minor shader problems that I corrected as well, and now it’s lighting properly. There are a couple of things bothering me, but for now it’s looking quite nice, and I can focus more on the AI for now. One thing did stand out for me, was that I really need to make adding shadowmaps a very high priority, as the lack of shadows really stands out in comparison the CRX engine, but I do think that the lighting and shading are superior. I will need to be able to change the DOF settings, since everything is so much more compact than Frenzy, scale wise.
I also began working on the physics, and right off the bat two things stood out. One, the movement feels so vastly smoother and more realistic. Two, I’ll have to think about how I want to handle collisions – my plan is for each map asset to have two meshes, with the second one being used for collisions. This too should probably be a setting, but there are a couple of ways to handle that. I will see how performance vs realism vs smoothness pan out after building a suitable level to play on. Right now I just have a single corridor that you see in the Blender render.
The animation handling is going to be vastly different than Alien Arena. With AA, essentially running, walking, and standing animations all had the weapon in a firing position, to allow for it to appear to be in a firing position when actual shooting the weapon while doing these maneuvers. This made these animations look a little less real, when a player was running while not shooting. With Saucermen, these three animation sequences have a duplicate sequence with the weapon in firing position. This way, when the player or bot fires, it will skip to that sequence, on the same relative frame, seamlessly appearing to raise the weapon and firing, and vice versa when they stop firing. The animation is also controlled differently. It speeds up as the player moves faster, and switches from walk to run when reaching a certain speed. This completely eliminates the appearance of “skating” you see in most Quake based games and probably quite a few others as well. I have a lot of challenges ahead, including adding the ragdoll physics which I’ll save for later. This will be used for death and some other sequences. I will very likely adapt the code I developed with Lee Salzman in Alien Arena since it was made using ODE and is very similar to Bullet(also made from ODE). I can very certainly use the structures and techniques I developed back then, they should adapt perfectly.
There is so much to do yet, but soon I’ll get an actual in-game screenshot posted, in my next update.