Getting Started: In the Cloud(s) Sean McFadden Summary (PPJ #01)

This week was spent doing two main things, both seemingly involving clouds. The first was getting our project website setup. I don't think we need anything fancy yet, so it consists of a basic standard website hosted on an S3 instance. I added some nice features like logging and view counting just so we can monitor exposure in the future. The website is really bare bones at the moment, pretty much consisting of only a few lines of text and some empty web pages. I plan on adding some more styling and media over the coming weeks, as we don't have much in terms of presentable media at the moment. However it is important to have a good framework for a modifiable website at the moment, as it can ease the process as the game grows. If you want, you can visit the website below!
 oilandcorditegame.com


Additionally, I spent a big chunk of time researching and planning the implementation of our clouds system. Since the game world has a massive layer of clouds below the player, as well as clouds scattered throughout the upper atmosphere, I wanted to find a good way of handling clouds that provide for a more optimized and customizable experience. At the moment, I there are two primary options for handing such a large amounts of clouds being rendered. The first option is a more stylized 3D approach that wont require too much shader work, but probably won't look nearly as entertaining. On the other hand, having a system for generating volumetric clouds around the player may be possible. Volumetrics in Unity are supported, so over the next week I will probably spend a good amount of time trying this method out. Of course performance comes first, and I will try to find the best way to optimize such a huge amount of clouds being drawn on the screen. 

http://killzone.dl.playstation.net/killzone/horizonzerodawn/presentations
/Siggraph15_Schneider_Real-Time_Volumetric_Cloudscapes_of_Horizon_Zero_Dawn.pdf

I found a really good paper from Guerilla Games about their real time volumetric clouds used in Horizon Zero Dawn and I think it is really inspirational. Their process of generating clouds and how their utilized provided some really great insight on how we can handle this. One of the most interesting factors about their clouds is their customization and use in story telling. Since clouds will be one of the most prevalant objects in Oil and Cordite, I want to make the clouds do more than just be backdrops. I want the clouds to tell a story, where you are, what the weather is like, etc. Of course this requires alot more work than a 3D model, but I think this can easily streamline level generation and design decisions in the future. I'm excited to keep working on these wonderful puffballs, and we will see how they turn out!

Overview:
 Time Spent:
  • Website: 3 Hours
  • Cloud Research: 6 Hours
Positives: Website hosting went incredibly smoothly, cloud research seems promising
Negatives: Clouds may take longer than expected, volumetrics requires a lot of research and shader use
Upcoming: Continuing cloud work, perhaps some game play implementation related

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Image
Jacob Dixey, PPJ#3 Playtest Survey Draft  - 2 hours 2nd Scrum Presentation - 1 hour Camera Improvements - 1 hour Spinning Action - 1.5 hours COM-Buster Takeoff - 1 hour Pause Gameplay - 1 hour Bouncing - 1 hour Tweaking - 2 hours Samples Spinning and Bouncing Scrum Presentation Pause Menu Positive: The level's visual style came together really well, in addition to many of the core mechanics surrounding flying being solidified with a lot of time put into tweaking it for playtesting. Our meetings have also given us a lot of good ideas for how we can communicate the different states of the player visually, such as heating up changing a shader on the COM-Buster and its trail, and when Overheating causing a fiery effect on the screen that slightly gets in the way of your peripheral vision. Negative:  It was another week of getting things together last minute. I want us to start meeting up earlier (say, Saturday) and then using Monday (or u...
Read more

Peter Eldredge PPJ #1

Image
Set up the Unity Project and GitHub, adding some of my useful Scripts - 1 Hour Group meeting about the project and tasks - 2 Hours Conceptualized and implemented a modular enemy framework - 3 Hours Helped Jake with programming the player controller (primarily the physics) - 3 Hours Final setup for the demo/build - 1 Hour Enemy Example Enemy Framework Example The behavior above was made just by tweaking some values on prefabs and scriptable objects. The idea is that this will be expanded throughout the course and we can have an easy way to create new enemies. The behavior system can also be expanded to movement patters and a health system/weak points. Here are some inspector tabs to demonstrate how the behavior was achieved. The scriptable object is the attack behavior. It controls the conditions for the attack to fire as well as the prefab which handles the attack itself. In this case, it simply instantiates the FastLaser prefab. The condition that must be met are that...
Read more