Graphics Write-Up #9

This was a pretty interesting assignment on both sections.  The environment map was much easier of the two, especially since pretty much everything to get it working was done inside of the fragment shader.  In the first picture below you can see it clearly reflected in both the spheres on the sides as well as the floor.  I also went and changed my specular lighting to use the correct view position, using the camera's actual position instead of taking it out of the 4x4 matrix.  It was really cool to see this working in the scene.  I imagine that in the case of an outdoor scene, the environment map would be mirroring the sky-box.

Getting the render target working was more challenging.  It's also one of the cooler things we've done so far visually.  I ran into a few issues that were mostly related to my previous code structure as opposed to the current assignment, but once I'd fixed those, everything worked pretty smoothly.  Most of the troubles with this section was just making sure to put all the calls and change the render target in the correct locations.  Oh, one issue I had was trying to get both of the above to work with normal mapping in addition.  It might be working now that I've fixed a few other issues I ran into, but initially it wasn't working for some reason.  I'm going to look into that more once I have time since it shouldn't be messing up.

Here's what it looks like:

Here's PIX:

Link to code:  http://www.eng.utah.edu/~jthummel/graphics/ThummelGraphicsAssignment9.zip

Two Week Pre-Spring Break Update

Things have been crazy lately what with the Industry Panel, Game Engineering, Game Graphics, AND Ubisoft on top of it all.  Not a good excuse for forgetting to blog, but there it is.

Last week was the panel and the gate decision.  The panel was fascinating.  It was so awesome to hear what people in the industry thought about our games, I learned so much from just listening to them.  I expected a lot of the feedback they gave such as scope issues for Co-Signers or the fact that Rover Rescue isn't an RTS, but there was also a lot of really amazing feedback for each game I'd never even thought of.

Vinyl was incredibly well received, but we also got a lot of great feedback on what we could improve.  Some key points were:

Making the song sound bad when doing poorly is really unique, definitely stick with this.
This game screams for mobile.
Use a controller, not the keyboard.
The speed indicator wasn't easy to see.

One of the best comments we got afterwards during a small play test session was the idea of adding another power up to be able to clear out all the static on screen.  This way if there's a section that's far too hard you'll be okay.  Mostly we just need to get better spawning off of the music.

There was no class on Tuesday, and then on Thursday all we did was learn which games continued on, Vinyl and Co-Signers.

This Tuesday we finalized groups and Vinyl now has 11 people on it.  Today we talked about what engine we want to use, what mechanics we want, our art style, pretty much everything.  It was a good two hours of team discussion and we really solidified our goals of what's going to happen.  On top of that we also checked out AudioSurf as a group to see what it's like.

Unfortunately, we're not positive on what engine we're going to use since Crytek seems to not be an option if we want to publish.  We're also looking at OGRE, but Unity is getting negative comments.  I really don't care which engine we end up using though.

Over Spring Break next week I'm going to look into pulling data out of an mp3 and also playing a bunch of other music games.

Here's a link to the video of our prototype we showed: http://youtu.be/icjEKQDvM-8

Graphics Write-Up #8

This weeks assignment was one of the easiest we've had in a while, which was nice.  Changing the Maya exporter was just a matter of seeing how the normals were done and then doing the same thing for the tangents and bitangents.  Of course, changing that meant the MeshBuilder had to change, but that was a simple fix to how the data was read in, after that all the binary code didn't need any modifications since it's all just more vertex data.

Writing the new shaders also wasn't bad since it was just reading in the new values and modifying the normal based off of them.  The most time intensive part of this assignment was simply making all the new files and loading them into the Lua file so that they're copied.

This was easily the most visually impressive task we've done yet, the normal mapping looks really awesome.

Here's what it looks like with normal mapping!  The left cube is with specular lighting, although you can't really tell with this screenshot.

Link to code:  http://www.eng.utah.edu/~jthummel/graphics/ThummelGraphicsAssignment8.zip