NanoBlobs 0.3, dev diary

[Zenka]

Oh no 400 smoke sources a player. My poor ADA (that's my PC).

Won't it be more logical that it are metal sheeps?
make them big and round, modern type of sheep. obiously made of metal.

[AF]

I dont like the sharp agressive scorpion look, especially for a unit with the role of the sheep. That and it just doesnt seem fitting for the overral scheme.

[Guessmyname]

Four legs good! Six legs bad!
Four legs good! Six legs bad!
Four legs good! Six legs bad!

(I sincerely hope someone knows where that came from)

[Archangel of Death]

It was four legs good, two legs bad.

[Argh]

All right, no more Orwell references

Moving right along... four legs, less aggro-looking, more rounded. Funny, that's how the original drawings were, drat my lack of a scanner. I should fix that this weekend, it would probably be a big help for the team, and scanners are fairly cheap...

Maybe we can find a "home" for this unit elsewhere. It's cute, and I like it, and I hate wasting anybody's work.

[jellyman]

Was it really an Orwell reference. Or was it a reference to the 'Bible' of signatures?

http://www.rhythm.com/~keith/info/siglines

[Argh]

That is, truly, the Mother of all AOL-using-people-who-should-not-be-allowed-near-computers Sigs.

<pants>

Ok, all better now.

Got NTAI's newest version sort've, kind've working with the early builds, but we're still a long ways from release. Screenshots of early combat would really be more confusing than useful, at this point, as we have a long, long way to go.

[Argh]

I only have two things to say about this:

1. It only has 1536 tris showing at any one time.
2. The treads are offset to demonstrate something.

[Zenka]

Very cool.
Are the tires (or how do you call them) going to rotate (run) in the game?

[Argh]

Yes.

And since I've tested it, with a working test-piece, I can say that with a straight face.

Those of you who know how hard that was to pull off... will appreciate it. That's all I'm going to say.

[SwiftSpear]

You're distributing alot of polies into the treads. It's going to make them alot more work to deal with with both animation and texturing, not to mention end user video card preformance.

[Argh]

The animation and texturing parts were, actually, very easy. It uses about the same number of lines of code to animate the tracks as it does to aim the gun.

As for the impact on framerate... as I said... 1536 tris per render, per unit... which is a lot lower than the per-unit tricounts Caydr was showing us earlier. I have other units in NanoBlobs with similar tricounts, and they aren't causing any serious pain, even with everything going full-blast. Technically, this unit has only 50% more tris, per rendering pass, as the unit it replaces, as each 3DO face is broken into two tris, and is then rendered double-sided. So, while it seems a little extreme, it's really not that bad. Plus the engine doesn't have to do the splitting or the culling in the first place, which actually helps things out. S3Os that are built efficiently can look considerably more detailed than 3DOs while having an equivalent tricount... it's just that simple, folks.

For my part, I've always wanted to see a fully-animated and properly 3D tread in a RTS, and now I've made one. I think it's going to be awesome, to the point I've just decided that sleep is optional and I will just get this unit finished RIGHT NOW so that I can see it in the game... and find out just how evil it is, performance-wise. Who knows? Maybe this will end up being just a dead end, and you'll never get to see it in the game... hehe, just kidding- it'll be fine for all but the lowest-end machines, I promise- and even they should be OK with shadows off

[Guessmyname]

The reason you don't see realistic, properly done, 3d tracks in RTSs is because its far easier to just use an animated texture

[Aun]

The reason you don't see realistic, properly done, 3d tracks in RTSs is because its far easier to just use an animated texture

But looks no way near as good...

This has come on a massive way since the first version.

[Argh]

I'll just say this... animating a texture around something like a tank tread is neither easy, nor fast... in fact, it was the other method I looked at, and I ended up rejecting it, because of the way that Spring handles swapping. There's a world of difference between doing a simple cyclic texture (i.e. the way that Cavedog did their "lights") and doing a cyclic texture that follows the UVs of an object that's oddly-shaped, like a track, without problems. The basic method is not a whole lot different than what I ended up doing, really- the main difference is that I can do a true 3D track, without cheating a whole lot.

Let's all just chill with this theoretical stuff, though, I'm getting closer to "done"- about another hour, I reckon.

[Guessmyname]

By "done", do you mean "finished the mod" or "finished the unit"?

[Argh]

Patience...

Here, chew on this for a second. I'll have real screens as soon as I've gotten it through Upspring and have gotten it into Spring, but I need to do the glowmap and reflectionmap first really quick.

[Drone_Fragger]

This mod pwns :D

[Min3mat]

release it already ;.;

[Argh]

Aw now, for all you know, it's pretty pictures I did with Paint

Seriously folks, the gameplay's still very rough, and the models aren't done yet. We'll release it when we're fairly confident that everybody will at least give it a chance- NanoBlobs is... a little different from normal TA mods.

In other news... here's the unit. The treads look kewl. Oh yeah, and that would be an AI flying all those Wolves around... thank Alantai for providing some early support for this mod, and making his AI robust enough to deal with its... oddness...