Jordon's IT Blog

Project Ignite V2.0 Development week 1

noreply@blogger.com (Jordon Brooks) — Mon, 11 Mar 2019 17:29:00 +0000

What is Project Ignite?

Last year, I got my first VR headset (the ASUS windows mixed reality) and I wanted to experiment with making things for it. I created a testing project to learn the how the VR template worked and added stuff of my own like guns and other things. I chose the name "Project Ignite" because I thought that it would spark ideas as in igniting a fire.

What are the future goals?

Next year I would like to turn Project Ignite in to a fully fledged cyberpunk game that I might release probably to the windows store because for me, releasing it to steam or any other place is either too expensive or with similar-to-life mechanics like having to put the ammo in the gun and pulling it back to reload and flying vehicles with having to pull the levers and steering with the steering wheel.

What have I done this week?

This week I have started Version 2.0 which is a complete redo because I wanted to remove all the unneeded blueprints and to unify all the code for the items because the way I had it setup before was that I had a static mesh actor that acted as a starting point for all the items that you could pickup, but because I also had to use skeletal meshes meant that I had to have 2 separate versions of what was effectively the same code. One for static meshes and one for skeletal meshes.

Unfortunately in unreal you cant switch the root component of an actor unless you use C++ so I thought that I could make a C++ actor that switches it's root component depending on an what enumeration was set. Sadly I wasn't able to achieve this so I found that I could use a actor component instead. Now that I have unified all the code that makes the items be able to be picked up, it makes it far easier to change and update code for both, static and skeletal meshes.

Another huge change is that you can interact with things while holding them for example, pushing an object your holding with another one instead of them having no collision and going through each other.

Zero Caliber VR review

noreply@blogger.com (Jordon Brooks) — Mon, 18 Feb 2019 20:55:00 +0000

Zero Caliber VR is a virtual reality simulator, first person shooter where you can fully customise a wide range of weapons ranging from pistols, shotguns, machine guns and snipers. All the attachments can be customisable like putting a sniper scope on a pistol or shotgun. There are a wide range of scopes, lasers, magazines (normal, double and extended) for all the guns and you can even customise the colour of them by spray painting on them. Finding cover in shooting games are a must if you want to live and in zero caliber you have to manually crouch in real live in order to get behind cover in the game.

The game itself has about 7-8 maps but it can take a while to complete each one. Currently at the time of me writing this review, you can play singleplayer or multiplayer PVE. Sadly I can't see any sign of PVP but maybe in the future, Xreal Games, the company behind it might have add it.

This game was made in unreal engine and I did something like it last year, Project Ignite, so how does it stack up against it. The weapons in Zero Caliber VR are more smoother in the way that they are handled, meaning that you have to actually pull the top part of a pistol back after you reload and you have to pump the shotgun everytime you shoot. The action of reloading the weapons is also different for each gun.

My thoughts of Zero Caliber VR are that it's a good concept and I would like to see more games that take the advantage of the hardware like this.

Green screening with Blender

noreply@blogger.com (Jordon Brooks) — Tue, 05 Feb 2019 18:42:00 +0000

For our animation we used a green screen so that we can act out the action and then use 3d modeling software such as maya and blender to recreate the actions to use in out animations. To separate me from the background I used blender 2.8 since the software I used to edit videos (Hitfilm) didn't have the tools to do it.

So I used blender to remove the green around me and replaced it with alpha. Since the camera captured more than just the green screen there were still stuff at the sides, so to remove that I simply created a mask with the mask tool around the green screen and plugged the channel key (To remove the green) in to a multiply node to remove everything that wasn't in the green screen. As unfortunatly blender isn't the best tool to do this in it took a whole day to render the 7500 frames (@ 25fps, ~5 minutes of video).

To conclude, I think that blender still has room to improve on 2D video rendering as it also rendered the 3D view too even though there wasn't a need to. One good thing about blender's compositor is that it used a node based workflow so it's easy to and and remove effects.

The Mask

London and Bossa Studios Review

noreply@blogger.com (Jordon Brooks) — Thu, 10 Jan 2019 12:08:00 +0000

Last Tuesday we went on a trip to a game studio in London called Bossa Studios, it took us about 3 - 4 hours to get there by coach and then we went on the London underground for about an hour. When we finally got there it was about 12. The studio itself was large and roomy with hints towards fun like consoles you can play on and various other things like Nerf guns. During our time there we got to play test some upcoming games and walk around the studio to see what the people were working on. The people there gave us tips to help us like saying if we want to be a programmer then we also need to know a little bit what other people do in their roles. The game engine they used was Unity.
Bossa Studios is the type of place where I would like to work for because it balances work and fun.

Keyframe Animation

noreply@blogger.com (Jordon Brooks) — Wed, 02 Jan 2019 15:20:00 +0000

Keyframe animation is where you use "master frames" (keyframes) which tells the computer where and what a specific object is doing at that frame and then the computer works out the frames in between the "master frames". An example of this is if we at frame 0 set the camera rotation Z rotation to 0 and at frame 250 we set it to 365, when we play it back the computer will interpolate between each master frame and rotate the camera 1.46 degrees until frame 250.

Here's what I currently have for the game trailer:

Stop Motion Animation

noreply@blogger.com (Jordon Brooks) — Sun, 30 Dec 2018 15:30:00 +0000

Stop motion animation is the process of taking a pictures of moving objects and turning it in to an animation. This type of animation is harder to do as if you do something wrong like forget to add something in the scene then you have to completely redo the animation, an example of this would be using the wrong resolution or if the camera moved and you cant get it back to the exact position.

For the camera I used my own Nikon Coolpix that I got for Christmas a couple of years back and to put the frames together I imported them in to blender as a image sequence and set the fps to 30 and rendered it as a video. The whole animation took 178 photos and was only 5 seconds long. The huge advantage of using stop motion animation is that it is easy to achieve higher resolution, this animation I did was originally 5k but I had to lower it to 800x600 so it could be turned to a GIF.

Here is a stop motion animation I made in class:

Merry Christmas

noreply@blogger.com (Jordon Brooks) — Tue, 25 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Merry Christmas everyone!

It took a while to make this model of a Christmas tree because I was going to use particle systems for the branches but it turns out there is a much simpler way to do it with planes and textures. Unfortunately it isn't decorated yet because i'm not sure how I would do the tinsel, the baubles i'm sure will be textured spheres. Anyway the model has 3.3k of triangles and 6.3k vertices which is large for a decoration so level of detail will be handy and should bring it down to a few hundred.

2D Animation

noreply@blogger.com (Jordon Brooks) — Thu, 20 Dec 2018 18:50:00 +0000

Today I have created a simple animation using blender's new 2D animation. It allows me to draw shapes and animate them using key frames. After trying blender and Adobe's Flash, I find that blender is much easier to use. Another great feature is layers which can be used to give the sense of depth and because each shape you create is a normal blender object you are able to join, move, rotate, and scale etc... It's much easier to use because I already know all the shortcuts. This render runs at 30 FPS and has 60 frames in total.

Cyberpunk Themed Roads

noreply@blogger.com (Jordon Brooks) — Sun, 16 Dec 2018 12:56:00 +0000

Last week I have worked on creating roads for my cyberpunk game. Unfortunately to use with the splines in unreal engine the models has to be subdivided. To counter this I will use the level of detail (LOD) to bring the poly count down when the player is far away. The model has 1024 faces and 1122 vertices.

ZLVR Review

noreply@blogger.com (Jordon Brooks) — Sat, 15 Dec 2018 12:45:00 +0000

Last Thursday I tried out Zero Latency Virtual Reality. My first impressions when I put it on for the first time was "wow". I found the experience very entertaining and despite your location and rotation being visually tracked by cameras and that it had to track all 8 players it was ok. I did loose tracking a couple of times but quickly regained it within a second.

While i'm quite confident at playing games in VR, when I first put on the headset and moved, due to past experience of VR, I felt like I didn't want to and was going to hit something. The games definitely gave me a amazing experience.

Dynamic Paper in Unreal

noreply@blogger.com (Jordon Brooks) — Fri, 14 Dec 2018 12:42:00 +0000

For a project im working on in my spare time, I have made dynamic paper. The special thing about this is that it isn't a texture of paper with some writing on it. Its fully dynamic so that you can change the text to anything just by typing in the text box.

How did I do it?

First I created a texture of paper using GIMP. To do this I created an A4 size canvas used the "RGB Noise" in filters to make it very noisy, I then turned the noise to grayscale and added motion blur to give the paper some texture.

I then scaled it down to 2048x2048 which squashed it but because of how we will set up the UV it doesn't matter. In fact it's more efficient this way because it allows unreal to create mipmaps for us automatically, saving time, making the game faster and it's less assets for us to track. I also exported it as portable network graphics (PNG) so that we don't get any artifacts that we might get if we were to export it as a jpg.

Next we setup the model for this i used blender. all we do is get a cube, stretch it to the size of A4 paper and then make it very thin - not too thin because if the vertices are too close together then unreal complains.

I also made a material and added the paper texture we just made. We export this now as a FBX, making sure that it is in the center of the grid.

Now in unreal we import all the assets we just created and make sure that the material is correctly assigned and properly rendered. Next we create a use widget. This is what we will use to render the dynamic text to the paper, in the widget we have a multi-line editable text box set as read only - we use this because the regular one can't have more than one line of text. We also use a scalebox so that the text can be scaled and a sizebox so that we can resize the area of where the text will be on the paper.

After that is set up we then remove the background so that is transparent. Next we setup the blueprints (diagram will be at the bottom of this post), first off we change the style of the tex, we set the width and height and text.

We then create an actor called "Base_Paper" this will have all the necessary blueprints and we use child blueprints for each different paper we have. For the actor itself it has a static mesh component with the paper mesh set, we also set it as the root and have 2 widget components sandwiched either side of the paper mesh.

For the actor's blueprints we have an array of the front and back components (easier to loop blueprints) and another array of 2 texts which will be text on both sides. in the loop we create a widget, add it to an array (so we can keep track on them) and set the widget component to that.

Cyberpunk Christmas Tree

noreply@blogger.com (Jordon Brooks) — Mon, 10 Dec 2018 17:39:00 +0000

Using Blender 2.8 beta I have created a cyberpunk themed christmas tree in my spare time that would be good to use in my game that may show when the in-game date changes to around christmas.

The model itself consists of 3,118 vertices, 3,091 faces and 6,182 tris. I plan on using LOD in-game so unless your really close to it it wont render all those faces and instead show something like 100 faces depending the distance you are from it and the quality of settings you have set.

As you can see from the screenshot, I have removed the bottom faces so that it has less poly count so it is faster to render, Another reason is that there is no point of there being faces there if the player isn't going to see it. In the game it wont have physics and so it wont fall over and will only be on the ground.

Live Normal - Android app

noreply@blogger.com (Jordon Brooks) — Sun, 18 Nov 2018 16:32:00 +0000

Live Normal is an app that is designed to let you quickly create high quality textures up to 4k for free. It includes the ability to create seamless colours, normals, height metalics and ambient occlusion maps straight from your phone. I have used it and I feel like it offers more than most of the apps on the store and that it is free and it does physically based rendering (PBR) allows it to look more realistic. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.GerardSlee.LiveNormal&hl=en_GB

Jordon's Toolbox Devlog 1

noreply@blogger.com (Jordon Brooks) — Mon, 12 Nov 2018 18:01:00 +0000

A couple of weeks ago I was inspired by myself to take the blueprint weather system I made which was split into multiple files and components and recreate it in just one single C++ actor. I wanted to see how far I could get it without actually learning the basics of C++. Surprisingly it was fairly easy because I know other languages like C#, which are very similar.

What was hard?

I think the hardest part of this project was knowing where to put the code, for example It took me over a week to realise how to access material parameter collections in C++ because it kept crashing. The reason wasnt that the code was wrong, it was just in the wrong place because I didn't know that material parameter collections get created when the game is playing and I was trying to access it in the editor which just made it crash.

This piece of code enables and disables various particle systems depending on the type of of weather for example, when its raining we want to activate the rain particle system and turn of all the others, if it is a storm, you want lightning as well as rain so we turn them both on. This also changes the materials to make them more rainy if it is raining too.

This will be compiled as a plugin so that I can just drag and drop it in to all of my projects.

Zero Latency Virtual Reality

noreply@blogger.com (Jordon Brooks) — Mon, 29 Oct 2018 13:20:00 +0000

Zero Latency Virtual Reality is a place in nottingham that allows up to 8 people to play together in a virtual reality world. There are currently 4 games you can play: Singularity, Survival, Origins and Engineerium. For 45 minutes of playing it will cost you £35, for 30 minutes it will cost you £30. Also the cost changes depending on the time of day.

Survival

Survival is you generic zombie shooter where you have to defend a place by shooting zombies that are trying to kill you. You can build barriers to defend the place. Throughout the game you can use 5 weapons which are the: Assault Rifle, Sniper Rifle, a Minigun, a Heavy Assault Rifle and a Shotgun.

Engineerium

Engineerium is a puzzle game where you have to connect platforms together using teamwork.

Singularity

This is more or less the same as survival except its taking place in space station with no gravity and with robots that are attacking you instead of zombies. This is the closest of the games that looks like cyberpunk.

Origins

Unfortunately origins is not released yet so we won't be able to play on it until later but it looks like a zombie shooter with some cyberpunk mixed in because the environment is all broken and worn down.

What's the difference between this and home?

The difference between this and playing at home is that zero latency VR has a dedicated warehouse-sized room that you can walk around freely from wires which means no teleporting so that it is more realistic. This kind of reminds me when in the 80's you had to go to the local arcade in your town and I feel this is at that stage where VR is not in everyone's house just yet, but it on its way and it will be in there soon.

So which one am I interested in?

I can't really determine which one I like the most because they are all similar. but I do know that I don't like many puzzle games so I feel the only one I might not play would be the engineerium but it is in virtual reality so maybe I will like it.

History of Games

noreply@blogger.com (Jordon Brooks) — Wed, 17 Oct 2018 14:56:00 +0000

Development of the computer game industry

Computer games have been around since 1940s, starting from simple dots to squares moving across a CRT screen. (Anon., 2018) Over time we have improved the graphics from displaying simple 16x16 textures to 2048x2048 (2k) Ambient Occlusion maps, bump maps, normal maps and textures maps. The first game to have normal maps is Halo 1 due to the xbox’s hardware capabilities. Battlezone from 1980 was the first game to use 3D in wireframe (Plus, 2010).

Lifestyle of a gamer

Gamers are usually known for always sat down, playing games all day and all night. Many people see gamers as someone who doesn’t move, eat all the time, be overweight and don’t go outside.

While I don’t think this is true, many non-gamers do because that is what it appears like on the surface. If we dig down, a gamer is someone who spends their time challenging themselves day and night and compete with others to become one of the best players at the game. An example of this are those who play in competitions and today it could also be considered a full-time job because you can do things such as livestreaming and creating entertainment. (King, 2013)

Gaming pioneers

Allan Alcorn invented one of the best-selling game called pong. Pong is a 2D-based game that is based off tennis. It allows 2 players to compete against each other, getting a ball to the other side, if it hits your side then the opponent gets a point and if the ball hits their side you get a point. The first player to hit 10 wins. Many variations exist today featuring artificial intelligence and more range of colours.

Allan Alcorn first completed a bachelors degree in computer science in 1971 and spent 11 years working in research and development (R&D) in Atari. According to his LinkedIn page he has also worked for Apple to help make programs for the Macintosh.

Allan Alcorn

Tomohiro Nishikado invented space invaders, a single-player action game where you control a Gun from the surface of a planet and aliens are coming down towards it. You must defend your planet by shooting them down and dodging their attacks. The game uses 2 colours, green for the friendlies and white for aliens. Due to its hardware and programming at the time when you got close to killing all the aliens on the screen it will drastically speed up, making the game more difficult because it doesn’t have to draw as much to the screen.

Tomohiro first started with an engineering degree from Tokyo Denki University in 1968 and then got a job at Pacific Industries. Pong wasn't the first game he made he previously made over 10 before it such as Interceptor and Speed Race.

William Higinbotham was one of the people who created Tennis for Two, which was the first video game ever created. The game was created for an open day event at the Brookhaven National Labratory in 1958. The device used to play the game on was as big as a fridge and used analogue rather than digital and ran at 36 Hertz (0.0036GHz).

Higinbotham was born in 1910 and in 1940 became a physicist that worked on the first nuclear bomb at the Brookhaven National Labratory. Unfortunately he died in 1994.

Development technology platforms

In 1995 Nintendo released the virtual boy. This was the first virtual reality headset for games. The Virtual Boy was tailored towards children and adults. It featured a red and black 384x224 (Anon., 2018) display and used a controller for input and cartridges for games.

Comparing it to the pimax in 2018 which uses 8k (both eyes combined) with 32-Bit colour and motion controllers.

We have also started seeing watch games recently like Pokémon go and lifeline, but we have yet to see how this develops.

Gaming Cultures

There are many cultures within the gaming industry this is because people like playing in different ways for example, consoles. Consoles are designed to allow people to have hassle-free gaming, no need to change settings, just plug it in and play while on the other hand, pc gamers like to mess around and explore. They want the best settings, the best quality and the highest frame rates. PC gamers are also the most flexible with in terms of what they can use for example, single/multiple monitors, hardware, mouse, Keyboard and controllers. The choice of operating systems. The stores etc…

There are also people ranging from 16 to people in their 40s playing games on their mobile phones on games such as candy crush when there out and about like on the train.

Some people also like using games and consoles in the past because of the retro theme. Many people think differently on what is classed as retro, I believe that anything older than 2000 is classed as retro but others think that it is games you played before you’re 13.

Gaming Identities and Social impacts of gaming

Currently people play games at many ages, the younger are more influenced by the older (Around 18 – 50s) as show on YouTube. Games such as Minecraft started off as a game hidden below, no one knew about it until one day people discovered that you could make some interesting creations in the game, showed it to the world and then it took off. Ever since Minecraft has become popular it has become its own thing. One thing that makes Minecraft standout is that it is available on every platform and it allows for crossplay between them all.

Evolution In Consoles

In the 1972 the Magnavox Odyssey allowed families to game at a price of $580, It offered singleplayer games using overlays that had to be attached to the screen and projected white squares on to the tv.

The colecovision came out in 1982 it offered a resolution of 256x192 with 16 colours, 1 kilobyte of RAM and an 8-Bit CPU. The controller improved from the odyssey by having more buttons labeled 0 to 9 in a grid pattern and connected to the console by a cable.

In 1985 Nintendo released the Nintendo Entertainment System or NES for short. The NES offered 24 colours 2KB of RAM and an 8-bit CPU that was faster than the odyssey, The resolution of Nintendo's console was 256x240 and allowed up to 2 players to play together on the same console.

The Sega Mega Drive, which came out in 1988 Improved upon the NES by having over double the amount of colours (64) and had 64KB of RAM. It also had a 16-bit CPU at 7.5MHz and featured stereo sound. The resolution of the Sega Mega Drive was 320x224.

Nintendo, in 1996, released the Nintendo 64 (N64) that doubled the resolution of NES (640x480) and was equipped with 4MB of RAM along side a 64-bit CPU @ 94 MHz. The console could also use up to 16 million colours (32-bit) and featured 16-bit stereo sound, and allowed 4 players to play at the same time.

In 2001, Microsoft began released the Xbox. it allowed up to 4 players to play locally and had internet access via ethernet to play online. The system had 64MB of RAM, a 733MHz CPU and offered internal storage of 8GB to save game progress instead of using a memory card like the previous consoles The price at the release was £300 and used Discs instead of cartridges.

Microsoft followed up with the release of Xbox 360 in 2004 which had 512MB of RAM, a tri-core PowerPC CPU at 3.6 GHz. It also Improved the controllers by making them wireless and was capable of running games at 1280x720 (720p) and had 250GB of internal storage that the user could save games to. The Xbox 360 also had 3 USB 2.0 ports and in later models, had wireless capability and kinect support. Extra info: during the transition from Xbox to the Xbox 360, Microsoft changed hardware vendors from Nvidia to Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).

The Xbox One, which came out in 2013, brought huge improvements. The console had a massive 8GB of RAM and an octa-core CPU at 1.75 GHz. In fact this is the same specs that you would find in today's mid to high range laptops. The storage also got an upgrade to 500GB and later upgraded to 1TB (1000GB) along with upgrading the USB ports to 3.0 to improve transfer speed. One major feature that the previous console didn't have is built-in Wi-Fi.

In today's generation we have the Xbox One X and PlayStation 4 Pro. The Xbox One X has a faster processor and graphics processor and 12GB of RAM. Both consoles can run at 4K at 30 frames-per-second, 60 on selected major titles like Halo, and Gears of War. Both consoles are also capable of running virtual reality.

Bibliography

Anon., 2018. [Online]
Available at: https://www.top10hq.com/top-10-oldest-computer-games
[Accessed 02 October 2018].

Anon., 2018. Virtual Boy | Nintendo | FANDOM powered by Wikia. [Online]
Available at: http://nintendo.wikia.com/wiki/Virtual_Boy
[Accessed 02 October 2018].

Plus, P., 2010. The evolution of 3D games. [Online]
Available at: https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/gaming/the-evolution-of-3d-games-700995
[Accessed 02 October 2018].

RUTHERFORD, S., 2016. Nintendo Getting Back Into VR, 20 Years After Virtual Boy. [Online]
Available at: https://www.tomsguide.com/us/nintendo-vr-return,news-22199.html
[Accessed 7 October 2018].

How I created the rain in unreal engine Part 1: Baking Normal Maps

noreply@blogger.com (Jordon Brooks) — Wed, 17 Oct 2018 13:18:00 +0000

Yesterday I showed off dynamic animated rain on materials on objects. Today I will be showing how I created them.

First off we need normal maps. To do this I used blender and created rain splashes and drips using the built-in dynamic painting system to create ripples on a plane using a particle system as the brush.

To set this up you create a plane, go to the physics tab at the very right and add the dynamic paint modifier. Create a canvas and change the surface type setting in the dynamic paint advanced section. Then you adjust the speed to 0.5 (50%) and the play around with the samping, spring and smoothness setting to the right of it. This will change the appearance of the ripples that will be created.
Note: the plane also has to be subdivided lots because it determines the quality of the ripples.

To create the rain you add another plane, raise it above the other one as show in the picture, then to to the particles tab and add the rain. Under the emission section the number is how much rain it will create, so the higher this number is, the heavier the rain will become. Un-check the even distribution and make sure it is set to random and not jittered as rain in real life is random. Just a bit lower under the physics section, instead of it being newtonian you want it to be a fluid and check die on hit.
Once that is done, all you need to do is to go to the physics tab and click on the dynamic paint modifier, this time create a brush and set the paint source to be the particle system you just created. Now you have a working rain splash animation.

I created a material for the splashes in cycles by using the geometry node and splitting it off in to the different colours and adding 1 to them, multiplying them by 0.5 and then, combining them , plugging it in to an emission for removing shadows and lastly connecting it to the surface output.

Lastly we are ready to bake the normals. To do this we first move the camera to the top of the plane with the splashes. To hide the plane that spawning the particles we go to the object tab and go all the way down to the bottom and in the cycles section uncheck everything, then in the hierarchy view where you see all your objects press the eye icon on the plane and this will hide it from our view while still being able to see the splashes created by it. once you have aligned the camera with the plane you then set the resolution of the camera to something like 2048x2048 and reduce it to 25% because the higher the resolution is, when we go to stitch the animation later, the tool we will use will stitch the textures together forming one large image, in my case for 512x512 bake of the normals will produce a 4k image to be used in the engine so if we were to use 2048 the final texture could easily be over 24k, which would most likely kill your computer unless you have a beefy system with 16GB or over with enough vram on you gpu! We use a single texture strip because this is what the engine takes to create animations and it could be compressed if you were to remove all the space you are not using such as the space between the puddles.

After you have exported the animation as a png sequence, you can use tools such as Leshy to stitch them together and remove the space that's not needed.

Here is a gif of the final animation:

Here is a video I have made showing these steps

Rain in Unreal Engine

noreply@blogger.com (Jordon Brooks) — Tue, 16 Oct 2018 21:34:00 +0000

I have spend all weekend reworking my rain system for one of my project and I will be using this in my new game to give it a more cyberpunk feel. It is more advanced than your typical rain systems because it automatically detects what faces are upwards facing and creates splashes on the surface, drips from the sides and it also leaves the bottom look dry for if your using it for like a shelter for the player but they can also see the top and sides of it as well.

As this rain is also a part of my fully dynamic weather system, it allows for multiple weather such as rain and snow. It also has a day / night cycle. This system that I have made is very powerful.

Thinking about this more, If I make this year's game with this and virtual reality, it would be pretty awesome because it adds to the cyberpunk theme.

Reflecting on its current state my next approach to improve this would be to dynamically create clouds based on a mask created with noise that is added to the skysphere that get darker depending if it is raining. Another good idea for this is to add more complex weather conditions such as thunderstorms, wind, etc...

Creating my own Game Engine in C#

noreply@blogger.com (Jordon Brooks) — Sat, 06 Oct 2018 13:18:00 +0000

While I was off college over summer I worked on putting my skills to the test. Creating a game engine from scratch is hard, this is because they are so complex.

What is a game engine?

In the 1980s creating a game was hard. This was because there were no game engines which means for every game you made you had to code it from rendering graphics to the screen, the player's actions. This is why it took so long and hard to create games back then. A game engine is simply a way to reuse code to make it easier to make games.

What does a game engine include?

A way to render graphics to the screen
Handle user input
Manage sounds
Show Effects
Collision detection
User Interface
Could include templates for objects like players
A way to handle objects
Could have physics
Could have artificial intelligence

How does a game engine work?

Game engines work by allowing the developer have access to tools which lets them develop games faster. Each of the topics I mentioned above are all functions or classes.

When a game starts it creates a thread (a second program) which runs the game loop. The game loop is responsible for rendering frames to your monitor over and over again and processing any necessary logic such as player movement and health systems.

The game loops

As this is a never-ending loop (apart from when you close the game) it is very important that you have built-in error handling that will close the loop if there is a problem as what you don't want is it to completely break and crash altogether.

Handling Logic

The way my game engine handles logic is that it loops through a list of all the defined objects in the game and runs any code that is in the "Tick" function every time the "gameloop" function runs.

Another think you can see in the code is that I start a timer when the gameloop start and stop it when it stops. I do this to measure how long it takes to complete the loop and process it in to frames per second (fps). The algorithm I use to convert the milliseconds to frames per seconds is 1000/milliseconds so for example if a frame took 1 second to process it would be 1 fps. (1s = 1000ms)

Objects and how they work

In my game engine objects use components like unreal engine. So a object with no components would be invisible and can act purely to serve functions.

I also have a box component which allows you to create squares, a sound component which is responsible for creating sounds and music, a sprite component for using images and lastly, a text component that handles creating text on the screen. Objects are also used for the heads-up-display (HUD).

Rendering graphics

The way you render graphics to the screen is that you create a virtual "canvas" the same size a your monitor and you render all the objects to that canvas and then render the canvas to the monitor. This is how "Vsync" works and it minimises screen tearing and flashing that can occur.

An Example game

This is an example game I have made with the newly created engine. It is currently bare but it has the potential to render more complex scenes.

Dark Metal Material

noreply@blogger.com (Jordon Brooks) — Fri, 05 Oct 2018 16:14:00 +0000

I have made a dark metal material in substance designer. This will be used in my game for this year for the floor or wall, scratches can be dynamically added to show wear.

Concept Art: Heads

noreply@blogger.com (Jordon Brooks) — Fri, 05 Oct 2018 14:27:00 +0000

I have recently been working on some concept art for my player in my new cyberpunk game. I have experimented with using different styles of hair and the colours used on them. I my opinion I like the bright green because it looks like its glowing and it could fit in with the theme of the game.

The Future of Graphics

noreply@blogger.com (Jordon Brooks) — Thu, 04 Oct 2018 22:08:00 +0000

Recently, Nvidia announced and shipped their new graphics cards called RTX 20XX. These new cards offer an important new piece of technology for gaming and graphics by using "Real Time Ray-Tracing" and artificial intelligence to improve scenes.

What is Ray Tracing?

Ray Tracing is an alternative method to rendering graphics to your monitor. The current method of generating graphics to the screen is called rasterization. This works by taking an object and directly converting it in to pixels on your monitor. While this is fine for games because it is fast, using this technique can make for unrealistic-looking scenes. We can see this in blender if we use blender render engine.

Ray tracing is the simulation of photons of light traveling from a light source to the player but reversed (in blender this is called the "cycles" engine). As This simulates hundreds of photons the slower this is. In the new Nvidia graphics cards there are newly designed cores that specifically tackle ray tracing. Unfortunately to make it real-time they had to reduce the amount of photons that are simulated and they don't lose quality by doing this because the cards has AI which aids ray tracing by estimating what it would look like if it were high quality.

Another feature of these cards is the ability to render at very high resolutions 4k+ without any impact of frame rates using the AI to estimate what it would look like.

This is some interesting technologies that I would like to further be developed. Using ray tracing with virtual reality and being able to render at 4k+ with no or little impact on FPS really could change the gaming industry.

FISHER, J. (2018). GeForce RTX Propels PC Gaming’s Golden Age with Real-Time Ray Tracing NVIDIA Blog. [online] The Official NVIDIA Blog. Available at: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2018/08/20/geforce-rtx-real-time-ray-tracing/ [Accessed 4 Oct. 2018]

Battlefield 1 Trailer Storyboard

noreply@blogger.com (Jordon Brooks) — Tue, 02 Oct 2018 10:42:00 +0000

I have recreated the battlefield 1 trailer in storyboards by using storyboarder. Here is a comparison of the key frames. In the first few sketches I used a smaller brush and later using a larger one.

In this first scene a man is hitting an enemy with a spiky bat (direction hinted with arrow) and explosions in the background.

In this next scene it is a extreme long shot with a woman on a horse moving across the desert. This was hard for me to draw because it is very focused towards shadows. Thinking back on this particular frame, you cant really see the horse as good because it focuses on showing the vast landscape.

The next one is a close up of the woman riding the horse with a sword. The camera angle like this suggests that she is powerful against the enemies.

This frame is a aerial shot looking down upon the war below. This is another example of how there showing how big the maps are and the type of vehicles you can use. I this one there is a person in a plane shooting at the enemies below. In this picture I have also experimented on using a different colour to increase the detail.

This is showing a soldier hitting an enemy with a shovel while a plane flies past. This is a 2 shot from a low angle and this suggests that they both have equal change. With this i have tried using a different style of shading sing just the silhouette.

This next one is an over the shoulder shot of a soldier in a plane firing a machine gun at an enemy plane in the distance. This takes you through the eyes of a soldier shooting down a plane in the game and it just shows how much detail they have added to the game.

The next one is showing a building on breaking from a plane. After looking back at this one I do think it would of been better with using the technique from the plane one with using a different colour to bring more detail in to the smoke and the pieces that are falling off.

This one shows an engineer (assuming he is in a tank) is starting the engine of a tank by pushing a metal rod like on the old cars in the time. The shot used in this is a close up.

The next frame shows a army of people on horses going in to battle with a plane flying over head. Again this would of been better if I added that extra detail to more show that they are horses and people on them.

This one shows a soldier in Armour firing a machine gun. I have added extra detail with using a different colour. From looking at it now I noticed that I put the right hand too far up.

In conclusion I think that i have made a good first attempt at storyboarding and will use what I have learnt from this in my future animations and storyboards.

Battlefield 5 Beta Review

noreply@blogger.com (Jordon Brooks) — Wed, 12 Sep 2018 19:10:00 +0000

Battlefield 5 is a World War 2 themed shooter where you play as a soldier.

Gameplay and Mechanics.

You have 4 specialities, medic, support, sniper and engineer. Medics can revive and heal your teammates. Support can give ammo and engineers can repair and destroy vehicles.

There are also various vehicles you can drive such as tanks, airplanes and bikes.

As you progress with each level you unlock new guns and gadgets which will help you and your team win battles. The game supports up to 5 players in a squad and 32 players in each team.

once a teams score reaches 0 the other team wins. The amount of flags and how long the team holds them determine how much damage they do to the enemy team. If you get hurt in the game you can get a health pack by either by a medic giving you one (teamwork), going to a outpost with a health pack crate or waiting a while for it to regenerate which could take a while. This is also true with ammo.

Although the gameplay is good as this is a beta there are bugs and glitches. Throughout my experience with battlefield 5 there are an number of bugs that stand out. In certain circumstances when a teammate is revived he can potentially get "stuck" in an position. Another bug is to do with the settings in the game, if you use directx 12, no matter what in-game settings you use, low, medium, high or ultra, 720p, 1080p, 4k, it will always lag and stutter, this is because for some reason battlefield 5 will use up 95% of your video memory and then result to hammering your ram which will decrease fps from 80 to 15. If this bug is fixed, directx 12 could increase fps especially on systems with more than 1 graphics card.

With all of that said, I would rate the beta 8/10 mainly for its realism and gameplay.

Phone Model

noreply@blogger.com (Jordon Brooks) — Sun, 09 Sep 2018 13:54:00 +0000

Today I have made a simple phone using Blender and Substance Painter. This asset is fully customisable meaning I can animate each material. For the screen itself I used a screenshot for the texture.

Each colour represents a different material. I have done this to easily see what materials are where before adding textures.

Here is a render of the phone using substance painter's Iray:

Overall This took me about 45 minutes to make.