Progress update – 6/09

Posted on June 14, 2009 by Brad Carney

So yeah, I haven’t posted any updates in awhile. I know I know… what a jerk I am! I’ll sit here and wait while you all throw bricks at me… OUCH! Alright now that that’s over with, let’s get on with showing you all what’s been going on with Project Vega.

Just because there haven’t been updates in awhile doesn’t at all mean that progress has been slow – in fact, things have been going extremely smoothly! About a month ago, I scheduled a list of features that I wanted to have implemented for a… “certain event in August” (hint hint). It was supposed to take over two months. I was done within two weeks.

First, a lot of rather simple features have been implemented which have dramatically increased the quality of how things look: filtering, mipmapping, and anti-aliasing. Some of you might have noticed how blocky and pixely the old screenshots of Vega (remember, it’s a codename!) looked. However, these new features have greatly improved how things look. Here’s a little before/after look:

Before:

DM-Sacrificial 04

After:

beta0132

We’ve also made a lot of progress on the maps and other content. Recently, I took one of the older maps that WastedYouth made, and retextured it using high-res textures. After doing that, doing some minor restructuring and lighting, it looks a hell of a lot better! Again, here’s a before/after of the map:

Before:

beta00091

After:

beta0130

So as you can see, things are progressing nicely! A lot of other things have been done, but none of them are quite ready to show… yet! We’ll have an announcement or two in the next few days – after all, I don’t want to cram too much into one post! :P

Anyway, one small bit of bad news I’d like to pass on – Agent Spork will unfortunately be too busy to be part of the project :( We’d love to have him aboard, but he’s just too busy with real life issues right now. Despite his absence, we’ll be just fine in the mapping department!

That’s all for now!

Posted in Screenshots, Technology, Updates | 4 Comments

What makes a good FPS weapon?

Posted on May 7, 2009 by Brad Carney

So last week, Mechadon, The Doom Freak and I were discussing the weapons I had come up with in the design documents. After discussing some of their concerns over the weapons, as well as listening to their ideas, I began to think about what makes for a good FPS weapon. After all, with so many ideas, how can one tell if they’re any good or not without implementing them all and trying them out (which would be very time consuming)?

Here’s what I came up with for what makes a good FPS weapon:

  • Simple. This eliminates confusion. When weapons have multiple attacks, and work differently in different situations and against different monsters, that creates a lot of confusion for the player. If a player is confused, they don’t feel in control because they don’t know what the weapon is going to do, and nothing is more frustrating than the feeling of not being in control of your environment.
  • Balanced. If a weapon is completely dominant in all situations, there’s no variety, and more importantly, there’s less skill involved. If all you have to do to win is “grab the best weapon and start shooting”… that’s pretty boring. Not mention that there’s not as much skill involved in that as getting multiple weapons and picking the right weapon for whatever situation you’re in. So, to be balanced, the weapon should be dominant in specific situations… not *all* situations.
  • Great aesthetics. Great looks and sounds. Come on – this one’s a no brainer!
  • Based in reality. This goes back to the whole theme of people enjoying skill-building when playing games. If the weapon is completely out there and completely defies the laws of physics, you’re not going to feel like you’re developing any skills. It’ll just feel silly, and like a big waste of time!

If you look at a lot of Doom’s weapons, which I think have largely been successful, they fit almost all of these criteria. Take the SSG for instance. It’s simple, balanced (slow-burning, mid-range, “default” weapon), looks great and feels great to shoot, and has some basis in reality.

So what do you think? Do you have anything to add to the list? Did I completely blow it? Let us know what you think!

Posted in Game Design | 12 Comments

Meet the team!

Posted on May 2, 2009 by Brad Carney

After we gave the world its first glimpse of the project codenamed Project Vega, we brought some additional people onto the team, bringing you fine people one step closer to having a new fun FPS to play. I’m very pleased with the people who have joined our great little team, and want to introduce them. Will you know any of these people? I bet you will!

  • Agent Spork. Mapper extraordinaire. If you haven’t played Ultimate Simplicity yet, you’re missing out! Seriously, go play it now!
  • The Doom Freak. Modeler/designer. Remember that sketch I showed you all a couple of weeks ago? That was made by The Doom Freak!
  • Dynamix. User interface/texture artist. He’s already made some great stuff that I wish I could show you!
  • Esselfortium. Texture artist. Known for his work on the 32in24 series, as well as the other 999,999 Doom projects that he’s working on. Where’s Greenwar 2 already? :(

So I’d like to publicly welcome these guys to the team! They join me, Todd Nickens (WastedYouth), and Brett “Mechadon” Harrell who were already part of the team. All in all, I think we have a great group of guys, and I’m know I’m having a lot of fun working with them :)

Posted in News | 5 Comments

Progress update – 4/09

Posted on April 19, 2009 by Brad Carney

So things have been pretty quiet from us ever since we posted our initial batch of screenshots. What’s up with that? Did we die? Are we too busy playing Ghouls vs. Humans to get any work done?

Well, not quite (though who knows – a lot of GvH may be being played)! While a lot has been going on, nothing is *quite* ready to be announced yet. However, if everything goes smoothly, within the next week I’ll be able to tell you about some hirings, as well as your first opportunity to see (and play!) Project Vega in person! That’s right – you’ll get the opportunity to tell me about how boring and crappy it is to play in person!

Anyway, things have been going extremely well, as those of you following our Twitter accounts may well be aware of. We’re all in the midst of producing a 3 map demo to help us build the foundation of our game. Todd has been working on the first map of this demo, and I’ve been writing up the design documents for the game, which detail everything that should be implemented (menus, monsters, weapons, etc.) as well as some guidelines for how those things are to be implemented (ex. “make it so that the monster is fun and doesn’t suck”).

One of the people we’ve brought aboard, whose hiring we haven’t announced yet (but can you figure out who it is?), has started taking these design documents and drawing sketches of the monsters in them. Once the sketch gets approved, he takes the sketch and builds a model out of it, which then gets skinned, animated, and anything else done to it down the line that we feel it needs.

… wait, you want to see one of those sketches? Well, alright then!

scan002

This is a concept sketch of one of the monsters that will be appearing in Project Vega. If we’re lucky, and I don’t completely suck as a game designer, it should be plenty of fun to fight against!

Anyway, more from us later! :-D

Posted in Screenshots, Updates | 5 Comments

Our development phases

Posted on April 8, 2009 by Brad Carney

After more than a year, we’ve finally finished the first phase of our development. This first development phase has been dedicated to getting our basic technology up and running: having a fully functional map editor, being able to run around in maps, getting all of the scripting systems into place, and getting skyboxes, lightmaps, and other visual technology elements implemented and working properly. It’s been a lot of work just to get the very basics in, but we’re very pleased with the results so far!

So now we move into the next phase of development: application. To use a housing metaphor, if the first phase was laying the foundation, this phase is about putting up walls, and flushing out the overall design of the house. In short, we’re starting to make use of everything the foundation has provided us to make something we can live in… or in our case, play.

Each phase of development is also broken into two phases: a gameplay phase, and a visual phase. So, once the gameplay elements are all set for a phase, we work on making them all look pretty. For instance, with the maps, in the gameplay phase we focused on getting them up and running so that there was actual geometry you could run around on, and in the visual phase we focused on making them look nice with cool lighting, textures, etc.

So now that we’ve completed the first visual phase, it’s time to get back to focusing on gameplay. It should be a lot of fun to start utilizing everything that we put into place before.

I’ll leave you all with this: a lightmap texture generated for one of the new maps Todd’s working on. Each region represents the lighting for a face, so if you stretch that region out of the face, and combine it with the texture, you end up with the face’s lighting. Enjoy! :D

A lightmap generated from a new map.

A lightmap generated from a new map.

Posted in Technology | 4 Comments

Follow us on Twitter!

Posted on April 7, 2009 by Brad Carney

That’s right! We’ve joined the rest of the trendy world and joined twitter! For those of you interested in following all of the little things with this project that aren’t important enough to write a full blog about (which seems to be most things), be sure to subscribe to our twitter pages! I’ve added a set of links to the sidebar for our twitter pages, in case you’re having trouble finding them.

Enjoy! :D

Posted in News | Leave a comment

Going backwards: From per-pixel to light mapping

Posted on April 2, 2009 by Brad Carney

About a week ago when we posted our first screenshots, I was hoping that that would be the end of our first phase in which we focused purely on visuals. Everything was looking great: skyboxes, high-res textures, per-pixel lighting, and several unshown features were all implemented and running smoothly – that is, up until Todd (WastedYouth) finalized his map.

The process of finalizing the map basically meant copying and pasting one section of it 3x because of the symmetry of the map (kind of like copying half of your CTF map when it’s all done). This quadrupled the number of faces and lights on the map. Even after all of my best optimizations (short of writing the shader in assembly), this brought the framerate to… 12 FPS! :O

What was causing this drop? The lighting. When I turned it off, I would go back to 60 FPS (which is what Vega is capped at). I tried lowering the max. number of lights that could affect a particular face (it had started at 8), and it helped performance, but made things look pretty crappy. After all,  only allowing a face to be lit by one or two lights just plain isn’t going to make them look very good – hell, sometimes 8 wasn’t even enough!

It didn’t seem like there was any way to speed up the lighting. When every pixel on the screen is being shaded by 8 lights, it’s just plain going to be slow… unless you have some kind of monster graphics card, which we don’t want people to have to have. So, I finally I got to thinking that if 99% of these faces aren’t going to be moving, and the lights aren’t going to be changing… why not precompute the lighting?

And that’s exactly what I did! From now on, we’re going to be using light mapping for the lighting as much as possible. I’ve just implemented the first version of it, and I’m very pleased with the results so far. Here’s why I think this is going to work out great:

  • It looks just as good! Look at these two screenshots – the first one is using light mapping, and the second per-pixel lighting. Note that they look almost exactly the same – except that the light mapped-shot has 4x the framerate :) beta0043beta0049
  • Additional effects. Some effects, like shadows and light-emitting faces, really aren’t practical on a real-time basis. So, we’ll end up getting even cooler effects out of this, and they won’t have any impact on the framerate whatsoever!
  • We can still do per-pixel lighting. Faces that move, or lights that are capable of changing won’t be factored into the light map. So, we really get to have the best of both worlds!

There are some drawbacks – it will take slightly more memory to do this (but not a lot), and it will either add to the load times, or the time it takes to save a map in the editor. In the end though, it will be worth it… because who wants to play a game at 12 FPS?

Hope you guys are as pleased with this development as I am! Let us know what you think! :-D

Posted in Screenshots, Technology | 6 Comments

Help us help you!

Posted on March 24, 2009 by Brad Carney

We’ve recently added a “Help Wanted” page because… well, we need help! If helping out cool projects is your thing, and you have some of the skills we’re looking for, then be sure to head over there and check out that page! The more great people we have aboard, the better a game we can make for all of you great fans!

Thanks so much!

Posted in News | 15 Comments

Welcome to the Vega Development Blog!

Posted on March 23, 2009 by Brad Carney

I’d like to officially kick things off by welcoming you all to the Vega Development Blog! Vega is the codename for a new first-person shooter (ex. Doom, Quake, Halo) being developed by Brad “Carnevil” Carney (me), Todd “WastedYouth” Nickens, and Brett “Mechadon” Harrell. To see this game in action, click the “Screenshots” tab at the top of this page.

So, why should you care about this blog? What’s your incentive to keep reading, and to come back? Here’s everything we plan to offer in this blog:

  • The latest news on our development
  • Articles on the technology behind Vega
  • Insight from the developers
  • Our opinions on what makes for a great game

In addition, you will have the opportunity to watch Vega’s development from start to finish. If any of this interests you, then you’ve come to the right place! … or hey, if you just want to see some screenshots of a kick-ass game, we’ll have that too! :D

Feel free to share your thoughts and opinions as we go. If there’s stuff you’re liking, tell us and you’ll get more of it. Don’t like something? Let us know that too, and we’ll offer something else.

We hope you all enjoy this blog. It ought to be a fun journey :)

Posted in News | 7 Comments