Eternal Crisis

3D Masons

2011-08-03T05:14:00.000-07:00

I've actually started a blog over at www.3dmasons.com which covers ramblings, Unreal Engine 3 programming, game mechanics programming, and so forth. If you're visiting this blog, you might as well go there instead, I very rarely update this blog anymore. I kind of keep it around as a past archive while working with OpenGL and GLSL.

A Long Time

2011-03-05T23:44:00.000-08:00

Realized I was still linking to this blog at many other websites, like Leadwerks, so I might as well write something. The Eternal Crisis blog is still being used but honestly I keep forgetting to blog. There is just so much to do that blogging is the last thing I tend to think about. Though I try to remind myself to blog, it's just another task on a pile of tasks.

First thing I had to do here was kill all the spam that accumulated. So damn pointless to sit there and spam. The pay for it can't be that damn good, everyone is better off wasting energy on things that is more productive and financially beneficial than spamming. Unless there are things about spam, purchasing email addresses, and all that, that I don't know about; which is very plausible because I don't do that kind of thing.

Anyways, just a quick update. EC is still in progress, and the most current plan is to start releasing demo prototypes, that progress in the type of mini-game. Starting with a simple target range (but, a mini-game, so there will be points and so on), then a more elaborate course using targets for enemies, and so on.

This will all be soon available for the public but that plan may change to community members who are more involved in our project.

Until next time.

Public EC Blog

2009-12-17T20:38:00.000-08:00

I had created a public blog over at the Eternal Crisis site. The point of the blog is that multiple members of the team can freely blog progress and development. Not everyone on the team knows about it yet, but we're steadily adding everyone's account so that they may blog whenever they wish.

The link is above but it is found here: http://www.eternalcrisis.net/blogs.

Desaturation Glow

2009-12-14T21:53:00.000-08:00

I was in the middle of attempting to reproduce an effect called "soft-glow" that GIMP uses, which was a feature request on Leadwerks by Ubu. Their effect uses a type of desaturation, so I had decided to work on the basic effects found on most programs. Brightness, Contrast, Hue, Saturation, Desaturation, and so forth. Combining some of the new functions I made in GLSL I landed on an effect that produced similar results as below.

The difference between the original results and the results below are several. The results before produced more of a blur since I was using a blur buffer used by multiple other effects. Without using the blur buffer as part of the glow effect I would sacrifice the volumetric light scattering effect, but using the blur buffer I get more blur than anything. So, I simply adjusted the texture look-up to take out the blur and kept the volumetric light scattering.

Brightness values and desaturation are what produced this type of effect. I think it brings out the brightness in the bright areas and the darkness in the dark areas. Which of course is what the intent of this type of shader should reproduce when adjusting brightness, desaturation, and so forth.

Updated: Hopefully these screens will provide a better look at the effects of this new shader.

Off

On

Clouds

2009-12-12T18:48:00.000-08:00

I haven't been keeping this blog updated; I have a new blog over at Leadwerks, my projects forum, and two friends forums that I update. That mixed with all the time I put into programming, there isn't much time left, and I tend to forget to update this blog.

Anyways, once I had most of the bulky parts of the new framework finished, I wanted to go back to clouds. Clouds was a major missing piece of the dynamic day and night cycle I had for this project. Without the clouds the sky looked very boring even with all the "pretty colors." I knew I had to do it, but I wanted to do it properly and the most efficient way.

I kept my Leadwerks Blog updated while I progressed and eventually made a video displaying some of the initial results. As of now, the results are better, but I still have to make a new video. Here is the current video displaying the new cloud layer (already updated to handle up to four cloud layers, which I'll explain in another blog post), displaying different cloud luminosities during sun rotation, and I had cloud density assigned to a couple keys to show how I can dynamically change the clouds density.

You'll have to mind the quality once I had converted it to mpeg format. The brightness is also increased during the conversion, it isn't that bright, but can be adjusted for that brightness. The short night portion is also much darker than it really is.

Happy Thanksgiving

2009-11-26T19:47:00.000-08:00

I haven't updated my blog for some time due to constantly programming several portions of my project. I'm redesigning my framework, programming a new editor with features that are more geared towards my project, having multiple meeting sessions with my team, and playing games when my brain gets more stressed.

Since it's Thanksgiving, I had decided to take it easy today, but that never turns out the way I planned. I programmed for a straight six hours before stopping, realizing that I'm not taking it easy, and played Left 4 Dead 2 for the rest of the day (until it was time to eat, that is).

A couple posts back I had posted up a screen-shot of a scene I was just messing around with and I'm sharing another of the same scene with different settings with vegetation, model LOD ranges, and so forth. I still need some more models, even if it continues to be models for testing purposes, it would help with my scene visuals.

Happy Thanksgiving

Framework

2009-11-13T17:09:00.001-08:00

I've started rewriting my entire framework from scratch. My current framework was great for quickly testing several aspects of the engine, especially shader effects, processing scene entities, and so forth. My original framework will be kept for that singular purpose.

I have a lot of reasons for creating a new framework from scratch, instead of just rewriting my current one, but it isn't a major deal. My current one isn't exactly very large, and a lot of it was written while I was still very new (using "very" since I'm still new, just not as new) so it isn't structured very well for a full game.

Large class names is one of the reasons. I did it to be organized, but while time went on I realized it was so daunting to type long classes. I was very new (again with the very) to the BlitzMax language and didn't use my familiar language of C#. For example: Game.RenderManager.SetAntialias(True) or Game.CameraManager.Camera.FarRange. All very long, especially when it comes to typing several of them together in a single line; EntityPosition(MyEntity, Vec3(EntityPosition(Game.CameraManager.Camera).x, 0.0, EntityPosition(Game.CameraManager.Camera).z))

Of course, I have plans for something like; EntityPosition(MyEntity, Vec3(EntityPosition(F.Cam.Main).x, 0.0, EntityPosition(F.Cam.Main).z))

Still fairly long, but not nearly as bad, and I can easily change the structure when I really start working on that portion of the framework.

The most important reason is threading. Utilizing threading specifically just to load content during loading times and hopefully dynamically; based on player position and camera far range. Leadwerks has Groups that are shown or hidden based on (my guess) the camera position and far range. I plan to use the same method, but before a group is shown (and given time before the player has positioned themselves close to be shown the group) to dynamically load all the models within that group and neighboring groups, using threads.

I will be doing a lot of testing, but this kind of setup is ideal for a game with very large terrain, and probably wouldn't be bad for small terrain based games. If it was too small of a map I'd just load everything though.

This is my progress and I have no screen-shots to share yet, but I will soon. Actually a video, for this process; Load Application, Developer Splash, Engine Splash, GUI. Multiple GUI actions. GUI New Game. Loading screen. Quick map.

I'll continue to post progress from there.

Editor

2009-11-10T02:45:00.000-08:00

I haven't posted an update in a few days, but I definitely haven't been sitting still. Working on several more post-processing effects, polishing the effects I've already done, managing my team, reorganizing/recoding my framework, and working on this:

(click for full view)

The Leadwerks Sandbox is a great tool, the new version 2.3 Leadwerks Editor (which comes out soon) is going to be even better, but my project demands a lot of custom features for our project. Therefore, I have to create a editor, one that fulfills all the needs of my project.

I have a lot more work to do but I started on it this morning. The canvas is indeed Leadwerks powered, has a rotating cube for initial tests, camera rotation/movement, and so forth.

Just Having Some Fun

2009-11-06T20:26:00.001-08:00

Radial Masked Blur

2009-11-05T16:21:00.001-08:00

Here are the initial results of the Radial Masked Blur effect. I need to edit the masks for the horizontal and vertical blurring, but it isn't too bad as-is. The editing part is really easy to do anyways.

No Radial Masked Blur

Radial Masked Blur Full Radius

Radial Masked Blur Partial Radius

Radial Masked Blur Horizontal Bottom

Radial Masked Blur Horizontal Top/Bottom

Radial Masked Blur Vertical

Blur value is still set to 0.007 but is now using 12 samples instead of 8. I can easily change the effect with values and changing the mask. Here is an example of the mask used for the full radius blurred effect. Click for the full view.

Radial Masked Blur Radius Mask

(Click for full view)

The same type of mask textures are used for the Masked Blur effect, which will be posted shortly, except that their inverted. Some of this effect variations will be used in my project, such as while sprinting/running, getting fatigued, and so forth.

Edit: Already fixed some of the textures and the effect looks a lot better. The Horizontal Top/Bottom texture made the effect look fairly bad, but now it's a lot better since the mask texture is more defined.

New Effects

2009-11-05T13:50:00.000-08:00

Due to my recent organizing with the rendering portion of my framework (which honestly still needs more organizing) I'm able to more quickly create additional effects without the original long way of creating and testing. With the new organization I'm able to create a new effect, test it extensively, and quickly consider it an official library or not.

That being said, I have several new effects coming up, and not just one or two. I created a shader and just kept going, to have several effects added to my library. The results will be posted next once I finalize a couple shaders and some of the textures.

I had taken the Radial Blur shader and created another shader called "Radial Masked Blur" which is the same effect, but uses a mask texture to define where (and the shape) of the blur. The blur can still be adjusted and I've adjusted it so the amount of samples can be adjusted (the more the samples the better the effect but is more expensive).

I had then taken that effect and went further. Using two of the blur buffers, I created the same type of effect but with additional blurring, using a mask texture to define where and the shape of the blur. I then combined these effects with the Depth of Field effect.

Radial Masked Blur, Masked Blur, Masked Depth of Field, with each having several different mask textures, giving me multiple types of effects.

Some of these effects you would have seen in other games, and the results will be posted shortly.

Depth of Field

2009-11-04T07:52:00.000-08:00

I wanted to work on a radial depth of field but in order to do that I have create the depth of field effect. Leadwerks already comes with two depth of field effects, near and far. I didn't want to manipulate those shaders to work a different way and I didn't want to copy and paste the shader as the start.

Therefore, I created one from scratch, and it's a method that Crytek uses in Crysis (CryEngine 2.0). Which they themselves adopted from ATi/Scheuermann and it's a very effective technique. Posted below are some of the initial results.

No Depth of Field

Depth of Field Heavy Blur

Depth of Field Lowered Blur

Depth of Field Adjusted Far Range

Depth of Field Adjusted Focal Range

Initial results aren't bad at all in my opinion and does resemble the depth of field effect displayed on Crysis. As shown above, several values of the shader can be adjusted on the fly; blur, far range, near range, and the focal range. This depth of field effect will be very useful in my current project and other projects in the future.

The next idea is to make a radial style depth of field. What this means is the focal, instead of being a square, will be in a radial shape. I will eventually get this effect going. As of now, I need a good break, since getting this depth of field working as I wanted had taken several hours.

Radial Blur

2009-11-03T04:46:00.000-08:00

After doing the night vision effect, messing with textures constantly, failing constantly with those textures, I decided to move on for now. I will eventually get an artist to create some textures to better fit the night vision effect. Right now, it isn't bad, but with a talented artists hand, it should look as good as any night vision effect (more true once I adjust some of the settings as well).

I started working on the radial blur effect, which isn't very difficult, and I'm happy with the results for such a quick effect. Radial blur can be used for multiple types of effects, so I figured I'd add it to the library. The results are below, but note that the blur effect is set at a value of 0.0075, and can be increased or decreased.

No Radial Blur

Radial Blur

Notice that the very center of the screen is focused but all around is blurred (with the above said value). I'm about to work on another effect that will be similar to radial blur. It's coming right up.

Night Vision

2009-11-01T13:44:00.000-08:00

As I said earlier, one of the games I'm current playing is Call of Duty 4, which has probably one of the best Night Vision post-processing effect in all the games I've played (disregard this if you've played a game with a better effect, I haven't played every game that exists in the world, even though I'd like to), and I've decided to try and replicate it.

I have a very good start. Right now it acts correctly as night vision, but I have to tweak the luminosity so that during the day it's so bright you don't want to use them (that or simply have a on/off flag that disables night vision, but what's the fun in that?). However, at the moment, I'm tweaking the textures used for the effect. I'm by no means an artist, but I do know my way around Adobe Photoshop, I've been using it for around seven or more years now.

I will update this blog with some screen-shots once I get the effect to the point where it's worth sharing, or if I feel like showing the progress as I try to enhance the effect more and more. After I've finished with this effect, I'm moving on to Radial Blur. However, I think it'll be a little tricky, especially if I try to base it off of Call of Duty 4, which I might not because the effect isn't exactly what I'm looking for. The blur comes in when you toggle aim to aim down the iron sights, which will be the intent for my project as well, but what they did is fairly neat. They test the depth of the center of the screen (where you're aiming), if the object in front is close, there is no blur effect, and the opposite if the object is at a greater distance. It will also only blur objects that are close in view if the center position is at a greater distance. Therefore, if you're aiming at a far distance and there are no objects in your peripheral view there is no blur. If there is an object in your peripheral view, it will be blurred. A decent effect, but not what I'm looking for.

That being said, that type of an effect sounds excellent as a default effect (an effect that is always in use) since it mimics the human eyes decently well in my opinion. First, night vision, then radial blur that I want to use for aiming, then the peripheral view effect. Updates coming up.

Second Update:

Newest update to the night vision progress. I compared some of these results to that of real night vision photographs and videos. I've notice a major difference during that research. The military high tech night vision does have these small horizontal lines that go across the view, but they are not as drastic as Call of Duty 4 makes their version of night vision. I attempted to replicate the lines only by resizing the noise texture within the shader instead of constantly editing the texture again. I will do a better texture later or have an artist do so.

I had also noticed that there is a type of film grain within the military version of the night vision, I'm not sure if it was just dirt on the lens (since all of the videos and photographs I looked at were used during action) or that is how it is viewed. Therefore, I added a touch of that type of noise to the effect as well. Here are the results in multiple screen-shots:

Night Time, No Night Vision

Night Time, Night Vision

Day Time, No Night Vision

Day Time, Night Vision

And of course, it was the point to have it irritatingly bright while using night vision during the day, since that's how it would be. Call of Duty 4 doesn't do this, they just disable night vision all together, which is a good idea. No need to allow an effect if it's basically useless to the player. I tweaked the shader to produce the result anyways.

Update:

Here is my current results for the night vision post-processing effect. It isn't bad but still needs a lot of work, and the noise texture needs work as well. I was attempting to replicate the noise texture from Call of Duty 4 so I could have a better idea of what direction I should go. For the next edits I'm going to compare to real night vision photographs and use that as a reference. When being compared to Call of Duty 4, the coloring and so forth isn't correct yet. I seemed to have made myself overly obsessed with the noise texture to realize the colors (illumination) is way off, but I'll fix it.

Night Vision Off

Night Vision On

GLSL Continued

2009-11-01T09:59:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I had decided to relax and take it easy. It was Halloween, a Saturday, and figured I'd just play games instead of making them Saturday and Sunday. However, playing games ends up creating additional ideas in your mind when you're a game developer, and I tend to call it "research" more than "playing."

I was "studying" Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare by Infinity Ward (IW Engine), Far Cry 2 by Ubisoft (Dunia/CryEngine), and Fallout 3 by Bethesda Game Studios (Gamebyro). While playing (um, "studying") I was examining their post-process effects. I've already had in my mind what I wanted for most of my post-processing effects for Eternal Crisis and for what situations.

I like to examine other games just to study what works and what may break the effect intended; not to steal ideas. Well, okay, technically I am stealing ideas, but just about every post-processing effect can be found in multiple games, so everyone steals post-processing effect ideas. The only difference is specific effects are copied between all games (i.e., High Dynamic Range, Bloom, Volumetric Light Scattering) and there are specific effects that vary between games.

There is no difference in my case. I have plans to use specific post-processing effects during specific conditions in my project, but I will introduce effects that are not common with other games. Once I've finished them I will post the results in this blog (now that I've fixed the layout width to allow me to share 800 width images/screen-shots).

I still plan to relax today, but I will jump between gaming and programming.

Happy Halloween

2009-10-31T03:37:00.000-07:00

Happy Halloween

Anti-alias

2009-10-30T10:56:00.000-07:00

Today I decided to start working on a new shader that would help benefit my project. There currently already is an anti-alias shader available, however I thought it needed some work. For something like anti-aliasing I figured it would be best to follow what one of the leading game developers do for anti-aliasing using a deferred renderer. So I did, I used basically used the same technique as what S.T.A.L.K.E.R. used by GSC Game World.

After a lot of tweaking I finally have some results worth sharing, although not perfect in my mind, it is fairly close to my intention. I will work on it more soon, but it's fine as-is in my opinion. Here are the results:

No AA

Old AA

New AA

As I said, not exactly perfect, but I'll work on it more until I find that it's definitely good enough to use permanently. Please feel free to share your thoughts as other peoples thoughts is highly valuable, it'll help determine how much editing I have to do, if at all.

GLSL Shader Progress

2009-10-29T00:04:00.000-07:00

After several hours I've finished roughly eighty-percent of the total shaders. Even though it's taken a lot of my time I'm glad I'm doing it. I've learned a lot so far about the total structure of the shaders package and I will continue researching it after I've finished completely rewriting them.

I also will be adding more shaders to fulfill areas of my projects needs. As I was originally writing this blog up, had taken a look at newer posts over at the Leadwerks Community, I found someone was asking about GLSL programming, and Josh asked the poster what possible effects would they want implemented that wasn't already available. I had to reply to this question since it was already on mind while writing this, and here is my uncompleted listed of additional shaders:

Radial Blur

Screen Frost and Condensation

Nightvision

Water Droplets/Splats

Blood Splats

Ocean

Underwater Volumetric Light Scattering

I also have plans to replace the current Screen Space Ambient Occlusion using Crytek's implementation/technique since it produces high quality results. The current SSAO still doesn't seem to work properly even though it was updated. Before I start working on the shader I will be evaluating the current SSAO shader to ensure I'm not using it incorrectly or my shader settings aren't incorrect either.

Since I've rewritten and reorganized most of the shaders it will be a lot of fun for me to start adding additional post-processing effects, and hopefully with ease. Not that it wouldn't have been easy before, but since I'm now more familiar with the whole structure it will be vastly easier for me.

GLSL Shaders

2009-10-28T09:18:00.001-07:00

I decided to start spending most of the day rewriting all the GLSL shaders provided with the Leadwerks Engine version 2.27. I have several reasons for doing so and none of it is really geared towards optimization.

The first most reason is to learn the structure. I've always jumped right into several sections (included files) added/editing/deleting when I felt the need to do so, without actually knowing much about the shader, and therefore the main reason is for self-education about the shaders as a whole.

The second reason is while I was writing up my day/night cycle, I had looked at several shaders for the purpose of creating my main day/night cycle shader, and found a couple very minor mistakes. These minor mistakes are things like misspellings, defining something like "varying vec4 projectSpace;" but within the main portion of the code using "projectspace."

Third reason is to reorganize the whole structure. If I reorganize the whole structure to fit my own style/theme, then I'll feel like I have more power over the engine, compared to before. With the original structure it just feels like working with something that someone else created whom I can't contact to fix small errors. Actually, the support is excellent at Leadwerks that I probably would get the help, but in this way I won't really need to.

I may provide the ending result of the reprogrammed and reorganized shaders over at the Leadwerks forum but may keep it to myself. Not to be selfish, but I don't want to act like I'm taking credit from Josh Klint which had put a lot of hard work into these shaders.

Day/Night Cycle

2009-10-28T03:55:00.000-07:00

I've been working on a dynamic day/night cycle for Eternal Crisis for several days now. I'm quite happy about the results so far, but there are still a lot of details to finish off. The day to night cycle is perfect, the night cycle needs some work but isn't much to complete, and there is a small problem when switching from night to sunrise.

Here is a couple day old preview of the dynamic day/night cycle (I had the free version of Fraps, so I apologize for the short two videos, I will post better ones once I've tackled the problem explained below):

I will eventually work out this problem. Since I already know what the problem is, it wouldn't take much to fix it, but I found myself working on another aspect of the dynamic day/night cycle. Clouds.

Thus far, getting realistic and dynamic clouds has been a hassle. However, I've only been at it for about an hour, so this is the beginning of a new battle. Here is the very first results I've achieved with only a single of three different methods I've tried so far:

I've been getting some great advice by the Leadwerks Community and I will eventually achieve what I'm looking for in dynamic clouds. The major features I want for the clouds in Eternal Crisis are dynamic clouds, animated/morphing, volumetric (switching from clear day to overcast skies), and are able to produce volumetric light scattering, as well as, shadow casting.

Eternal Crisis Blog

2009-10-25T20:44:00.000-07:00

I decided to go ahead and create a blog here at blogger.com. I'm not exactly sure how often I will blog, but it'll give me something to do at times and a place to display some of my developments.

Eternal Crisis is a game I'm creating, which is a name I've had since before 1998 (feel free to do a whois on eternalcrisis.com) and is, for a while now, a registered trademarked name. I won't go over the gory details about the game, but it is a rather large scale project, which is the reason I've been building my team up (mostly modelers, artists and animators).

Eternal Crisis is proudly using the Leadwerks Engine, currently version 2.27, which you can read the owners (Josh Klint) blog here: http://leadwerks.blogspot.com. It is a fantastic engine, produces phenomenal results with simplicity, and more details about the engine can be found at the website.

I've just created this blog so I eventually will put in some time to tweak the layout a bit. I've been web programming way longer than I've been game programming, so my current skills are driven towards web programming. My next blog I'm also going to share what I've already shared on Youtube, the Leadwerks forum, and the first two previews are displayed on Josh's blog.