Holiday Project

[Sarevok]

Wow the concept art are beautiful. Did you make them yourself or commission an artist ?

[Starglider]

Wow the concept art are beautiful. Did you make them yourself or commission an artist ?

I'm nowhere near that good; my best efforts at freehand look like this. I've brought a couple of artists onto the project to produce the story and character artwork.

[Starglider]

Added water ripples (for objects hitting the ocean)



Also particle effects for the phantom ray bombing



Much as I'd love to do something clever with deferred shading, I don't think the X360 has the pixel shader throughput to handle it (and draw the 10000 trees, 9000 undergrowth sprites, enemies, particles, water etc), so I'm sticking with old-school forward rendering plus assorted trickery.

[Starglider]

New dev video showing air-to-air combat with the phantom ray enemies.



The particle streams they fire look ok in motion, but I'm getting a kind of MLP:FIM vibe looking at this still. The phantom rays are the equivalent of bombers in Ace Combat, Blazing Angels etc; they move relatively slowly and focus on trashing the island, but they do have a short-ranged attack they will use on the player if you get too close. Blowing the flippers off the phantom rays causes them to spiral downwards, and if you do it low enough or keep blowing them off after they regenerate, the rays crash into the ground/ocean and die in a big explosion. In playtest this is perversely satisfying.

[Starglider]

These are what the sketches I send to the storyboard artists look like :



From the absolutely mandatory 'fly low through valleys to avoid being killed by superweapon' mission.





The voice actors should have fun with that last mission;
Airship Captain : "Etheric batteries to power, turbines to speed!"
Ironclad Captain : "Load enchanted grapeshot, prepare for volley fire!"

[Zixinus]

Airship Captain : "Etheric batteries to power, turbines to speed

I never actually watched the show and yet I still find that funny.

[Starglider]

My design sketches for the in-game art where the characters are working out how to use the island defences;

[Starglider]

Some more in-progress story art :



I am currently working on various fire effects; fireballs, flamethrower, setting fire to the island (see, those burning trees back on the first page of the thread have a purpose) & drifting smoke.

[Sarevok]

Is that a rock or some kind of creatures swimming under the water (in the picture titled SP 8.1 and SP 9.1) draft ?

[Starglider]

Is that a rock or some kind of creatures swimming under the water (in the picture titled SP 8.1 and SP 9.1) draft ?

I am pretty sure that is a reef.

Shadow claws charging their LAZORS fireballs;

[Starglider]

Initial version of fire effects;



Clearly there is a lot of work still to do; dynamic lighting, correct billboarding instead of placeholder, smoke, craters, some depth issues etc. It is sufficient for gameplay testing though.

Also, some more concept art;



In the final mission the airships and ironclads you saved earlier come back to help you...

[Zixinus]

Clearly there is a lot of work still to do; dynamic lighting, correct billboarding instead of placeholder, smoke, craters, some depth issues etc. It is sufficient for gameplay testing though.

Smokey is still going to be pissed though.

[Starglider]

The game's story-mode 'cutscenes' are continuing to progress, here's my concept art for some of the backgrounds (real compositing will be a lot better);



On the programming side lots of tedious but necessary engine tasks, like making the damaged landscape roll back properly when you restart from a checkpoint, and lots of stuff related to framerate.

[Sarevok]

You are putting a lot of effort into this. Are you going to try find a publisher or is this still a hobby project ?

[Starglider]

You are putting a lot of effort into this. Are you going to try find a publisher or is this still a hobby project ?

The game will be released on Xbox Live Indie Games.

[Darth Yoshi]

What about PC? I'd definitely (well, probably) pay for a PC version, lacking an XBox.

[Executor32]

Seeing as it's made with XNA, I would assume that wouldn't be too difficult. That, and I'm guessing the screens thus far were made while running it on a PC.

[Starglider]

Seeing as it's made with XNA, I would assume that wouldn't be too difficult.

The main problem with a PC release is that the control system is designed for an Xbox 360 or PS3 style controller. Playing with a mouse/keyboard would be possible but would seriously impact the game experience.

That, and I'm guessing the screens thus far were made while running it on a PC.

Yes, although I usually keep the detail level set to the same as the Xbox. I got fed up with my video encoder downsampling from 60 to 30 FPS by dropping every other frame, so I have implemented a full screen motion blur mode that averages each pair of frames together. I will use this for future videos.

[Starglider]

Did a lot of fixes to the tree rendering, including the distant fire animation (no longer a canned texture);



Still needs dynamic lighting (of the landscape) and smoke.

[Starglider]

I've posted a new video; the story mode air combat is progressing, still some rendering glitches related to the fire effects.

Also some more concept art

[Darth Yoshi]

The main problem with a PC release is that the control system is designed for an Xbox 360 or PS3 style controller. Playing with a mouse/keyboard would be possible but would seriously impact the game experience.

Well, I do have a gamepad, so that's not a problem for me, but I suppose it would be inconvenient for someone who doesn't.

[Starglider]

First try at some smoke effects. I'll probably have to simplify it to get it to work at 60 FPS on the Xbox360 though :



Also some more concept art;

[Starglider]

Implemented dynamic cubic environment mapping, will be used to make the airships and ironclads shiny;



The airship is procedurally generated using the basic dimensions of the Hindenburg class. I will do the gondolas and markings later.

The result of getting an actual artist to redo those colour sketches I posted earlier;

[Starglider]

Provisional mission names;

1. Etheral Incursion
2. Second Strike
3. Forced Migration
4. Fragile Dreams
5. Awakening the Sentinels
6. Homeward Bound
7. Secrets of the Ancestors
8. Interdiction
9. Unnatural Brood
10. Nightmares in the Mist
11. Naval Encounter
12. Confrontation
13. Fire and Darkness
14. Desperate Assault
15. Infiltration
16. Prayer for the Dawn

#0 : Tutorial : Practice flying, rings, target shooting
#1 : Tahay, Daytime : Destroy worms + rays, intro to basic game mechanics
#2 : Tahay, Daytime : Destroy worms + rays + claws, intro to special abilities
#3 : Tahay, Night : Defend convoy of airships against worms + claws + slicers
#4 : Kyvitoya, Daytime : Intercept multi-axis attackers, intro to character switching
#5 : Kyvitoya, Sunset : Introduction to magical defences, Lyozar joins
#6 : Atieu, Daytime : Escort albatross home, Alaysia joins, put out fires, defend against claw attack
#7 : Atieu, Sunset : Lean about power attacks and high-power defences, first vulture encounter
#8 : Atieu, Foggy : Split party : Sakoti + Lyozar do attack on aerial convoy, Lyozar bails out
#9 : Fillicoudi, Daytime : Split party : Alaysia + Deajan ground attack hatching rays + worms
#10 : Fillicoudi, Foggy : Nightmare Stars attack in numbers, defeated using defences, Sakoti rejoins
#11 : Fillicoudi, Sunset : Defend fleet against rebel ships + monsters, then use it to repel rest of attack, vultures + Lyozar seen
#12 : Atieu, Night : Worm swarm attack against sabotaged defences, lots of vultures, Lyozar rejoins
#13 : Fillicoudi, Night : Defeat massive attack against sabotaged defences with fire shields (projected by owl monks) to avoid.
#14 : Kyvitoya, Sunset : Naval + air battle against vulture cultists, stay below 100 feet or get shot down by corrupted island defences, fly through valleys and destroy portal generator
#15 : Tahay, Foggy : Infiltration along specific flightpath, avoid waking torpid monsters, then mop-up with defences
#16 : Tahay, Stormy Night : Defend against overwhelming assault with ironclad fleet + death-ray armed airship support, until superweapon can be triggered.

I am open to suggestions if anyone has a better idea for the names. Also some more story art of course;

[Starglider]

Motion blur and subscale rendering are contentious topics. My original design for the Windhaven 3D rendering was a classic forward renderer running at physical screen resolution (720p on Xbox) direct to backbuffer, with no motion blur, HDR or fancy postprocessing, hoping to avoid the need by making 60 FPS nearly all the time. In practice it made 60 FPS unless you flew through a forest or had a lot of particles effects and terrain in view, in which case it drops to 30 FPS. This is a bit juddery.

On the Xbox forums the sentiment seems to be 'all the cool kids i.e. AAA titles are running at 600p or less, locked at 30 FPS, with upscaling and lots of blur'. They do this so everything can be dynamically shadowed specular postprocessed HDR etc.

This is an alternate version of the renderer, running on PC but with Xbox settings, using 'smart motion blur'. The landscape is rendered at 640p and the water is only 500p, but I refuse to compromise on the HUD or the foreground bird, which are still 720p. Variable four to eight sample motion blur is deployed using viewport manipulation on the landscape and vertex interpolation on the bird;



The Microsoft guy was probably right about the subscale rendering, static images are slightly blurry but that removes some single-pixel noise and allows me to have a higher terrain resolution anyway. At 60 FPS the motion blur is also a clear win, the virtual frame rate of 300 FPS is just uncannily smooth even on a 60 Hz monitor. At 30 FPS I'm not so sure. Basically it has the 'Transformers' look of any hard camera movements severely blurring the scenery, and even normal flight adjustments wipe out fine detail on the landscape.

I think I'm still going to go with it. Console gamers are probably more used to and tolerant of blur than judder. On PC any halfway decent graphics card will easily maintain 60 FPS all the time, and a decent card (5870 / 6970) can now do 1080p with high detail and moderate software supersampling on the landscape. There was some serious concern from one of the testers about this (it pretty much went : motion blur? nooooo!! less than 720p?? noooooo!!! turn it off turn it off horrible console awfulness aaaargh....). I will be including a reasonable amount of configurability in any PC release though.

The bird body still looks wrong, but I will eventually implement normal mapping on the contour feathers, which should fix it. The 'dust' lines aren't blurred because they have an important game function; letting you know your airspeed and drift velocity; and I want them to be working in hard turns at 30 FPS even if it means looking less nice in stills.

Also while I'm here, the cutscene compositing code is coming together;