laurentGameDev

[laurentgamedev]

Desert bus for hope vlog demo for Kate Stark

[laurentgamedev]

RamblingGate

You know sometimes I get thoughts stuck in my head and have to write something down to make my own thoughts clear. So here's my opinion and thoughts of gamergate as an (somewhat) outsider to most of this.

To preface this I am a white guy in my early twenties, I aspire to be a 3D modeler and do know a lot of people that aspire to get into the game industry, most of them guys, of pretty much every minority, and some of them girls. I know programmers, concept artists, animators, fellow 3D modelers. The one thing we all share in common is that we all love gaming, from AAA to indies we don't always agree on what we like but as a whole everyone I know that wants to be in the industry or is in the industry shares this passion for games.

So #gamergate has been a thing for well too long it seems now, looking back at it the whole Anita Sarkesian and Zoe Quinn thing that sparked this whole mess seems so far away. It all started in early summer when a group of people started to rally behind an angry ex of Zoe Quinn. He claimed that Zoe cheated on him with game journalist to get better reviews of her game that was coming out. As it is the internet a witch hunt happened accounts of Zoe and some of her friends got hacked and attacked through messages such as death threats and releasing personal information also known as doxing.

The aftermath of the situation left a group of people who were agitated and were looking for somewhere to go with the momentum they had. At which point gamergate was created, though such things as game journalism integrity were tacked onto the movement, looking back at it, it was clearly never the main reason of it.

Should women be allowed to critic games for lack of representation of their gender, yes obviously. In general if any minority feels they are being discriminated or not properly represented by the medium they should be allowed to voice their opinion. Sure some people will disagree, but as long as there is a civil conversation sparked, it will lead to better games in general. Do we always need to play the white male in every game? No games such as Alice: Madness Return, Tomb Raider, Recettear, Left 4 Dead are all great and add to gaming as a whole. Adding more variety of characters isn't going to "kill games" it's going to make it grow and allows people that don't feel engaged by playing a white male in his early 30s to enjoy games more. You know what it's not going to do? It's not going to stop the next uncharted it's not going cancel the next bioshock it'll just give more variety to people. What if the next bioshock gives you a choice of being a white guy instead of imposing it unto you.

4chan, let's talk about this for a bit. While the movement started here and gain a lot of momentum on the website, I don't think it's fair to users of the site to be automatically lumped into the movement. That's all really, I don't particularly like 4chan now a day, but I do know people that do and they aren't gamergate activist nor are they bad persons... mostly.

How can we "win", well in short we can't. Death threats aren't going to stop. The whole Zoe Quinn event was just a catalyst for the group to form and that's what it is. There is no single way to make things more like prior to the event. The people that truly believe they are in the right in making bomb/rape/death/swatting threats will need to learn that it's not a reaction any decent human being has, either they will have to get to that conclusion on their own or by legal means. Hopefully slowly the opinion of minority being a part of the people that enjoy games will need to get ingrained into the industry and things will change. #gamergate will not stop nor will it dissolve as quick as it formed but the more the idea grows the more the group will erode and hopefully go the way of the dodo.

What can "we" do, well try to support people going through harassment may it be a journalist, a dev, a person that stood up for another. Don't fuel the fire and you don't need to try extinguish it, but make sure to help anyone that gets burned by it.

So game journalism integrity... is it an issue? Honestly I can't say, what I think happens between publishers and journalist might just be me projecting things I believe happen. There's no backing between my impression of the state of journalism and the actual thing. There is definitely a discussion to be had on the subject and it should have happened 6 months ago but other issues got priority, and it never happened. BUT #gamergate is not the place for this discussion to be had, twitter as a whole is not the place. But what is the place? Well that's really hard to say but some prominent figure will need to start the conversation or at least moderate it.

Well I think I rambled enough to clear my head.

[laurentgamedev]

...Sploosh

Alright here's an other quick one, this is one of the game I feel is a work of art as a whole. I am talking about Trine 2, there is no way I can describe this game other than art.

The shaders in this game are amazing, the story is great, gameplay is fantastic, and it's a really cheap game. If you don't own this game buy it! 

It has... too much good stuff in any screenshot for me to explain completely what is going on. Though I can say that they don't ever go easy on the bloom shader. Yet you still are able to see clear edges and objects you can interact with still stand out as any respectable 2.5D platformer should do.

There's dynamic light source linked to objects in the scene such as chandelier inside and weapons, like the fire arrow from the thief, with dynamic shadows.

There's fog to render things in the distance, particles with more bloom! Distortion effect around stuff like fire. Beautiful light rendition, from specular  diffuse, and emisive.

[laurentgamedev]

Bravest Bloggers

This is going to be a quick one, toon shading also known as cell shading. It's a really simple process all it requires is knowing light.

If you'r able to calculate light level, you can easily stagger it so instead of being smooth there's different light stages. Something like:

if(intensity > 0.95) intensity = 1.0;

else if(intensity > 0.85) intensity = 0.85;

else if(intensity > 0.75) intensity = 0.75;

else if(intensity > 0.65) intensity = 0.65;

else if(intensity > 0.5) intensity = 0.5;

else if(intensity > 0.45) intensity = 0.45;

else if(intensity > 0.35) intensity = 0.35;

else if(intensity > 0.25) intensity = 0.25;

else if(intensity > 0.15) intensity = 0.15;

else intensity = 0.1;

It gives the object a nice look.

And that's it for toon shading, only need 3 lines of code.

also catbug!

[laurentgamedev]

http://shaders.die

Alright so last I've 100%, this is about saints row 3. Well one level in particular as it changes the game aesthetics completely. I'm talking about http://decker.die where you get send off into a virtual reality and shenanigans happen.

First I'll talk a bit about this picture. As you can see you are now a blow up doll... well there's been worse but yeah frequent model changes throughout the level happens without having a loading screen which leads me to believe that the toilet, your character model, and the sex doll all have the same amount of vertices and are being rearranged into different form with some kind of blending.

Next there the lines around everything which makes me think of crosshatching of some kind but instead of being applied to shadows like toon shading, it's being applied to the edges of models with a bit of RGB distortion too.

The bullet trail behind the projectiles is neat, it changes the location of displayed pixels on the Y axis to be higher. Also lightsources galore... look at all of them in there glory most of this is baked into the textures if I remember this game properly but still sploosh. 

Here we have the level exposition which is a great looking shot but not much more to talk about in this one, just thought it looked impressive.

And the boss where there's as much Gaussian blur as... probably shouldn't finish this joke slightly inappropriate  Also your avatar now has a new texture which the light on it is animated, and texture is the mesh of the model though it might not be accurate, haven't seen the model itself in maya or equivalent.

And to finish this off here's a video of the level if anyone care to see this animated.

[impactings-deactivated20240405]

[laurentgamedev]

Shader's will do that to you >_> dammit Hogue

[laurentgamedev]

SLI

*WARNING* no images in this post, sorry *WARNING*

Alright, it's six in the morning and I can't sleep because I was thinking of shaders and computer graphics so I decided to get those blogs done. I don't know what's up with me but the hardware part of computer graphics seems to catch my eye all the time I've done a vlog on NVIDIA roadmap; and now I want to talk about another NVIDIA GPU feature SLI, ATI got their own version of this called crossfire but I'm unclearabout how it works and as an NVIDIA person after having been burned on several occasions by ATI I'm not too interested. 

After this runon sentance let's get to it. 

What is SLI?

SLI is a method NVIDIA uses to utilize more than one GPU to render what is being displayed.

How does it work?

There are multiple ways SLI does that process, one is by utilizing a different GPU to render to next frame, so if both render 60 frames per second put together they'll get up to 120 frames per seconds.

What else can it do?

Well having more processing power let's the user experience more immersive computer graphics. Such as realtime ambient occlusion (SSAO) in games such as ours SSAO might be able to be used both for games which require so much more information to be calculated it takes a really big toll on the GPU.

Anisotropic Filtering, it's a way the GPU can calculate the distance between the camera and any texture being applied to objects and mipmap it accordingly. The farter the texture the blurryer it get while staying crisp at close range to the camera.

Antialiasing, blurring out lines to make it seem like they aren't being displayed on a pixelated screen is a major challenge for programmers. There are many ways to do so but there isn't a perfect one so the formulas keep getting refined. NVIDIA has it's own formula called FXAA which has many neat feature and isn't to taxing to the GPU, such as adding transparency by multisampling edge of displayed objects and adjusting alphas accordingly.

PhysX, see previous blog about planetside where I ramble about this feature!

It can do a whole great lot more but I won't pretend to be able to explain how those feature work but I'll cite some: Maximum Pre-Rendered Frames, Multi-Display/Mixed-GPU Acceleration, Threaded Optimization, and Triple Buffering (actually I know this one... maybe in another blog)

[laurentgamedev]

Unreal 4

As I've been literally told to get off my ass and get more of these blogs done (and I completely agree) here’s one about the first commercial game using the unreal 4 engine: Daylight.

As we've been shown in a previous tech demo by Epic the unreal 4 engine is an impressive beast, it can handle particles like smoke beautifully and has a neat way of interacting with light like the metal of the armor and the erupting volcano.

But a tech demo only showing the extremely optimized wouldn’t make an engine what makes it is the games using it. So far except for the tech demo nothing has been shown as finished product on it. But everything changed when the fire nation attacked... wait I mean PAX east, the first commercial game using the engine made it’s apparition on the show floor and it looked something like this.

Which looks in no way anywhere as good as the demo suggested sadly, the light reflecting on the hand looks nothing too spectacular, compared to other AAA, even though all the models shown have a very high texture quality the way the light reflect on the main character is eerie somewhat uncanny. Man I really got to finish writing the one about the uncanny valley...

In this screenshot without the character in the shot everything looks much better which makes me feel as if the character makes my mind notice more of the irregularity in the scene as there’s a giant gap in style between both.

Images can only tell so much about a game here’s a video by totalbiscuit and one of daylight’s developer which provides much more insight into the game and showcases some of the game’s cooler particle and lighting effect, like the flares and the glow sticks.

http://youtu.be/UQd7CYCodFo

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The evolution

I thought I'd get started early for the blog this week since well I came across this.

It really shows how much shaders, and other means of displaying computer graphics evolved throughout the years. It shows the amazing thing the GPUs inside our machine, well most... are capable of doing. Stuff like new dawn, "which isn't pre-rendered" show how much technology has advanced throughout the years and how much we are capable of accomplishing with our current well "high-end" GPUs available  right now if we put our self to it. Yeas it is obliviously overly optimized but if we could achieve this right now imagine games in 2 - 3 years once the new consoles start to be well understood by developers and they aren't being hold back by 8 years old hardware. Think of the possibilities we are going to be able to achieve.

(LINK) Simply look at stuff CD Projekt was able to achieve in Witcher 2 by developing primarily for PC instead of consoles look at the original crysis and how crysis 2 suffered by being on consoles, still a great looking game with mods and stuff but it's nowhere as impressive compared to what the original was. /rant. Alright I think I'll end here since it is a 2 hours video I posted but think about and look at how much we'll be able to achieve in a mere 3 years.

[laurentgamedev]

A week in stuff... and brain melting

Forgot to make a blog last week so I won't this week. Well maybe I will and try to blog about what I've been doing instead of writing this blog. First I tried to implement VBOs in our game engine as our lead programmer requested and remembered why I didn't enjoy programming anymore... On the plus side we now have VBOs so there's that... Then I modeled a couple of enemies, and started working on our final boss.

Now to something shader related. I've been playing one game today to a somewhat compulsive manner. Antichamber, a somewhat artsy first person puzzle somewhat platformer mindmelter. The game looks great, it has a very minimalistic look and uses shaders to a big extent. From the blending in the particles emitted by the gun to the disappearing cubes, and the black ominous entity which shows up once in a while. It has great, no amazing game design and is plenty of fun if you don't mind throwing out some preconceptions about game out of your head. (WARNING SPOILERS INCLUDED) I'll post an hour or so of gameplay which I've recorded earlier. (/END WARNING). Great game the uses it makes out of shaders is amazing and should be tried for it's simplic yet beautiful visuals and mind bending preconceptions shattering puzzles.

[laurentgamedev]

Here's a quick Hud design

[laurentgamedev]

There and back again

Alright start of a new year, new classes, this blog will be to show an improvement on last years prototype we made. To start off I'll post the screenshot of last semester prototype. 

Now off with the assignment, we were told to try and photoshop our previous game to see what it could look like after we add shaders to it. So here's my first try, I tried to go for a more cell shaded look on this one. Though to get the intended look the game itself might need to be redone I feel it's a step in the right direction.

For my next idea, I tried a more over-saturated simplistic look not quite monochromatic but close to it. Though I might have overdone the blur effect a bit...

For my final idea I went with a more handdrawn style which might be the one I prefer of the three, it didn't require to much fiddling and only required 3 filters to achieve, the color pencil filter with 40% opacity, the graphic pencil filter with 50% opacity, and a saturation of the base layer since the two layer on top made it look quite grey.

And that pretty much concludes this week's blog about the game we are trying to make this semester.

[laurentgamedev]

Greedy Farmer

Last board game of the year, yay. 

I honestly haven't got much to talk about for this one, it's a board game about collecting cards with the same name... It's very simple. It achieves the goal which we were given to teach the players which fruits and vegetables are in season in our region.

http://greenbeltfresh.ca/whats-in-season Was a great tool to make sure about what's in season.

Rules:

- A player needs 4 of the same cards to win.

- A player need to put a card down to be able to pick up a new card from the deck.

- Each player has a maximum hand size of 4.

- If a player falsely announce their win they lose.

And that's about it, very simple, easy to learn game. With this done back to working on the actual game due on Friday.

[laurentgamedev]

Moves Like Khan

Oh wow it's been a while since I've done this... more on that later. Nah just kidding, today's blog is about the third and final prototype for game design. Our group chose the name Moves Like Khan for our deliverable, in honor of the main actor from chaiya chaiya Shahrukh Khan. It's a party game meaning that the rules are very simple and can easily be picked up by anyone even without having previously played, it also involve movement and player interaction.

Rules

(these are written with the assumption that the players know what the various moves are already. If not, the judge can provide clarification, or they can reference the descriptions/video)

Designate one person to be a judge

the judge decides if a person is performing the moves correct

The judge shuffles the cards and places them on the table

Start playing the music!

Players take turns drawing the dance cards, and then proceed to perform the move indicated on the card

They must perform each move for the equivalent of 2 musical bars, which is about 8 beats or once times on every other beat (which is about 4 seconds total)

The cards build up like a list or train and successive players must perform all previous moves in the order drawn (up to a maximum of 5)

the entire "dance" must be fluid from one move to the other

Once the train (list) reaches 5 moves, the player discards the oldest move and draws a new one, always maintaining a maximum of 5 moves at one time

If a player cannot properly perform their dance, they are out and the cards are returned to the deck and reshuffled

Play starts again, with one less player

Once two players are left, they battle it out performing moves in rapid succession until one falters

We tried to keep as close to the content of the chaiya chaiya as possible, so we named the cards using dance moves from the choreography, and making players perform those moves. At first we were thinking about  making a game somewhat similar to Simon, but in the end we ended with a completely original game which reassembles more musical chair than anything. Letting the player see the cards all the time was a pretty big game changer too, instead of playing a game of broken telephone, the players were more confident on their moves and started to show their dancing skills and "comboing" the cards together which made the whole thing much more interesting.

Since no one is expected to be great at it, seeing the other players gain confidence on their action also boost your own morale and lets everyone have fun. 10/10 would play again.