Discover Top Posts Tagged with #andrew willmott

Swarm & Procedural Content in SimCity 4, The Sims 2 and Spore by Andrew Willmott

This is a series of talks I gave at a Procedural Content workshop at EA Redwood Shores, mostly covering Swarm, the swiss-army-knife visual effects system I wrote that has featured in all the games I've worked on. In addition to general visual effect usage, it's proven a very useful prototyping tool, which has led to it being abused in various interesting ways well beyond its original design remit.

In particular it was responsible for 70% of the original GDC 2005 Spore demo. (Thereby unfortunately fooling a lot of people into thinking the game had already been developed.)

Swarm Overview

Swarm Procedural Content

Procedural LOD (older Sims 2 stuff)

As a bonus(?), here's the first talk I ever gave on the effects system that evolved into Swarm:

The Timbuktu Effects System

Timbuktu was the code name for SimCity 4. Now you know.

Source:

This is a series of talks I gave at a Procedural Content workshop at EA Redwood Shores, mostly covering Swarm, the swiss-army-knife visual e

#simcity #simcity 4 #sims 2 #ts2 #sims2 #the sims 2 #spore #graphics #game development #lod #procedual #Andrew Willmott #swarm

I'm listening to Andrew Wilmott's presentation on the development of The Sims 2 and he says at 29:30 of the presentation audio that the target hardware for the game to run on was very similar to the DirectX 7 level (came out in September 1999 and updates came out in 2000), so they had to keep most graphics tricks pretty simple.

...So our target hardware was very much kind of DX7 level, so we had to keep most of our graphics tricks pretty simple...

Demos with Direct X7:

Audio Recording of presentation:

Audio Recording of Shipping Sims 2 presentation by Andrew WillmottLink to presentation:https://archive.org/details/shipping-sims-2-fullLink

Slides from presentation:

From Andrew Willmott site:Shipping Sims 2This was a talk given at the Game Tech conference in 2004, and covered a lot of the aspects of what

Here is the auto-generated transcription of the audio recording of the presentation:

DirectX 7 is an old version of Microsoft's DirectX API that was released in 1999. It was included in Windows 98 and Windows 2000 operating systems. DirectX is a collection of APIs that are used to handle multimedia tasks such as video and game programming on Microsoft platforms. DirectX 7 introduced new features such as hardware-accelerated Transform and Lighting (T&L) for 3D graphics, support for DirectSound3D positional audio, and DirectMusic for music playback.

На русском языке:

Здравствуйте! Не так давно вернулась к симсу, и тут попалась ваша тема на форуме. Чтиво, надо сказать, увлекательное. Хотя и осилила я это в

#sims 2 #ts2 #sims2 #the sims 2 #sims 2 beta #Andrew Willmott #direct x #directx #directx 7 #1999 #2000 #game tech #game development #game design #3d graphics #old games #retrogaming #graphics #Youtube

Andrew Willmott presentation is a hidden gem. There are a lot of information about development of game, especially in Q&A section.

#sims 2 #ts2 #sims2 #the sims 2 #sims 2 beta #Andrew Willmott #game design #game development #game tech

How Pixar's Movement Animation Became So Realistic | Movies Insider

In this video about Pixar animation I heard the thought which the animators of The Sims 2 also guided, I believe (Watch and listen presentation by Andrew Willmott)

Pixar animators not trying to make things look necessarily perfectly real. What they trying to do is make sure that the emotions that are coming out of the characters, and what they are thinking, feel 100% real.

Time: 12:47.

#sims 2 #ts2 #sims2 #the sims 2 #ts2 simblr #simblr #youtube #animation #pixar #Andrew Willmott

The 113 Wright Way from early version of Plesantview. Look at the shadows from the trees. They are soft as from the walls of the building. They are drawn by the CPU since the objects are considered an extension of terrain in this instance essentially. Perhaps such shadows for trees and characters were abandoned due to the fact that when editing the landscape, objects that had such soft shadows began to make some weird stuff.

More about shadows in The Sims 2 you can read here:

http://www.andrewwillmott.com/tech-notes#TOC-Height-Map-Shadows