Sanctimonia Update: Objects, and More Objects!
Kevin Fishburne, as per his promise to make Aiera his main venue for announcing news updates, left a comment announcing that he had begun to implement objects in his Ultima-inspired online game, Sanctimonia:
Am well along but am still having some difficulties, as well as some breakthroughs that really please me. Object implementation has went two distinct way: 1) bottom-centered objects and 2) bitmap-centered objects. Bottom-centered objects are trees and such which are tall and have central stalks, while bitmap-centered objects are flatter and have no roots. These two designations actually control the way the bitmap is drawn in the client rendering window, and allow objects to rotate and place properly.
To illustrate, he (of course) posted a video:
Objecty goodness!
Also, in an earlier comment, he posted a link to a video showing the setup of the camera rig he will be using to take photos of object models. These photos — taken at different angles — will be used to create a faux-3D effect when the player rotates the view.
I just got back from a week-long vacation in Las Vegas and Arizona. I saw the Grand Canyon. Words can’t really describe it adequately, nor the surrounding countryside on the way there, but it gave me a much better perspective on the way the landscape in Sanctimonia should be presented. Hopefully this will result in a richer, more varied and realistic landscape. I’ll do my best. 🙂
SANCTIMONIA Update
I’m almost three weeks behind in my weekly reports, in part due to a lengthy vacation and otherwise due to just not getting around to it. I’ll be summarizing the progress over the last three weeks in a report Monday at the usual place.
If you’ve seen the recent videos of object implementation you may have noticed it falls short of the proposed “16 different directions” technique. This actually has been implemented and is working, though it’s not easily apparent from the videos. The starfish use all 16 bitmaps, which were photographed and cropped using version 2 of the photography rig and a real starfish. I have some other bitmaps (rocks, a model tree) which were also photographed using v2 of the rig, but I consider them unfit for release.
After upgrading the rig to v3 by using a larger platform for the objects and moving the three light sources to equidistant positions I did some experiments, but am holding off until I better understand chroma key compositing/bluescreening.
I’m getting some reflected light from the platform background onto the objects being photographed. I’m in the process of modifying dowel rods and such to raise small and large objects above the platform while keeping them centered. I’m also planning to replace the paper backgrounds with minimally-reflective cloths, and adjust the aperture to focus the field of view on the object and blur the background.
I’m considering photographing objects from 32 directions rather than the current 16. This would be especially effective for larger objects such as boulders and trees, which suffer the most from having only 16 images.
The networking code is solid object-wise and the client only keeps track of the objects it needs to. Sorting objects so they graphically overlap properly in the client still has not been implemented. I also added loading object images as needed so they don’t need to be loaded at startup; a primitive form of memory management.
My composer Absynth moved to North Carolina, but we’re still doing the soundtrack.
I fixed numerous bugs and inadequacies in Sanctimonia and Littoral.
I upgraded my PC back to an SSD and configured my /tmp directory to mount in RAM. I also changed the client and server symlinks to use local files instead of the main project files on the file server. This greatly reduced rendering times in Littoral, particularly object generation.
I need to make the mini map rotate to match the player’s orientation to improve ease of navigation. I also need to figure out how to convert a vector expressed in radians to a vector expressed as (x, y). That will allow projectiles to be correctly rendered (arrows, rocks, torches).
That’s all the news for now.
The report, mostly redundant, has been posted. For fun I made a video using existing assets, previously described as unfit for public consumption. They still are, but as I commented in the video, at least the music is good:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unokkkCcxFQ
Yeah, seriously, Kevin…did you want me to enable your account for article posting?
Hey Ken. Yeah, I think that would probably be a good idea. Sorry for ignoring your request earlier. Things have been stressful lately for me and much more chaotic than normal.
I’m about to sit down and start getting some work done as I haven’t for the last few days, so hopefully some good news will come of it. I’m trying to correct particle physics and possibly implement a day/night cycle and lighting effects. The client also doesn’t count objects in the cell grid correctly so sometimes they disappear from view.
Let me know the procedure for posting an update once the settings have been changed and I’ll start posting weekly updates on the main points of progress. Thanks, as always.