Destroyable Objects on the Fly

The reality in the game industry is very important in these days after a lot of development in the hardware devices that increased year after year. The new GPUs in the market can now support to process millions of vertices per second, what about destroyable objects in the game? How can be implemented? Well, a complexity exists behind the scene; most games will have at least some sort of feedback, such as decal texture, or particle system showing dust or smoke. Other games have a prepared destroyed posture for their objects that are visible when the object reaches some limits like windows and tables. Games rarely do this though, because of the complexity of modifying geometry in real time, also extra preparation necessary by artists to create damage geometry.

Well, there is simple solution to this problem, it calls Decal Tessellation is a simple solution to this problem. The idea behind this solution is to take displacement map texture, project it onto geometry and tessellate the geometry in real time; this will make the geometry to look as a physically damaged geometry. The tessellation that makes it possible to implement this technique in real time.

OpenGL 4.0 and Direct3D 11 have APIs for hardware tessellation, and the GPU must support hardware tessellation also.

Hardware Tessellation

You can observe the pipeline process figure that shows you the Direct3D 11 pipeline which includes the tessellator stages. The vertex shader  is sitting on at the top of the pipeline. The vertex is responsible all vertex transformations, this includes the transformation to clip space before the rasterization step.

What is belong to the tessellation, the input mesh is called a control mesh or control cage, since it’s made of control points (also called patches). The simplest patches are just triangles.

The vertex shader can transform the control mesh, as in the case of animation. Otherwise it passes the control onto the next stage. After the vertex stage comes the hull shader which has two roads that run in different phases.

• The control point phase runs once per control point.
• The patch-constant phase runs once per patch.

The first phase (control point) can be used for doing further transformations of the control points, then it passes the vertices to the next stage. While the patch-constant phase hull shader is responsible for setting the tessellation factors. The factors are set for each edge of the patch. They determine how much tessellation can be made on the mesh by breaking it into triangles).

The rendering performance is influenced by the tessellation factors in an obvious manner. Then the hull shader comes after the tessellator stage. The tessellator is a fixed function stage that generates the new vertices that make up the tessellated patch.

After that the domain shader receives the new transformed vertices which gets called once per tessellated vertex. The vertices of the patch get evaluated in this stage. As an example, if displacement mapping is used by the patch, the domain shader fetches the height values from the displacement map and translates the vertices. If the patch is a Bezier patch (parametric patch), then the domain shader will do some mathematical calculations to transform the vertices to their world space position.

After processing the patch surface, the vertices will be transformed into clip space by the domain shader. The next stages will execute the rest as a non-tessellated rendering, with vertices passed to the geometry shader then followed by the pixel shader which gets executed for each pixel.

Caryl Shaw producer, longtime Maxis employee left EA (Electronic Arts) company for Ngmoco. She was an online lead for SPORE at Maxis, and she will take the same position as a lead producer.

Brandon Sheffield: how does your role differ at Ngmoco versus Maxis?

Caryl Shaw: it’s different in some ways and not so different in others. my title is live producer, and that means I’m working with the games once they’re live, which i also did when i was at maxis as the lead of the online team. I live for launch days—there’s nothing more exciting to me than shipping a game and watching customers play and talk about their experiences—and that’s something that i loved at maxis and already love at Ngmoco. We Rule launched globally for the iPhone two days after i started at Ngmoco, so i got a good taste of launch right from the start.

SPORE was a classic PC boxed product, and the online features didn’t generate any additional revenue after the game was purchased by a customer. at Ngmoco the games are free to download, and we generate revenue from in-app purchases. so now my job will really need to revolve around how to keep our customers happy with the game by creating new content and features that they can easily see the value in. I’ll have a great opportunity to contribute directly to the success of the company now, and that can be really hard to experience at a big company like ea.

BS: What do you hope to be able to accomplish? i mean your personal goals within the company.

Cs: I’ve been doing online development for the web and video games for 15 years, so one of my personal goals was to be able to step into a job and be able to hit the ground running. while i definitely have lots to learn about iPhone game development, I wanted to be able to really contribute from day one, which I think I have been doing. With a company that moves as fast as Ngmoco does, we need to have solid online systems to support almost instant scalability if a game takes off, so I’m hoping to be able to contribute some of the learning I have in that area. Oh, and I want to help the company make money! (laughs) the potential for success is pretty great, and I want to help contribute to that in any way I can.

BS: is there any similarity between the prototype approach of Maxis on SPORE and the small game creation style of Ngmoco?

Cs: the SPORE team made over 100 unique prototypes for SPORE and spent over a year doing them. I think it worked for that kind of game development—creating so much complicated tech from scratch just needed lots of time for trial and error and most of all for exploration. Ngmoco game development seems to move much faster—so far I haven’t seen much in the way of prototyping —but what I do see people spending time thinking about, talking about and doing is live tuning of the games. Talking to the eliminate guys about live tuning experiments feels a lot like talking to the SPORE engineers about using prototypes to understand player behavior. And with live tuning, I like the instant feedback you get from customers who are actually playing your game. It feels very real.

BS: What would you say to someone who has lost their job and is looking at the social or iPhone space?

Cs: well, I guess I’d tell them to not expect a lot of stability—these are platforms that are young and bound to have lots of ups and downs before they stabilize. But to me that’s part of the excitement. And do expect to work your ass off. You’ll have to figure things out along the way and you’ll have to try stuff, make mistakes and learn from them. And then try again. Like I said, part of the excitement.

Pixologic ZBrush 3.5 R3

Zbrush has become as a stone for artist’s workflow making easy to create fast and efficient high-poly organic models.

By the release of Zbrush 3.5, Pixologic shows its capability to building, continually adding new features and making it as fundamental tool for the artist.

Hard to understand it, easy when you learn it

Pixologic didn’t plan in the beginning for making Zbrush to be as a 3D program, it wanted to be as 2.5D, which was basically 2D with faked depth, material and lighting.

Because of this reason, its functionality can be very difficult to people who have a long history with other 3D programs. As an example your workspace is not a 3D view port, it’s actually a resolution-dependent image, this can be observed when you start to zoom in, the result pixelating the image. To zoom in on your model, you have to scale it up instead of a real zoom that can be result by moving the camera near the object in its space. As a result, a lot of other tools in Zbrush behave as a 2D program not as 3D.

Pixologic made a great job by provide  massive amounts of resources, supporting the community around its software, providing updates, tutorials and videos.

Pixologic’s website www.pixologic.com, help new users who start to use their software, by publishing new tutorials on their website and showing them new techniques around their software.

Another tutorials resource for Zbrush can be found on www.zbrushcentral.com, They have a great forums, also unnoticed feature called “thread gallery”, which quickly sets all images submitted on a single page, this method makes it easy for the user to browse the posted images.

A great video sources for Zbrush can be found on Gnomon website at www.thegnomonworkshop.com, but these tutorials are for sale. This is not the end of the tutorials’ book; you can find tons of other great sites as well, finding the solution for other problems that the user can face in his workflow.

Drive it through its interface

Pixologic made their software (Zbrush) customizable, palettes can be docked, top, bottom, left and right of the workspace; also almost everything has been assigned a shortcut key, a new shortcut keys can be assigned for almost every tool in its interface and by the release of Zbrush 3, the shortcut can be created by holding the ctrl key and clicking on the desired tool.

A new feature was added to view a description of any button by simply hovering the mouse pointer over it while holding the ctrl key.

Zbrush can be used with the pen and tablet, every brush is set up to measure for pressure sensitivity and a good tablet really is a must.

Thoughts and Features

Pixologic encourages the artists to approach 3D modeling like clay sculptures; also Zbrush can talk to other 3D packages by importing .obj file format.

After you have your model in Zbrush, you are ready for sculpting, this is where the fun starts and Zbrush really shines. While you are working with the mesh, you create new, higher subdivisions as you need more and more detail. The amazing thing is you can increase your numbers of polygons without slowing down the operating system; it’s amazing even when you work with 8 million polygons model without even stutter in the stroke.

Zbrush has a great 2D brushes and tools that can make their job well done, beside this when it’s using with the 3D tools it really allow you to do things, such as paint, bump maps, specular, diffuse, an applying materials on separate channels and directly on the working model.

It can be used as a great texturing tool for the objects made in other 3D packages, as an example, the artist can make his model in 3D Studio Max or Maya and export the model to .obj and then sculpturing the model and adding some depth to it by Zbrush then painting it and also can importing texture images and apply them to the model; finally the artist can export the texture to be used by the used 3D package program that was used.

Also Zbrush can create normal maps files for the model, these normal maps contain the information about the depth of each part on the used model, later these normal maps can be used by the 3D package program and associated it with the model.

What is new about version 3.5 r3

Pixologic has added a lot of cool new and updated tools to work with, it has a new set of brushes called Polish Brushes, and they are smooth and flat, when using them they begin smooth but when increasing the pressure they are affecting the surface by chiseling it and flatting it, this is nice especially when you are working on a high subdivision because you will see the result on a high detail surface.

A big significant addition  to the version 3.5 is in Zsketch, it comes in the form of updating Zspheres to what is called now Zspheres II, the new version of Zspheres emulates the feeling of working with digital clay.

Also plug-ins integrations that contain such as Subtool Master and Decimation Master, which is by far the best optimization tool that it has. It can reduce the number of polygons from 6 million down to some hundreds kilobytes without you even being able to see the difference.

A new feature that was added by Pixologic, is occlusion tools, and updated polygroups and masking, beside this there is also a new Quick Sketch tool for quickly sketching out the models in 2D, this will allow you to export HD Geometry in your normal or displacement maps.

Pros and Cons

Pros

1. Great tool for sculpting and texturing.
2. Excellent tutorials, technical support and great community.

Cons

1. Learning curve can be disappointed in the beginning for new users.
2. Stability problems, sometimes it suffers from crashes.

Vancouver Convention Center that was held ahead of Game Developers Conference in Canada, Dragon Age beat out Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes, Assassin’s Creed II, Fifa 10 and Dawn of War II.

On the other hand, Assassin’s Creed II by Ubisoft, took three awards which are for best visual arts, best console and best game design categories.

All the Canadian Game Awards are provided by the Digital Media and Wireless Association of British Columbia and its partners, including Reboot Communications and Greedy Production.

This first event was an excellent showcase of the amazing talent of our video game developers in Canada, Michael Bidu the president of DigiBC said.

The list of winners in each category:

• Game of the Year: Dragon Age:Origins (Electronic Arts/BioWare).
• Best Console: Assassin’s Creed II (Ubisoft Monterial).
• Best Handheld Game: Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes (Capybara Games).
• Best Downloadable Game: Critter Crunch (Capybara Games).
• Best Audio: Dawn of War II (THQ/Relic).
• Best Game Design: Assassin’s Creed II (Ubisoft Monterial).
• Best Technology: Prototype (Radical Entertainment) and Assassin’s Creed II (Ubisoft Monterial).
• Best Visual Arts: Assassin’s Creed II (Ubisoft Monterial).
• Best Writing: Dragon Age: Origins (Electronic Arts/BioWare).
• In-Game Cinematic: Ghostbusters (Rainmaker).
• Most Promising Game: ModNation Racer (United Front Games).

BLUEHOLE Studio has developed cutting-edge MMORPG,
TERA ONLINE: The Exiled Realm of Arborea, by using UNREAL ENGINE 3

This game was developed by a Team of 180 at Bluehole studio, this company was formed in March 2007 by entrepreneur Byung-Gyu Chang and the producer, art director of NCsoft’s,
lead game designer, lead programmer and Lineage II and which also used Unreal Engine technology.

Unreal engine is a great engine that has great features like rendering expression and performance, also it has a high productivity development tools. The other side of this engine’s feature is some features were implemented during the development of Unreal Tournament 3 and Gears of War 2, applied to Unreal Engine 3, allowing developers to direct access to Epic’s latest technology.

And about the cinematics part, their technical art director Shin-hyoung and his team has used Unreal Matinee and Unreal Kismet to create the game’s opening cinematics.

We did our best to express the feel of character skins and various materials used in real costumes by utilizing features such as diffuse, normal, specular and specularpower provided by the Unreal Engine’s standard phong shader, Shin-hyoung said.

The other part of the creativity is that Unreal Engine 3 let you to customize each character visually.

Unreal Engine 3 allowed our technology artists to edit materials freely so that various visual looks could be produced, Lew said.

Tera Online can let you to customize your character (changing face, accessories, tattoos) depend on the parameter that you set.

Bluehole got the most out of Unreal Engine 3 technology and it helped Epic Games Korea and Unreal Development Network(UDN).

It tooks 3 years to develop Tera Online in Seoul and the reason for using Unreal Engine 3 is to use the game in the global MMORPG market.

The Korean MMO market is very competitive, Harns, associate producer said.

The market has a great games’ titles and not just that but also high quality.

The market anticipates emerging killer titles, with a focus on not just a few new elements but the  overall quality of the games. We are developing Tera Online to the level where every such need is satisfied. From the early stage of development, we’ve targeted a global market for this new flagship franchise, Harns said.

Tera Online is on the top-tier MMORPGs that uses Unreal Engine 3 as its game engine.