zaphod

I started typing up a spirited reply but after reading your post a few more times I couldn't make myself believe that you were being serious.

here is what I did today

hehe, Marshmellow used to be one of childhood nicknames got the body mostly squared away. The white and blue parts will be separately tweakable.

ok, bout time to unwrap and texture this guy

I have started on a new character - I will post a pic of him once I finish modeling him before I start on textures.

THIS is red alert: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85tMFIA6Dy0 also, apparently nobody uses plain ol meatbag soldiers anymore. I want to see some god damn humanoids running around and getting splattered to bits. Why does every unit have to be 4 stories tall and mechanized?

we used our framework we are developing for Zero Gear. Those screenshots are from the maya viewport though.

got a freelance rush job from my old employer this week, this is a little 3 scene shooting gallery for a little tech demo using a wii-mote. modeled, textured, and lit in ~18 (almost consecutive) hours. It's been a long time since I have done environments under the gun like this, it's hard to keep myself from going back to different parts and touching things up rather than powering through everything.

that was our first thought too, but it actually seemed a bit trickier than projecting shadows based on the kart geometry. To do a flat projection we need to do line traces against the render geometry which isn't that fast since our level isn't bsp or anything like that, just a polygon soup. We could use the physics system and the collision mesh we use for that and it would be much faster but we are trying to keep the rendering and the physics parts as separate as possible since we want the server to handle 100% of the physics. There could be a better way to do it we are missing but we already almost have the projection shadows in there and they should still be pretty cheap.

yea, we already have shadows halfway working on the kart, we just need to spend a little bit more time making that work because right now we can either have the shadows from the kart and a full bright level, or no shadow from the kart and vertex lighting on the level - we just have to spend a day or two figuring out how to get both working at once. I think that combined with the strong rim lighting on the kart and character is really going to make the player pop out against the background. I also want to experiment at some point with baking in some ambient occlusion shadows on the environment via texture shadows, I think that combined with the vertex lighting might make things look pretty sharp. I'm not sure all lower end hardware could handle the texture shadows though since they would eat up a chunk of memory. What I have started on next though is some new character models, I want to get some straightened away so that you can swap out characters as well and karts / hats / etc. I don't think I am going to be getting much done this week though, I am taking on a bit of freelance work to make some rent money

SHIT. I need to make a phone call.

Hexen? cool thread.

I made a much larger and more explanatory post about rim lighting on zee blog: http://nimblebit.blogspot.com/2008/02/r ... athon.html also includes some wallpapers / screenshots

real brief update, I was playing around with cubic environment maps in ogre today when I found something that clicked and made me try to use it to fake rimlighting using just a cubemap and no shaders. After a few hours of experimenting with how to build the cubemap, I hit a breakthrough and just like that we have rim lighting! I am going to make a more detailed post about in on our blog about it when I get it implemented fully, but here is a pic of it working in game: and this is the setup I finally settled on in maya to render out my cubemaps from: on the programmer side of things, Brian has been setting up the networking framework and re-architecting things that need to be moved around in order to be networked. We are hoping to have a multiplayer karts driving around by the end of the month.

from SA, some great ones on here: http://www.somethingawful.com/d/video-g ... ements.php

"c'mon babe, it's for mapcore!"

I'm pretty much a monogamist when it comes to gaming, right now I am still in a committed and deep relationship with TF2.

you ain't no kinda man if you aint got a beard.

from new years

Thanks for the vote of confidence Matt! It was good to meet you at that event. You can be part of our marketing division

yes, that story is ridiculous.

ooooooooo we will be interested in looking into how we might integrate this into the project I think . .. http://www.devbump.com/story.php?title= ... _of_Charge

Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his own brow?

that thought about ad's has definitely crossed our minds, we have talked about a lot of different methods for monetization. Right now I think we are kind of leaning towards a regular flat cost for the game, and trying to get it on something like steam (ok, not like steam - we want to put it on steam because we both think it's awesome!) We definitely want to generate income from the game, our entire goal with this project is to hopefully provide us with enough resources to make another game, and another and another, etc. We really just want to make our own games for a living and we want to use our own resources to do it whenever possible. As far as gameplay, it's not written out in detail or anything, but there will be items you pick up on the track, that part will be similar to other kart games. We have ideas for stuff here and there but we are really trying to just let the game inspire us as we get parts of it done and possibilities emerge. A few things we have been working on lately but ran out of time to finish to include in the video are, slowing down the head turning animation and running it independently of the how fast the wheels are turning (it's too twitchy right now) and also having the kart cast a shadow which we have run into some minor headaches over, but will figure out soon enough. So look for those in future videos I think it's really fun to develop in "videos" it seems like we just figure out what we want to show in our next video and then that becomes the milestone and sets what we have to work on in order to show that off. We have been discussing the idea of our next video being a bunch of networked karts racing at the same time, which I think would be awesome!