Waldo

It's interesting to look at the HUD in WoW - there's a lot going on. But what's interesting is how much power the user has to lay it out as they wish. It lets you not only make it how you like it, but also grow it as you learn the game. The game grows, you learn more, your HUD evolves into a more complex thing to handle it.

I really like the HUD concept in Metroid Prime, where it is literally a real HUD. I've been working on a system for a learning game concept where you can choose to be in either first or third person. When in third person, there is basically no HUD beyond generic chat-type text. You only get a HUD display in the more traditional sense when you are in first person, and more specifically it's displayed as if you are looking at the inside of your helmet (like Metroid Prime). Pic of the effect...

I've been working on a new HUD design for a project, and would love to browse through some gallery of HUDs to see the good, the bad and the ugly, not to mention what seems to be a common style/theme that works (or doesn't). Not that I'm offering, but would anyone else be interested in such a thing - or know of such a thing?

Something I'm seriously thinking of doing is putting delta-height data in the Alpha channel for each tree, then use it for parallax mapping in a custom shader. Would really bring things alive. The tree density data btw is generic "conifer" or "hardwood". I actually have much finer scale data (breakdown by species, by different sizes, etc.) but for this sort of high level view I don't need to get that detailed. You get more variation when you get down on the ground.

This terrain texture is a procedurally generated image that simulates the look of a satellite/aerial photo. It is generated using some custom software I wrote, which processes digital elevation data to create the hill shading effect, along with additional datasets that give the aproximate density of trees over the entire area. Based on the tree density data, trees (conifer, hardwood and snags) are randomly distributed, complete with little shadows. Here's a 1/16 scale version of the original. Click on it for a larger version. Because it's all procedurally generated, I could in theory generate about any resolution I want with it, but i've found you don't gain much when you go over 8192 at least for this much land. For comparison, here is the same area in Google Maps. More info on the project this is being used for at http://www.fsl.orst.edu/lemma/gnnviz/

Yea - i'm moving to Multiverse at some point though. I'm not so happy with Torque in some ways.

Someone say trees? Not as detailed as tomdon's pictures - more a quantity over quality type display... This is from a "sim" of an area in NW Oregon (Blue Mountains / Wallowa-Whitman area) I'm working on. Approximate level area is 20x20 km, tree placement based on data sets of estimated tree coverage. Project page at http://www.fsl.orst.edu/lemma/gnnviz

Austin was interesting I must say. Got to see/hear/meet a lot of interesting peoples etc. Multiverse was everywhere it seemed like - oh wait that's cause I was wearing their shirt they gave me! Actually they managed to get into a lot of panels, get Jon Landau to do a keynote, etc. PR & Marketing on the move. Had a good talk with (Mike Sellers) who it ends up worked a bit on the SimMars project that Maxis had once upon a time (but canned). He was pretty interested in the project as it must be similar to some of the stuff they were thinking of back then. He's also developing some DARPA/DoD projects on Multiverse right now. Mike, assuming you were there - Hollywood seemed pretty prevelant to me at least in the places I was. What did you think? I mean say beyond Landau doing a keynote. Oh yes - i like this cartoon...

I dunno, this company has done pretty well making essentially a really crappy/dumb game. Also check out http://www.driveonmars.com/index.html - another "are you kidding someone paid for this?" game. Like I was gonna quote that! NO LINE BREAKS MAKE BABY JESUS CRIE! OK. So no PVP. if you're at all thinking of making anyone inside of education or NASA etc. interested, you can't have it. No explosions, no deaths, nobody even gets hurt. Boring yea, but there are actually games out there that do pretty well without it. Second Life and A Tale in the Desert are two. I actually REALLY like EVE Online though haven't touched any of hte PvP side of things (happy miner am I), but I can understand the draw. Ah and the James Cameron thing. I had no idea about that until I'd started up my project. But that guy it ends up is (or was) REALLY into Mars for a while. Some articles like http://www.newmars.com/archives/000014.shtml.

lol god I knew someone wuold ask :^O Let's say that i'm working madly on it, it's late, and i've never done anything quite so challenging in my life. That said I've learned a LOT making this book.

Been messing around a lot lately with an MMO engine called Multiverse. It's not complete yet (closed beta state), but has some interesting potential. The basic business model is that the tools to develop new games as well as the server are free. The company also has a single client application that is used to play any game written for their technology. Multiverse then acts as the proxy between the client and servers. If you create a new game and charge for it, they take a cut and make their money. If you charge nothing, they dont' make anything either. It has a "steam like" system built in to allow you to download new and updated game content from servers whic I must say is pretty nice to anyone running a game that updates. Website for the company is http://www.multiverse.net. They are doing a presentation at the Austin Game Conference and I'll be semi-fortunate to have a short trailer shown on a project I've started that's a Mars colonization themed MMO, PvE & no PvP, realistic sim set in the near future (2050 or so). Target is for entertainment gameplay, educational use and also possible NASA visualization tool or platform for collaborative development and planning of future missions. Links to info on it and a shor trailer I slapped together on their "Games Built on Multiverse" page. Here's a screen from in-game - part of a "small" test map that is 40x40km. BTW the estimable David "Zafod" Marsh is my brainstorm buddy on this project.

HL1 did get ported, and so all the textures you're doing have "their place" in the port. I see no reason why when it's released, someone couldn't take these images and replace the existing material images with them. What's going to be the biggest issue is the rescaling of all these textures in the original map source. The port is done with all the original textures in their original scales. So you can't just toss in a 256x256 replacement for a 64x64 without modifying the original map source. Though their scale didn't change, they did get improved by adding reflective properties, etc. FYI, as some of you (*cough*Zafod*cough*) may know, Source textures are now refered to as "Materials". Each one is in it's own pair of files, rather than being crammed into a "wad" file. The first file for a material stores the image (basically), and the second is a text file containing specs on the material. Stuff like it's material (wood, metal, etc.), what image to show in the editor, properties for water (like reflection, fog when viewed from out of the water, and when in, etc.), two materials you can use if you want to blend two of them together, and a lot of other stuff I shouldn't talk about :^)

I was assimilated into the Combi.. err Collective...