go-kart model

[e-freak]

was about to post that one - just got dougs mail and thought "some one is the happiest indie game dev alive now" ^^

[Ooghijmiqtxxa]

Just wanted to pop in and say Zero Gear is going to take over the universe. I met David and Brian at the SF Postmortem and got to talking to them about Zero Gear, among other things. These guys are very serious and know what they're doing. I even got to play around a bit with a demo of Zero Gear and the Kart and track looks more amazing in motion. Really guys, you are doing a fantastic job, keep it up!

[zaphod]

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

[zaphod]

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.

[Bic-B@ll]

i have no idea what youre talking about but it looks cool and is progress so yay

[zaphod]

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

[Gorion]

looking good, you guys are really moving up ahead

[Sentura]

i'm thinking, where are the shadows hidden

[OL]

yeah, I don't know if you haven't gotten around to it yet but even some simple cartoony shadows could add a lot to the graphics quality. Especially in the screenshots of your desert level, the cacti and buildings, not to mention the karts, are kind of just floating there.

regardless, loving it so far

[zaphod]

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

[Pericolos0]

looks great =)

How about just a shadowplane on the car instead of rendering realtime shadows? Looks great if done right and super cheap.

[zaphod]

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.

[st0lve]

you win the award for coolest dev. alive.

[PhilipK]

Damn this is turning out better every time I check.

[zaphod]

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