Let there be worms!

I could swear I have seen you somewhere before?...






And another (but less sucessfull) experiment i did was this other very classical sprite...


It don't look as cool as the worm, in fact... I'm a bit disappointed how bad it looked in 3D.
But its no problem, I will have to make it thicker and use less darker shadings at my next try.


but the worms look cool! and the editor is starting to take shape(even if there are tons of work left) :D

stay tuned for more awesome sprites resurrected in the world of voxels! :D

Editor sneak peek!

Since I have not shown any cool pictures for a while, I decided to show you guys some very early tests from the Liero3D model editor I'm currently working on :)

The interface look like crap, and uhm... not to mention my "lovely" -not so artistic- test model *cough*

But that is less important atm, what really matters is to make the 3d view, color palette and 3 separate 2D views working, and most of it is.

Next up is to make it possible to select what depth layer in each of the 2d views you are currently drawing on, this will be shown as 32 boxes bellow each 2d view(since the model is a maximum of 32x32x32), similar to how the drawing works in the Q-Block editor.

The overall scale of the windows will change, I think the palette should be smaller, and the 3 other 2d views scaled up as much as possible.
The 3D preview will have its own 4rth window aligned like the other 3.

And oh! before anyone asks, the color palette is temporarily randomly generated ;-)

When all basics is in there, I will add a row with simplistic buttons at the top of the window for SAVE, OPEN and so on, I'm sure it will be a neat little editor :)



I have a few interesting features i plan to implement, one has to do with the color palette(more about that later).

But perhaps the most interesting one is to take some inspiration from the game Spore.
where each creation is stored in a normal PNG picture, and model data is stored in the metadata.

What I really like about this is that it makes sharing content and general overview so much more practical and flexible, you could browse the directory with your creations in any software that suports png :)
and of course, most operating systems would automatically make thump-nails for preview, sweet! :)

[edit]
And one more thing, you guys can expect LOADS of new pictures in the blog as soon as i add all the necessary functions i need in the editor, i think i will post all the models i convert from the original 1.33 in the blog(if people are interested) :)

PS:
I'm also feeling a bit happy today! :D
I received money from a Foundation: 300 Euro! and I have 2 more that I might get from!

hopefully I will manage to save most of it until the other ones arrive, and if everything goes my way(for once)... There is a chance that i can get a laptop! woohoow! :D

I am alive!

It has been a long time since there was any news on this project, so i thought i should just let you guys know that this project is still alive and kicking :)

Over the last month I have not had any energy to do any serous programming....
But i think it is starting to turn around again, and i have started working on the Editor from which all models will be made for L3D.

The editor will also be shipped with the game, and from within you can load existing game assets to mod them freely.

It seems logical that i create a simple editor that anyone can use without having any knowledge in 3d modeling, with would have been necessary if i for example made the models in a 3d modeling software like maya or 3d max.

This way I need to spend a little more time working on the project, but at the same time it would probably be much faster to create all the content(and there is allot of it) in a editor designed for simple block art, instead of an editor like 3d max.

The editor would probably closely resemble: QBlock

I'm sorry that i don't have any cool screen-shots or videos this time around, but i thought that i would show you guys another voxel project a friend of mine has been working on for a little while.

The game is calld: Lootfest and is a simple but interesting "zelda" style game inspired by 3D Dot.
It would appear my Liero3D game inspired him allot, since he started working on it after he saw my project, and he also implemented my fake SSAO technique among other things ;-)

He used the first solution I created that is vertex based, and not the one i later changed to that is Texture based, but it works well for his needs.

So, congrats to Fabian for Finishing Lootfest, and I wish him all the luck with his sales on XBLIG :)

Ladys and gents...

I can tell that you people have been starving for something more than screen-shots and empty words for a while now, so I thought it was time for something more interesting...

So... without more delay... I happily present: The first movie.

Nothing to fancy just yet, I am showing off some of the basic features in the engine, but there is more to come, so don't worry :)

And that is not all, I'm also happy to say that I am the proud owner of Liero3D.net *drum sound*
and some web-space at One.com.
I'm currently prioritizing the game engine, so the page will probably stay "empty" for a little while longer ;)

Note:
Any feedback if ofcourse wellcome, as long as it don't involve the particles lack of shading :P

sweet shades!

Just as i expected, the texture based "Ambient Occlusion" effect looks a hundred times better than the previous vertex based one, and I'm almost finished with it! :)

There are a few blocks missing(you can see that some corners are not shaded) but this will be fixed very soon.

I will also change the way I write blog posts, it looks like people really don't like my rambling over the last month(apparently visitor number plumbed from 680 to 160 in one month), so i will try to make it more interesting.

From now on, I will write shorter posts, and only post new messages if i have some new cool pictures or movies to show :)

Youtube video will be up shortly, I only want to add some gore and worms to blow up ;-)





Note: The shadows are a bit over the top atm, I will make them slightly lighter.

To fake a fake

70% of all woman are faking it...
But I wonder how many who need to fake the fake?

After trying a SSAO shader and seeing some unsatisfying performance(on a very primitive example) , I decided to look into alternative solutions that would be faster to render and could work on older machines.

So I did a simple test where i darkened vertexes next to other blocks, and it looks something like this:



It looks really bad in a few spots, and quite good in others, but on average it is not as good as I was hoping for, so my next attempt will be to use gradient shaded textures instead.

Currently things are only evenly gradient, but I want the shadows to be stronger the closer you get to a corner, This is not possible to do when we color the vertices's directly, but would be very simple to do on a texture.

This is of course a very fake way to do "Ambient Occlusion", but considering that we get it almost for free, I can live with it.

Note: The picture to the right has slightly darker shadows.

Feeling the pressure

With only 2 days left to the game-dev LAN, I'm starting to feel the pressure...

Unfortunately, I wont manage to implement everything i wanted to implement, but i hope i will have most of the important ones from my TODO list.

some of them are:

• Instanced based voxel Particles for blood, explosion fragments and dirt.

• A few pre-set weapons used for demonstration in free-camera mode.

• A few dummy objects to blow up, generating cascades of blood and gore that paint the terrain red :)

hopefully i can also put together a more decent and more presentable loading screen, but it don't have very high priority, probably the very last thing i do if i have time to spare.

Things that i wont have time for:

• SSAO(this really bothers me, it would have made my project 100x more presentable and attractive to view).

• Depth of field.

• Player physics.

• Some form of simple multiplayer test.

It really is sad that i wont have time to implement multiplayer before the LAN, it would have been awesome to test play the game with the other people there, but I guess we cant have it all :3

I have spent the last 2 days messing with the instancing for my particle effects.
And I think I have everything solved(except for some performance penalty to be solved later).

If things goes well, the particle engine should be implement into the engine today, and unless any unforeseen problem should arrive, perhaps record a short tec-demo and upload to youtube :)

[Edit]
The particleManager is implemented and running very smoth, I'm very happy with the performance and how it works(pre-loading and recycle old particles).

But i forgot that the custom shader i used for instancing would create problems with fog...
so until this is solved, I don't feel its worth making a movie and upload to youtube, I would only regret it later.

If only i had a working Depth of field class, it would not create the same problem, and everything would look awesome! :D