Friday 11 February 2011
Demo: Seawars!
This is the video for the 1-player mode of my graphics assignment.
List of OpenGL or other features used:
- Texture mapping
- Collision detection
- Shaders (sea waves, boat wakes, cell-shaded moon)
- Model loading from scratch
- Objects transformation
- Basic AI
- Basic GamePlay
- Dynamic lighting
- Particle effects
Boat wakes have been realised by adding a quad behind the boat model and one triangle on each side. Then, these three objects have been moved using the same vertex shader used for the sea waves, with a higher frequency, according to where the ship was moving or rotating.
Not shown in this video is the first-person view, which makes the boat stop to aim to islands more precisely. This was achieved by transforming all the objects on the scene zooming them and rotating them all according to the sniper movements.
The subsequent video, instead, shows the 2-player mode, in which each boat must destroy the other one, and where destroying islands is only useful for grabbing power ups (in both videos you can see the augmented speed power up).
The total given time for the development was four weeks, with just a little tutorial on OpenGL carried on before. Most of the features have been implemented from scratch, by researching on books or course slides, with sometimes a little help from our teachers.
Some of the features (mostly shaders, fp view, 2p mode, particle effects) have been developed in no more than one day, while the deadline was approaching. That's because most of the time was dedicated to 3D transformations and the model loader, which uses obj files to create boats, islands, wakes and bullets, other then to the basic gameplay mechanics to make it an actual game.
I'm sorry about the poor video quality. For example, you cannot see bullets from boats.
This is the address to my youtube channel
http://www.youtube.com/user/dariazzo84#p/u/1/qVhQkjwbhts
If you set an high resolution there, you'll be able to see the demos properly. Sorry about not being able to link my videos directly onto this page.
Thursday 3 February 2011
Just to point out!
On this month 'Develop' there is a short article about Italian video game market, which could be very interesting for English people but awfully inaccurate for people who have a wider idea of how things go down there.
First off Will Freeman, the editor behind this article, makes a list of economical difficulties Italy is experiences in the last years. As always when speaking about Italy, the news he gets from M.A. Rickards, chairman of the annual IVDC (Italian Videogame Developers Conference), are somehow vague to say the least. Basically, he says that the crisis lowered the funds coming from the government and wants game developers to move in this direction, being more persuasive or passionate when looking for funds.
The imprecise bit about it is that crisis in Italy is not for real. It is just an excuse to lower wages, to avoid hiring and to keep costs down. Since the first pictures of employees in Wall Street leaving their offices years ago burst over the first pages of newspaper, bosses started looking for the opportunity of turn that international feeling in their favour. So, the change must happen on an ideal layer, and if the video gaming industry in that country is so poor, it's not because of the crisis.
Then, the speech turns to the alleged ignorance of Italian government about the field. That's true, but it is also true that this situation can be extended to a lot of aspects. It's true that the most funds in art go to cinema and music, but the quality of films and record which comes out is incredibly low for a country that in the past has leaded this two artistic fields for centuries; it's a shame. This is not my personal opinion, but something clear to which ALL critics agree. More than considering video games by their economic aspects, Italian government will be attracted by the way in which video games can work as an art, and in a couple of years maybe rate them higher then cinema or music.
But these countermeasures would come down to nothing in the Italian job market. This is how it works: people come out of schools, universities, colleges. They are then thrown into an office, where their chiefs make them sign (wrong verb) an intern-ship contract, which usually lets them without any income for 4 or 6 months. Then, if they're good enough and they have somehow mastered their new (and first in most cases) job, they are signed for a 'determined time contract' or an 'apprenticeship contract', which basically makes them earn something like 1000 euro/month for 1 or 2 years. Then, amazingly, they are NOT guaranteed to be finally hired. If they are kicked out, they usually end up at a cafeteria or serving at McDonalds, since they don't have many opportunities given the fact that they always worked on the same topic.
Is this model applicable to video game developers? That is a work which requires dedication, long development, leniency about deadlines, a solid group. Impossible. How many major studios are there in Italy? Ubisoft Milano, then nothing. What is the percentage of people hired after their apprenticeship (the whole technology field)? It's around 50%. This two statistics will go hand in hand from now on, meaning that if the latter doesn't rise, those guys in Milan (MotionSports on Kinect and other AAA titles) will remain an exception.
If you tried to send your resume to all the, let's say, 20 studios, working in Italy, 18 would not even respond you.
It's a good, and fairly ambitious, habit to say: “We can play with the 'Made in Italy' brand” as G. Caturano (CEO of a new media company in southern Italy) states, but first there are a ton of other things to fix and, unfortunately, for as much as the Italian very creative and capable developers, most of whom have abroad experience, can say, right now Italy cannot be on the map of the video gaming world.
The point is not about passion or other so-called intangibles, but about managing complex and young new businesses in a country in which you get your first wage at 30.
To me, this article told nothing about the actual situation it wanted to depict. Nobody, as reported, thinks that “video games are like gambling, or very bad” in Italy, they simply don't have time to think about something so challenging, because the current state, which is not even close to getting better, doesn't let them.
First off Will Freeman, the editor behind this article, makes a list of economical difficulties Italy is experiences in the last years. As always when speaking about Italy, the news he gets from M.A. Rickards, chairman of the annual IVDC (Italian Videogame Developers Conference), are somehow vague to say the least. Basically, he says that the crisis lowered the funds coming from the government and wants game developers to move in this direction, being more persuasive or passionate when looking for funds.
The imprecise bit about it is that crisis in Italy is not for real. It is just an excuse to lower wages, to avoid hiring and to keep costs down. Since the first pictures of employees in Wall Street leaving their offices years ago burst over the first pages of newspaper, bosses started looking for the opportunity of turn that international feeling in their favour. So, the change must happen on an ideal layer, and if the video gaming industry in that country is so poor, it's not because of the crisis.
Then, the speech turns to the alleged ignorance of Italian government about the field. That's true, but it is also true that this situation can be extended to a lot of aspects. It's true that the most funds in art go to cinema and music, but the quality of films and record which comes out is incredibly low for a country that in the past has leaded this two artistic fields for centuries; it's a shame. This is not my personal opinion, but something clear to which ALL critics agree. More than considering video games by their economic aspects, Italian government will be attracted by the way in which video games can work as an art, and in a couple of years maybe rate them higher then cinema or music.
Is this model applicable to video game developers? That is a work which requires dedication, long development, leniency about deadlines, a solid group. Impossible. How many major studios are there in Italy? Ubisoft Milano, then nothing. What is the percentage of people hired after their apprenticeship (the whole technology field)? It's around 50%. This two statistics will go hand in hand from now on, meaning that if the latter doesn't rise, those guys in Milan (MotionSports on Kinect and other AAA titles) will remain an exception.
If you tried to send your resume to all the, let's say, 20 studios, working in Italy, 18 would not even respond you.
The point is not about passion or other so-called intangibles, but about managing complex and young new businesses in a country in which you get your first wage at 30.
To me, this article told nothing about the actual situation it wanted to depict. Nobody, as reported, thinks that “video games are like gambling, or very bad” in Italy, they simply don't have time to think about something so challenging, because the current state, which is not even close to getting better, doesn't let them.
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