Task 18: Elements of Game Technology, part one: game engines

In this blog entry I will be writing about game engines, how they vary, their advantages their disadvantages, usability and what games they support.

There are lots of game engines out there to pick and choose from but a lot of Games Company’s use their own in house engines this is due to the fact that the engine has been in use for a number of years, they have control over the whole direction the engine takes. They have a direct connection with the people improving their engine, bugs get fixed in a matter of days not months and also they can get access to improvements that haven’t been completely finished but could be helpful to the developers.

Here is a list of commonly known Game engines, the games on the engine and the Companies that use the engines.

Game engine	Games	Company
Unity	Cartoon Network Universe: FusionFall Tiger Woods PGA Tour Online GooBall Global Conflicts: Palestine Off-Road Velociraptor Safari WolfQuest Dead Frontier Battlestar Galactica Online	Cartoon Network Electronic Arts Over The Edge Entertainment Serious Games Interactive Flashbang Studios Eduweb Mikesgames Productions Bigpoint and Artplant
CryEngine 3	Crysis 2 ASTA: The War of Tears and Winds ArcheAge Cabal 2 Class 3 Forged by Chaos Nexuiz Ryse Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2 Tour Golf Online Warface	Crytek Polygon Games XL Games ESTsoft Undead Labs Panzar Studio Xaviant IllFonic City Interactive OnNet
id Tech 4	Doom 3 Quake 4 Prey Enemy Territory: Quake Wars Wolfenstein	id software Raven Software Human Head Studios Splash Damage
RAGE	Midnight Club: Los Angeles Grand Theft Auto IV Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis Red Dead Redemption	Rockstar Games
Source engine	Half Life 2, Team Fortress 2, Portal, Portal 2, Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2, Counter-Strike: Source, Day of Defeat: Source, Alien Swarm Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines Sin Episodes Dark Messiah of Might and Magic Zeno Clash Vindictus / Mabinogi: Heroes KOS Secret Operations	Valve Troika Games Ritual Entertainment Arkane Studios ACE Team devCat (Nexon)
Unreal Engine 3	America's Army 3 Batman: Arkham Asylum Borderlands Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway BlackSite: Area 51 Gears of War Gears of War 2 Gears of War 3 Unreal Tournament 3 Rainbow Six Vegas Lost Odyssey Mass Effect Mass Effect 2 Mass Effect 3 The Last Remnant Medal of Honor: Airborne Blade & Soul Bulletstorm	Eidos Interactive Gearbox Software Midway Games Epic Games Ubisoft Mistwalker BioWare Square-Enix NCsoft People Can Fly

The unreal engine has a lot of Games company’s using the engine this is due to its ease of use and its amazing features. The games that have been made in the unreal engine have been amazing and most have won awards for how good they were. Batman Arkham Asylum won and was nominated for loads of awards from sites like giant bomb, game informer, game trailers and games radar. It also won a BAFTA for game of the year and the studio won spikes Studio of the year.

The unreal engine can be heavily modified as its core is written in C++, it was originally used for first person shooters but then it has subsequently developers have made stealth, MMORPGS and RPG’s games using the unreal engine.  Unreal engine 3 is designed for Xbox 360, windows, windows vista, windows 7, Mac OS X, PlayStation 3, Wii U, iOS, Android and Adobe flash player. This means it’s one of the most versatile engines around. A lot of the gaming code is written in the Unreal Script a lot of gameplay can be shaped and moulded with going to deep into the internals of the engine.  The engine has come a long way since the first Unreal Engine 1. Here is a comparison between the engines and the character models of the unreal tournament games.

The CryENGINE is another huge engine like the Unreal Engine and was primarily used for  first person shooter games. Crytek used a technology demo called Far Cry they then realised and saw its potential and started to turn it into a game after progressing the engine Ubisoft bought the rights for the Far Cry franchise. Crysis was developed for the CryENGINE 2 and when it was released it was unfeasible for computers to run on its highest or even average settings. As the computers became better the game was used as a benchmark tester to see if you had a good computer or not.

The CryENGINE 3 was announced at GDC in 2009 and it was announced that the engine was being developed for Microsoft windows, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and even the Wii U. Crysis 2 was also created on the CryENGINE 3 and was a multiplatform game which helped other developers see the potential in using the CryENGINE for use on the consoles.

I must say I prefer the Unreal Engine due to its ease of use, is kismet system which allows you to alter the Gameplay scripting and this is very easy to use as it is uses nodes. This helps bring life to our levels and or models.

Task 17: Elements of game design, part six: documentation

Documentation is crucial in creating assets/levels because if you miss out the planning phase you can go completely off topic, create something that is too memory intensive. Documentation also helps in the development pipeline as is it covers; Concepts, Character profiles, Narrative, Scripts and others.
 

I have been looking on the internet to find some technical specifications for poly counts on current and prior titles, here are a couple of URLS.

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=43975

http://www.games-dev.com/forum/topic/1222-polygon-count/

http://forums.epicgames.com/threads/757776-Question-Poly-count 

A rough outline for various platforms:

 “DS can render 2000 triangles per frame max as it runs at 60fps and the system is capable of 120,000 per second.

So in order to get everything you need in game from 2000 triangles characters are generally limited to 300ish triangles but can be anything up to 2000 if all you want on screen is a character

PSP has a bit more power triangle wise but is limited to a maximum texture size of 128x128, so characters in PSP can be up to 900 triangles I would say.

The Xbox and Wii can do perhaps a few thousand triangles for a model

and PS3 360 and PC development will be something around the region as this quote from unrealtechnology.com

QUOTE

We build renderable meshes with 3,000-12,000 triangles, based on the expectation of 5-20 visible characters in a game scene.”

From looking around in multiple forums I have found out the weapons in first person games are normally 10k and in third person roughly 5000k. This is surprising to me I had always thought they would be a lot lower. I have also noticed that texture budgets are a lot smaller than I initially thought this is because textures take up more memory.

Over summer I am going to produce a small level in udk here is my Project Brief. 

I have not come up with a concept as of yet but I know my specifications and my limitations. I will be working to current Xbox 360/PS3 standards. I will be using 3DsMax to create my assets, Zbrush and crazy bump to create and enhance my normal maps and use the unreal engine 3 (udk) to present my level in engine. I will be creating low/medium and efficient density models. In the udk I will be using kismet and creating lighting setups.

There will be several stages in the production process:

·         Concepting, mood boards and research

·         White boxing

·         Concepting

·         Asset List

·         Tile able textures

·         First lighting pass

·         Hero assets

·         Secondary assets

·         Second lighting pass

·         Kismet implanted

·         Minor assets

·         Final Passes

I will aim to stick to these limitations;

·  My scene should be under 25,000 triangles.

·  Total texture budget, (for all your maps, diffuse,normal, specular etc) is under 25mb.

• All objects, cameras, maps and materials in the scene must be uniquely named to enable the assessor to navigate the scene comfortably.

• Assets should be textured using maximum 1024x1024 textures. Prioritise detail and reuse texture space wherever possible. Maximise the use of your texture sheets.

• Texture maps should be in .tga format.

• Save all related maps together in un-flattened .PSD documents

I’m leaning towards a gig venue for my summer project as I really like going to see live music in smaller venues and I think I could make a very well made scene. I think I would also like to create a character as from the way the character will look you should be able to tell what kind of music they play.

If I am going to create a character here are my limitations:

       ·      I will be setting myself a limit of 10,000 tris

Colour diffuse maps

·         2 x 1024 x 1024 (diffuse no alpha) 24 bit

·         1 x 512 x 512 (diffuse with alpha) 32 bit

Specular Maps

·         2 x 1024 x 1024 (specular maps) greyscale

OR

·         2 x 1024 x 1024 (colour specular) 24 bit

Normal Maps

·         2 x 1024 x 1024 (Normal maps) 24 bit

Task 16: Elements of game design, part seven: Level Design

In this blog I am going to be looking over and discussing about level design and how it’s not always about the visual aspects but how the level plays and interacts with the player.

When we started to discuss our ideas for our level the group talked about things that we could have the player interact with the main ideas where doors switches and jumping from a couple of platforms . Our Story was that the character has driven to this lab and he has to search the lab to find out what had happened there. We kept the level very ambiguous which probably didn’t really help us with the players interactivity.

When we were creating our Initial floor plans we would change and manipulate the floor plan to create a more immersive level but still we wanted to keep the character to the queens building so we had to make certain compromises.

In the level we wanted from the start and elevator system this was chosen due to the fact that our level was set in a subterranean lab and we needed the player to get to a down to the bottom of our lab quickly. The kismet for the elevator was drafted in the first week as we knew we needed it too work as it is a key component in our level.

After we created our level I realised that we had a very simplistic level of interactivity. We had only had to turn on switches to open doors. We could have had some more interactivity with some of the objects in our level. The robot arm could have moved when you went up to it and pressed the buttons. We only took advantage of verticality twice and both times we used stairs we could have used other means to scale or environment.

Here is an image from a game called Damnation. The image is a piece of concept art which was then given to the level designers to decide a rough plan of a level it shows that there are multiple routes through certain sections and I love the fact that you can see where you have come from throughout the level, it makes the level feel immersive.

A great way to mix up your bog standard paths is to add some verticality this can add some new gameplay mechanics and more player interactivity. Say for example if a player was walking down a path to a door and instead of it being open it was locked, you can see the switch  for the door but it’s up on a ledge to the right of the player. Then you have to climb up either using rocks, ladders or even create steps using barrels. Finally you get to pull the switch to open the door this could then let some enemies into the path or lead to a cut scene of what’s behind the door.

Level design in fps multiplayer is different to that of single player. In multiplayer levels designers need to take into account a lot of factors. Choke points are key in multiplayer levels this is where most of the action happens as the two teams head down a certain corridor or enter and large room. You cannot have one team turning up late because they had to navigate a longer route. In multiplayer maps things have to be balanced but this does not mean all the maps have to symmetrical. You can balance an asymmetrical level by giving certain weapon drops or even giving elevated terrain to the side of the map that might have more of a disadvantage in the overall layout.

Vehicle project

For my vehicle project I decided to design a high-end nightclub boat that would take its passengers up and down some of the most beautiful rivers in the world

I first started out by doing some quick sketches and photo shop design ideas using the silhouette method. Then came the process of designing ideas, joining those ideas and finally refinement.

After I chose my final idea I went into, and design ideas for the paint scheme and material choices.

Storyboarding helped my ideas developed and helped me identify some of the flaws within my design. One of the main issues was that I was going to have a glass back to the boat. This is not a good idea because you would be able to see all the cables and joining sections, which would then make it ugly and pointless.

I want to come back to this project to tighten and improve the design and to think more about how it would work and how it would be built.

Leicester city painting

This week I've been during scenes of buildings around Leicester.

I have drawn 12 prep sketches and have found a building I really like due to the lighting when I was there and the large panes of glass that surround the restaurant. Also the building from a certain angle reminded me of Edward Hopper's painting called nighthawks. So I decided to do a digital painting for my final.

The Nighthawks painting has influenced a lot of people, Ridley Scott has said “I was constantly waving a reproduction of this painting under the noses of the production team to illustrate the look and the mood I was after”. When he was directing the film Blade Runner. Also the painting was recreated in the style of The Simpsons for one of their episodes called Homer versus the 18th Amendment.

Here is the final outcome of my painting. the left-hand side of the image resembles the Nighthawks and is very empty, this forces the viewer’s eyes onto the focal point of the image. The focal point being the restaurant, I would like to add some characters into the scene as it would give the painting some life.