VectorStorm Blog

Is it just me, or is there a whiff of the Wing Commander 3 around StarCraft 2′s single player campaign mode?   I mean, Mission -> Cutscene -> Awkwardly composed interactive GUI with actors uncomfortably standing in front of a low-resolution static CG backdrop, where you click on the actors to talk to them until you get bored, then click on a computer to get your next mission -> Cutscene -> Mission, repeat.  (Side note:  it must take an awful lot of effort from the artists to make realtime CG look so much like poorly composited green-screen FMV from sixteen years ago.)

Anyhow.  Folks who know me will not be surprised to hear that I’ve purchased StarCraft II.   I’ve only spent about an hour with it thus far, which basically equates to running a couple of tutorials (before deciding that I didn’t really need to run those tutorials), and then doing the first three single-player missions.  This means that I’m not yet ready to pass judgement.

I have a thing about RTS games.  They are games that I really, desperately want to like and be good at.  They have that “strategy” word in the genre name, which in my head translates into “games for people who are good at thinking”.  Yes, I know in my head that the RTS genre really has far more in common with Diner Dash than with any true “thinking man’s game” (apologies to anybody who hadn’t already noticed that, and for whom I’ve now ruined RTS games forever).  But that knowledge doesn’t sway my heart.  In my heart of hearts, I yearn to be awesome at RTS games, to prove that I’m a smart person (despite all evidence to the contrary).

So I always fall into this insidious little trap when a new RTS game comes out.  I hear about the game and think “gosh, that RTS game sounds really interesting, I should play that.  I bet it’ll be really interesting and lots of fun, and I’d be good at it!  I could impress my friends/workmates/random strangers on the Internet!”  I purchase the game, play the first five or six single-player levels, and then remember that I don’t enjoy playing RTS games, and immediately uninstall it.  You don’t want to know how many RTS games I own for which I’ve played through the first five missions and then no further.  But if you were to count up every single RTS game which has come out since the original StarCraft, you’d probably be pretty close.

As I mentioned before, I’ve only played the first three missions of StarCraft 2, so I haven’t yet hit that magical fifth or sixth mission yet, where the increasing micromanagement and complexity might cause me to suddenly remember that I don’t like this type of game and ragequit.  But to be fair, the original StarCraft is the only RTS which I’ve ever played right through to the end — I even played through to the end of its Brood War expansion, although that one felt like a slog (I just wanted to know how the plot ended).  So I’m interested to see whether I stick with this sequel, which is very much the same game, only prettier.

I do keep expecting to see Mark Hamill wander into those interactive screens between missions, though.  Or maybe somebody in a silly lion suit.

Just a quick note that the bare bones animation system I mentioned before is now working.  ”Actors” are shared, so you only have one copy of each animated model in memory (although that detail is hidden from game code).  Each animated model can have any number of animations.  Each instance of each actor can have a different animation playing at any given time, or can be at a different position within each animation.

Stuff that’s still left to do on the animation system:

• Flagging animations as “loop”, “ping-pong”, or “play once then stop” (currently, they all loop).
• Consider spline-based interpolations between keyframes (currently, linear).
• Consider supporting material animations.

Sorry for lack of updates this week;  most of my time and attention has been going to the day job.  Haven’t had a lot of free time this week, so I’ve been spending that free time pretty much exclusively on coding MT2, rather than on updating this web site.  Hopefully back to more frequent progress updates this weekend/next week!

So I was hoping to get animations in and working today, but as it turns out, there was a dependency that I hadn’t thought about — to have animations work nicely, I really needed support for multi-part models.  That is, a single file which can contain a whole hierarchy of renderable objects, including their relative positions, orientations, and etc.  This wasn’t too difficult to implement, except that it exposed a bug in my file parsing code.  That file parsing code desperately needs a major refactoring, but I’m not going to do that until post-MS2 (or maybe never);  I’ve patched the bug, and will keep soldiering on with the current system.

Today’s screenshot shows the very first quick test model — several meshes loaded from a single data file, and arranged in a hierarchy.  I’ve also set up the file format to easily (eventually) support VectorStorm’s future rendering path that I’ve talked about a few times in the past.

Anyhow, now that I can load several meshes into a single hierarchy, I can start working on animating them.

Back in the early days of this  web log, I wrote a short series of articles about “awesome” game ideas, as distinct from “good” game ideas.  One of the three game concepts I put forward in that series was this:  ”A platform game where the player may drastically grow and shrink at will.”

Well, imagine my surprise to find that somebody’s independently designed and implemented a prototype of that game!  (Warning:  requires the Unity browser plug-in)   I’m thrilled to see how well the concept works in practice, and doubly-thrilled that I didn’t have to build it myself, to get that validation.  :)

I wish there were more levels and more polish, but as a proof of concept, I think it really, really works.

Link:  Specter Spelunker Shrinks

Finally starting to feel properly better, today, though I’m still finding myself becoming easily winded under any sort of physical exertion.  But at least the flu symptoms have abated.

So I’m beginning to spec out what’s going to be in the MS2 build of MMORPG Tycoon 2.  It’s mostly gameplay stuff, but before I start on that, I’m going to be doing some graphic work — it’s been far too long since I did anything that could be seen in a screenshot!

Here are these initial graphic tasks:

• An animation system.  (Consider importing animation data from a 3D package)
• Modelled + animated PCs, NPCs, and monsters.
• Trees.
• Improvements to terrain system.

Today I’ve begun on the animation system.  Animation systems can be big, complicated things, depending on what features you want them to have.  Animation systems are one of my special subjects, so this one is going to be fairly full-featured.  Biggest issue is going to be where the data’s coming from.  I imagine that in the first revision, I’ll just be entering data by hand, but in the long run, I should definitely be reading the data in from data files exported from a 3D package, so that I can get actual animators to create assets, instead of needing to do everything on my own.  Hopefully I’ll be able to get the animation system finished up tomorrow.

On the topic of PCs, NPCs, monsters, and trees, I’ll just note that MT2′s graphic style is somewhat stylised, and I expect that these new bits of art will be as well.  Imagine hyper-deformed  characters built out of cubes, and you probably won’t be far off.  With the number of entities potentially visible on screen at once, they need to be very cheap to render.  But I still want to have them be animated, and nicer than the simple boxes that they are right now.

On the topic of the terrain engine, I’ve decided that the terrain system that I was using in MS1 won’t scale well to a full-size MMO, and that even if it would, it doesn’t provide as much terrain resolution as I really want.  I’ve identified two minor changes to the system which together should allow substantially higher vertex density for the terrain, but also should reduce MT2′s current memory footprint from around 600 megabytes down to about 50 megabytes.  I’ll talk more about these modifications in a few days.

But for now, it’s time to sleep.  Exhausted.