"When Colony Ships Attack!" - [v3x3n]

Daily 09/10/03

from JoeUser Forums

Kinda a slow morning actually. I checked in my stuff from last night. Worked with scott to get a better texture for the phaser and explosion.

The afternoon picked up a bit. I evaluated a couple of max->.x exporters. The best one I've found so far is the freeware one:

Panda DirectX Exporter
http://www.pandasoft.demon.co.uk/directxmax4.htm
Congratulations to PandaSoft.

If you haven't used it, I highly recommend it. Plus it's free whereas PolyTrans is $400.

Alex and I sat down together and we got the animations working. They're still not in yet though, but it looks like we may be able to get them in before the demo. Woohoo!!!

I started working on the scorch marks and damage stuff when Alex got my attention.
We got the high poly ship in. It looks pretty sweet. Here, take a look.





The rest of the evening was spent with Alex tweaking the lighting and letting him fuss with the backgrounds. Man, the lighting was a pain. Now I think we've finally nailed down our lighting. At least I hope so. What do you think?
 

Tonight, I think I'll just chill. Maybe play some games. I'm itching to get some homeworld in. Maybe it's because of all the space stuff we're doing. Then again, I still haven't finished the scorch marks. I don't know...

9,208 views 6 replies
Reply #1 from JoeUser Forums Top
We can work on that. I'm just glad that we finally got a handle on all the material and lighting properties so that we can control them. I thought we did that before, but something must have snuck in to muddle the whole situation. We spent about an hour cleaning it up to day so that we have exact control over the lights. I think Cari and I will try to implement a lighting manager so that no sneaky lights can get in and screw up what we have.
Reply #2 from JoeUser Forums Top
The one thing I did really like was the lighting the weapon effect gave off when it was fired.. Very sweet :-) I like! We do have to change the colour to something more like the beam though.
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Reply #3 from JoeUser Forums Top
The problem was not with getting the lighting working well but getting the working period. We will have some time to get the lighting just right but for now I would have to say the game looks much better and is "getting there"..
Reply #4 from JoeUser Forums Top
Ooh that is cool. I think the lighting on the ships may still need some work, they're kind of dark. More polygons definitely helps! Very exciting!
Reply #5 from JoeUser Forums Top
I have an idea about the edges of the screen but I don't know if we have time to get it working.. Woudn't it be cool if the egdes of that map had fog all around it? An example for this is kinda like how they do it in FPS's to show that you can't see far in the distance. Anyway I was just thinking about it, might look cool.
Reply #6 from JoeUser Forums Top
I like the way in Star Trek they had a 3d (volume) gaseous effect as you moved through the galaxy. That would be cool to see - don't know how hard to implement it would be, though. :-)