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*** Monolith Production's Finger Server
User name: dussault
Plan modified: Tue Apr 20 10:47:58 1999
4/19/99
Lithtech2 development is proceeding far faster than I
expected. At this point, it's like night and day compared
to where it was a few months ago. Cool features are
getting added every day. What's cool is that the R&D will
continue for at least the next few months.
It's interesting to see the Lithtech API evolve over time.
We've experimented with so many styles and ways of
structuring things that the API has looked very different
at different times. As it moves on, I can see it steering
a course between speed, complexity, usability, and
consistency.
Our Lithtech2 E3 demo is looking AWESOME. It's very
outdoors-ish. It's already looking much better than I had
envisioned. While not "2 years before its chosen time",
this demo will pump fear.
I'm psyched to see 3rd Law's (Bloodshot's) game at E3.
From what I've seen so far, it's looking great. It has
been great working with these guys, it's obvious they have
a lot of experience and know their shit. Their game will
kick ass so keep an eye on it.
A few of the new developments...
Skeletal animation is working great so far. Each model can
now have multiple textures assigned to it as well. M.A. is
pimping out models with shared animation sets.
Support for 32-bit textures and screen surfaces has been in
for a while. I'm very happy with the way it's structured..
all the color conversion code was strewn out before but now
it is cenralized, clean, and simple. It's definitely
better to be using 32-bit textures and a 16-bit screen than
16-bit textures and a 32-bit screen.
The TNT2 owns me. It's very interesting to be working in
this paradigm where the card isn't the bottleneck anymore.
The bottleneck is much more on the processor and data
structure side. The biggest overall change in Lithtech2
will be to support the kind of rich environment that we can
now render in the networking, tools, and physics.
We have a SoftImage terrain exporter now. This is a huge
leap over the previous way we made terrains. It's much
faster and easier to texture and manipulate the terrains in
Soft.
There are some new tricks the preprocessor does to optimize
the terrains. It can sometimes strip out 65% of the polies
on the terrain with no noticeable difference.
Detail textures really enhance the look of our terrain. It
really makes the texture on the terrain look larger and
more detailed. The goods...
The model lighting is much more accurate now. Models can
be lit accurately from lights placed in the environment, so
you can get nice subtle bits of light all over them.
We're playing around with different blending modes that
work well for things like the sun and clouds passing
overhead. I'll describe this better later.
We've got some cool time of day effects going in. The
entire world gets lit directionally as the sun passes
over. Model lighting and shadows tilt around as the sun
moves. The entire terrain gets lit as well.
There's a new type of object called a Canvas that allows
the game to render polies directly.
This allows for some cool effects like lightning, fire,
glass shattering, etc..
Pultzar hasn't been messing around at all. DEdit is
getting friendlier and friendlier all the time. The node
names in the node view can be set to show the class name or
object name. You can mirror brushes. There are sphere and dome primitives. There are browse dialogs for filenames,
etc..
Bouwman's been working on improving the visible surface
determination for Sanity. There have been major speed
improvements on that game already and he's not even done
yet.
Countdown to Mule Variations: 8 days
3/13/99
Just finishing up the implementation of skeletal animation
for Lithtech 2. This will REALLY help our games have more
models with better animation. There are several key
advantages of skeletal animation we'll be using extensively
in our LT2 game:
Shared animation sets - Models with the same skeleton can
share animation sets. This will save the animators TONS of
time in exporting and tweaking animations. This also
allows us to change the geometry of the character very
easily without changing the animation.
Memory savings - Skeletal animation itself cuts the memory
requirements of model animation down by a factor of 2-3.
Using shared animation sets should halve it again.
Basically, animation memory will NOT be a problem!
Rotatable nodes at runtime - This will allow us to move
character heads, eyes, limbs, and mouths independent of the
animation they're playing. One thing we might experiment
with is a 'ragdoll' mode a model can be put into where
their bones use realistic physics without any specific
animation being played for infinite variety in the
character deaths and recoils.
The attachment system is being reworked to allow MUCH more
flexibility. Attachments points on models used to be
geometry nodes in the model. This took up lots of memory
for the extra animation data. Now, the 'sockets' will
simply be a position and rotation offset from a bone in the
model. This means we can have MANY more attachment points
for free and they can be repositioned inside ModelEdit very
easily.
Other than that, LT2 is proceeding very nicely. There are
new optimizations in the preprocessor that help reduce the
final poly count a LOT.
Pultzar is on DEdit now - the new DEdit is kicking butt.
We now have model exporters for these modeling packages:
SoftImage, 3DSMAX, Lightwave, and Maya.
The next few months are going to be heavy graphics R&D.
I'll describe the specifics of the features we're doing
later (doing want to speak too soon :).
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