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*** Monolith Production's Finger Server
User name: dussault
Plan modified: Tue Aug 24 13:26:40 1999
8/24/99
Time for a quick update:
The first iteration of the terrain functionality is in now.
Wes has been busting out cool terrain levels for a while
and everything is proceeding smoothly. I know I will have
to revisit terrain a couple times in the next couple months
to get it better and better, but the hardest part is over.
As part of the terrain work, the engine's top-level search
structure is a quadtree instead of a BSP tree now.
(Changing to an octree is very easy, but we don't
need it for NOLF). This comes in handy, is faster for
certain operations, and handles non-indoor games better
than a BSP as well, so I'm glad this got in.
While working on model LOD, I found a way to rework the
skeletal animation loop to be MUCH faster. I can't believe
I missed this before.. it was so obvious, but it's a relief
to have the LT2 models rendering at the speed one would
expect.
I'm very pleased with the way the model LOD came out. It's
much simpler than the Shogo method (which was similar to
Intel MRM) and is a lot more efficient. In the game, we
will be using a set LOD offset for each GAME detail level
(ultra-high, high, medium, low), and the animators can
tweak out what each version will look like. The
transitions between LODs are smoothed out so you can only
tell it's doing LOD if you really look hard.
The model rendering will get another pass in the not too
distant future, and I'm expecting even more performance
gains. Sometimes this kind of thing bites me in the ass
though.. envision this scenario, "I am specifying 1/3 of
the vertices as before, but it renders slower!" Or how
about, "I removed 20% of the transforms, but it renders
slower!" There are those who say there's a reason for
everything, and there are those who use 3D APIs...
Primary things left to address for LT2 (I'm leaving these
extremely general because I'm sure I'll end up doing the
exact opposite of whatever I say here :)
- Lighting enhancements
- Networking
- Mods
- More model optimizations
- More terrain optimizations
- General renderer optimizations.. I have some ideas
that I'm very excited about
I saw Ministry last weekend and it was an awesome show,
way better than their last one. At the last one, Al just
sat there in a chair and barely moved, at this one, they
all went nuts. They even played Supernaut! I almost got
myself perished in the pit but it was fun as hell.
Emails are coming in about once a minute... I really wish
Outlook had a way you could tell it to only check for email
every X minutes, or only let high-priority email through.
The little email icon that comes up in my taskbar when I
get an email feels like an eye staring at me, daring me
to ignore it..
6/23/99
Time for an update about E3. I've been amazed at all the
interest in Lithtech that E3 generated. Here's an article
I can't argue with:
http://www.voodooextreme.com/articles/E3_99/
I can't really pick one thing I saw as the most
impressive... it all sort of blended together. The things
that stick out in my mind are Drakan, Anachronox, and 3rd
Law's Psycho Circus game. 3rd Law just released this video:
http://www.bluesnews.com/files/kiss/kiss_e3-99_indeo51.shtml
I couldn't believe the hordes of monsters in their game..
you have to see it to believe it. If I had a Men of the
Year award, the 3rd Law team would get it.
The most memorable events I have of the E3 trip are:
1. I busted half a move. In my vocabulary, busting a move
is getting a phone number from a girl you don't know.
Busting half a move is complimenting them but not having
the balls to get the number.
2. We played pool in a bar next to Jamie Fox.
3. Jason, Chris and I had just finished up a nice meal and
were stepping out of the restaurant on the Santa Monica
Promenade when we saw some lights flicker about half a
block down. We all looked, then there was a HUGE (3 story
high) explosion in which a manhole cover was blown out of
sight. The first thing I remember is feeling a heat wave.
The next thing was seeing the crowd go into panic mode. We
stood around for a little, then got up closer to see that a
hole about 10 feet in diameter had been blown in the
road. Apparently a gas pipe had exploded. The square
piece of metal that holds the round manhole cover in place
was jammed in the road sideways so it looked like a diamond
sitting on one of its edges.
After E3, Joel and I were at Universal Studios
at 'Creativity', at which there were a bunch of informative
talks. It's good that the people that populate the video
card companies are cool since we have to spend so much time
with them :)
Lithtech2 is proceeding along nicely. Among other things,
S3 texture compression is in now which reduces our texture
file sizes and will make a big difference on cards that
support it. I was amazed at the quality of S3's texture
compression library, I can't even tell the difference
between uncompressed and compressed textures (but then
maybe that's because I don't want to see it :) Just in
case, each texture can be stored as compressed or
uncompressed.
Jonathan and I went to a Tom Waits show in L.A. last week,
it was totally awesome! After 2 1/2 hours and 3 encores I
could've sat there for another 10 hours. We saw Chuck
Weiss and Benicio Del Toro hanging out in the lobby too.
Our seats were pretty far back (and security was tight!) so
we didn't have a very good view, but I got the first hour
or so on tape!
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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