Light FX

Here are some examples of light effects as seen in some earlier screenshots. They are all done with an additive shader using vertex color and vertex alpha so there is no texture used at all. The upper ones show the vertex colors and the black and white ones show the vertex alpha.

Shot1

A shot of the interface.

Arena20

This screenshot is taken from the editor.

Ka-Boom!

Been working on some updated FX, among other things.

Texture and Lighting

Long Overdue Update

This video is a little old already. The level has been partially re-textured and many of the FX have since been updated. This is running on an iPod 2g, so pretty pleased with performance.

Glow Goodness

Wrote a shader to be able to combine the vertex alpha shadows and self illumination.

Code

Neato

I just tested out and discovered the self illuminated vertexlit shader doesn't require any extra draw calls.

EhnMil

Success!

Shadows

Faked AO shadows off of objects using no extra texture or render passes, just oldschool trickery.

Another dude.

426 polys, 245 verts, 128x128 texture.

Level2

Another test level completed in about 2.5 days which included re-texturing about half the texture used, re-creating all the level pieces, re-UVing those pieces, laying out the level, placing all the pieces, building the collision, lighting the level, merging the geometry and optimizing the geometry, breaking up the geometry, exportation/importation, and re-lighting in Unity. The tile pieces were scaled up and enlarged so a fewer number was visiable on screen to keep the vert count down below 4k in most cases, almost 1k of which is the character. Draw calls stay below 20 for almost the entirity of the level, some of which are also taken up by the character and weapon and HUD.

Lighting Tests

This is the initial lighting test using lights in Unity and keeping them set to Forced Vertex. It looks okay and the performance is good, except that after adding a few lights, they begin to cut out because all the geometry is being combined. After trying a few variations of layouts and light settings, I realize this is probably not going to work.

Here is the level combined and vertex welded in 3dsmax, and then vertex lit which, which not only processes way faster in max, but it also runs in the game without any lighting calculations so there are way less draw calls becuase there are no lights in the scene. The only down side is that the level isn't as easily modified after it is merged together, but by this point the level design should already be signed off on.

Spookiness!

Hey, its Xmen legends!

Level Layout

The overall level layout. The plan is to section off areas into optimal rendering/memory chunks and if need be, break the level up into multiple levels with load transitions between them.

Level Shot

A shot of what the final level complexity should look like.

Texture Planning

Planning out texture usage for level and object geometry for indoor levels. Using two 256x256 textures should give plenty of real estate for a set of rooms along a same theme, along with a good variety of destroyable objects to fill them with. The goal is to use as few textures as possible.

I should be able to mix up the wall geometry a bit and use pieces of texture from different bits so I get a ton of different wall sections.

8 objects should be enough per level. I might have to use a couple spaces for larger objects, or combine texture bits from multiple spaces.

Crates!

Every game needs 'em! :P

Level Testing

Went back to my test level to test out some level texturing methods. I think a simple, clean look will be the best for ease and speed of creation and will downsize very nicely since there won't be any small details to get lost.

original

final