Testing hallway to demonstrate Post Processing effects, using bloom, DOF (Depth of Field) colour & desaturation shifting.
early testing of Image Detection Post Process effect and early gun sound manipulation
Early Work on the courtyard area with a fountain.
23/01/2011
Today we carried out a pipeline run, Kieran created a concept of a pillar which Josh then modelled, Kieran then textured it ready for me to import and set up in UDK, the resulting picture is my lobby scene built upon a little with the mentioned pillar in place.
Lobby imported into master level with the placeholder windows for the 1st floor level to be imported later today, each floor is its own level streamed via level streaming in kismet, the master level holds the terrain, each floor is then streamed via distance and load nodes I've set up in parts of the game world.
Early build of lobby with Auto Save feature
This video had to be slowed down as UDK decided to record it at 10x the speed it was running at
It shows the lobby in an early form along with the auto save feature running, at the moment it is only a text placeholder on the screen which will eventually be replaced with something else.
Landscape
The following is from my own website, it covers my work on the landscape for S-E-M-I
The landscape toolset in UDK is a remarkable tool, since switching from the old terrain tools to the new landscape tools I have felt my environments really stand out, Although the UDN is an amazing resource for finding out everything Landscape has to offer sometimes you have to dig around for yourself and experiment, the following work is 50/50 UDN knowledge and experimenting.
So let's paint the scene (pun intended) I'm currently working on a landscape to surround my level, I've been working off some concept art provided to create this world, So far there is the landscape itself, the level and a few spike shaped static meshes, in the concept art these spikes have a sort of lava pool around them as if they broke through the surface and the lava was still settling.
To begin with I started painting lava around the base of the spike, I could go hap hazard about this part but making a good shape with the base lava material is key to how the pool will eventually turn out.
So now we have our lava it's got to be worked on, lava just doesn't sit there like that and if the spike has indeed broken through the surface It must have a rocky outline around the pool, so next it's time to turn down the brush size and started working on the edges.
For now we just need to cover the outline of the lava with this texture, adding detail should always come after you have formed a base.
And there we have it, a nice outline of rock to contain our lava, it's not much to look at yet but it's a start and is already shaping the final outcome of this piece.
If we take a closer look however you can see the lava is overlapping the rock a bit too much.
This can be fixed by painting the rock over these areas to create the rocks lip over the lava, trial and error happens here so you should also experiment a little and dont forget about your undo key!
After getting your outline just right you should now look at adding some variation and detail, for this I'm creating rock ridges coming off the outline itself so it doesnt seem repetitive.
This part will be were you really give this piece life and it's all materials!
Afterwards take a step back and see how it's going.
But that rock texture is not enough for this, If this spike is breaking through the surface and creating a lava pool, I felt that lava would have dripped over and scorched the ground, So I then added a dark rock texture to start creating this scorched earth.
After working on the detail a bit more and touching up a couple of places I switched over to the "lit" mode and this is how the piece now looks.
There you have it, through the use of landscape materials you can really create unique pieces in your environment.
Programming
A common feature for games in this generation is to have an auto-save feature that save's the player's progress without the game itself being paused which could result in the players immersion being broken, Thanks to a new section on the Unreal Documentation Site, I can achieve a save/load system along with an auto-save feature, I will be using the information provided by Epic Games to integrate this system into my current game type info, character and level classes.
The save/load system page can be found at http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/DevelopmentKitGemsSaveGameStates.html
The following are screen shots of the example system provided by Epic Games.
Extending from my work on Enemy A.I from last year, I decided to revive the code and ramp it up to work in a wave system, multiple enemies that are aware of changes in the surrounding area and can adapt to navigate around it, They also decide if they want to stay side by side next to a fellow team member or rush on ahead creating spontaneous and erratic attacks that are never the same.
These screen shots are my basic work into applying navigation mesh to the lobby scene and running a basic crowd system through it to test for any problems.
