TRACKVERSE Alpha v0.1 @ Steam Greenlight! Come Vote! :D

[xsx]

You are a rocker really !

Homebrew party is the next power in the gaming scene !

nice visual work !

[chaosavy]

Looks awesome! And it is a great motivator for me to keep on struggling with my own project.

thanks!

[yapdakilla]

Thanks chaosavy and xsx,

Your encouragement is great motivation to keep us working on our own project even though we're still struggling to get it out

[Naxel]

This project looks amazing.

Could you give us novice shader programmers some ideas as to how you created your main shader for the models. I am really interested in your approach to handle normal and parallax mapping and how you manage 3 light sources.

[xadhoom]

Here is their blog. Might be interesting for you:
http://liquidrockgames.blogspot.com/

xad

[Naxel]

thanks for the link. its an interesting read.
but still no information as to the implementation of their shader.

[xadhoom]

Ok, only a superficial discussion about their multi material shader.
Do you want shader code?
What especially are you looking for? There is e.g. a neat shader phong/normal/AO map shader in the wiki by nullsquared:
http://www.ogre3d.org/wiki/index.php/No ... ing_Shader

xad

[lf3thn4d]

Hi Naxel,
Thanks for liking our project. Unfortunately we can't provide the method on how we did our shaders. It's very specific to our engine and uses many custom properties and special material generation.

However, the techniques are pretty straight forward stuffs. As long as you understand how shader and lighting works, it's just a matter of mix and match of shaders. The parallax technique we used is the cheapest technique described in this(http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~keith/610/pa ... apping.pdf) paper.

For light source, I previously wrote a shader that handles 3 lights at once. However, I've soon dropped it due to lack of registers for other more important stuffs like shadow and environment maps. So now for each light, I use a new pass to additively lit them. The only special case is the directional light where I combine it with the base ambient pass for optimization. This obviously comes at the cost of not being very optimal when we don't need it. However, one can always write another special case shader for objects you know will never see sun light.

[yapdakilla]

Update on the props for the 2nd level, this time some sunken ships:







Currently working on a track racing through a derelict ship engine.

[yapdakilla]

more shots of the low poly ship interior track before I start working on the high poly version.

[xadhoom]

With the nice AO maps these shots look really good I also like this post-modern style!

Are this engines are going to be activated during the race?

xad

[lf3thn4d]

It's supposed to be a broken sunken ship. So the engines won't be activated. However, there will be sparks flying around.

[Kyle_Katarn]

Oh good god, this is absolutely stunning! Please keep us up to date on this! As a matter of interest, what physics engine are you using?

[lf3thn4d]

Thanks. We're using bullet physics.

[yapdakilla]

Ship interior update 2:

Here's a Blender3D render on a partially textured ship interior. Will be adding additional detail using detail maps once in game to enhance the details.

[Kyle_Katarn]

Wow, its looking great so far. Keep it up

[yapdakilla]

Thanks Kyle_Katarn

Ship Interior update 3: Lighting tests

Here's a rough lighting idea for this part of the track to convey the feeling of a dark and dank environment. Image rendered in Blender3D. Will be destroying parts of the interior later on and adding the race track in.

[xadhoom]

I think the lighting in this scene could be improved with some long streaking shadows and dark areas to let it look more "unstable".

xad

[yapdakilla]

xadhoom: Will look into selecting certain lights for shadow to give some depth to the scene. At this point of time our spot and omni lights have no shadow. Only sun light. Will definitely look into that matter.

Anyways here's an update on how the ship interior looks like within the level editor plus detail maps with some test lights. no ambient occlusion map yet though as the model is not fully completed yet. Lighting will be further tweaked when the entire track is set up and finalized.

[yapdakilla]

Tweaked the omni and ambient lights for more contrast in the scene for player to focus their view towards the center+colored specular maps.

[yapdakilla]

Hi guys, we've just launched our own twitter site at http://twitter.com/LiquidRockGames where we'll be posting our dev updates live!

[yapdakilla]

Lf3T-Hn4D just posted an update on his awesome Track Node Editor on our blog.

http://liquidrockgames.blogspot.com/200 ... ditor.html

Excerpt:

"Over the week I've been working on a very important feature; Track system. The need for this system was due to requirements of a racing game. In a racing title, we need to know if our player craft is inside or outside of the track. We also need to know how to respawn back into the track. Last but not least, we need to have a way to know if a player has finished a lap..........."

[yapdakilla]

Lf3T-Hn4D just posted an update the craft teleport fx on the dev blog:

http://liquidrockgames.blogspot.com/200 ... ffect.html

Excerpt:

"While waiting for my code to compile, I started thinking how we want to do re-spawn effect. Blinking the player craft directly into the track is downright ugly. Hence, I though having some teleporting effect would be cool....."

[yapdakilla]

More misc. screenshots of the ship interior with a work in progress racing track:

[xavier]

(In case anyone is wondering, this "Xavier" person posting comments in those entries is not me -- for example, I don't have a clue what "Wipeout HD" is...)

That aside, it's mightily impressive what you two are pulling off here.