Alien Dominion: The Acronian Encounter - Released!

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RobertoK
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Alien Dominion: The Acronian Encounter - Released!

Post by RobertoK »

Hi everyone!

You probably noticed the video on the main page of http://ogre3d.org, so you know what this game project is. (if not, check it out!).
If you download the game installer you can see the files we are using, textures, normal maps... You can use those for learning. Also, can play the game and have fun.

So, please feel free to comment, suggest or ask questions on how A.D. was created or related.

After learning something new a nice way to say thanks is to purchase the game. :D

We are very interested to hear from you!

Here's of screenshot:
Image

More details /download intaller / buy game on:
http://www.blackfiregames.com

Cheers,
Roberto
Last edited by RobertoK on Tue Apr 06, 2010 3:37 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: Alien Dominion: The Acronian Encounter - Released!

Post by jacmoe »

You are required to post screen shots for this forum.
Consider it free advertising - and it looks like your game's got eye candy to boot. :)
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Re: Alien Dominion: The Acronian Encounter - Released!

Post by RobertoK »

Done! :D
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Re: Alien Dominion: The Acronian Encounter - Released!

Post by mkultra333 »

As the main page post says, those explosions look great, I watched the vid. The rest looks really good too.
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Re: Alien Dominion: The Acronian Encounter - Released!

Post by sinbad »

Yeah, I can watch those explosions all day. Nice work!
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Re: Alien Dominion: The Acronian Encounter - Released!

Post by Jabberwocky »

Sweet!
There's some crazy space dogfight action going on there. Thumbs up. :)
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Re: Alien Dominion: The Acronian Encounter - Released!

Post by petrocket »

luv the graphics!
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Re: Alien Dominion: The Acronian Encounter - Released!

Post by PolyVox »

It looks beautiful :-) And as has been said, the explosions look particularly cool. Can you shed any light on how you did them? Are they standard particle systems with fancy textures, or have you done something different?

I'll give the demo a go, but not until the weekend...

[Edit:] After watching the video more carefully it looks like you are useing real geometry for the explosions (plus particles for the sparks, etc). It's something I've been thinking about for my own project since it is the way they were done in Quake 2 (which I always thought looked quite 'meaty').
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Re: Alien Dominion: The Acronian Encounter - Released!

Post by BTolputt »

The explosions rock! The rest of it is pretty cool too, but the highlight is definitely when you take out a ship :)
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Re: Alien Dominion: The Acronian Encounter - Released!

Post by RobertoK »

Hi!

I did invest quite a time to research how to make good explosions. I watched videos of explosions in slow motion, checked out a bunch of projects. I did a research how to make those using shaders and I concluded that the most "meaty" explosions could be made like this:

1. Watch carefully how an explosion spreads in slow motion. First, there is a white ball of plasma spreading in a spherical fashion. Next some yellow tones appear near the outer parts. The ball spreads darker and reddish gradients are present gradually going into some dark smoke that dissipate in space.

2. Create a sphere in your favorite 3d program and do a couple of steps of morphing to create the shape of the explosion. Some time was needed until I was satisfied with the explosive spreading of the ball of fire, because it looks quite more natural if the spread falloff speed is logarithmic. So, in the first fractions of the time the ball spreads fast. After some time it begins to take shape and starts slowing down. The modeling of the shape had nothing to do with colors: those are added in Cg shaders via texture gradients.

3. Implement the morph exported from the 3d program and experiment with color gradients for explosions. The shaders use Ogre's pipeline to get the vertex data and modify the alpha and color via Cg. Once I got the colors right and the darkening of the explosion, I created some more morphs and exported them so they can be used randomly. Also, the explosions are rotated randomly via quaternions so they look different every time even if they are not procedural. However the colors are indexed from the explosion color gradient procedurally using a 3-6 step fractal equation (depending on graphics setting: low, med, high) in the pixel shader.

4. Once all that was ready I added the sparks and the smoke emitters to it.

The morph approach is more controllable. I also tried to make the shape procedural, but the noise functions for the spread of the explosion looked unnatural. I checked out NVidia's procedural explosion sample, but I concluded that with morphing I can do better. The morph trick uses less vertex instructions and thus works fine on older graphics cards.

So, basically a morph input, one noise texture, one color gradient texture, mixed in Cg shaders.
Let me put it in a Monty Python language: "bring it all mixed in a bucket" (morphs, textures, passed time all to the Cg "bucket") and later one tiny mint for the end (insert the actual explosion). Bon appétit! (Waiter running away) .... KABOOOMM!

Hope this helps! :D
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Re: Alien Dominion: The Acronian Encounter - Released!

Post by PolyVox »

That’s some great information :-)

The use of gradient textures to look up the colour and alpha information what pretty much what I had imagined was going on, but I had also expected the initial spheres were being deformed procedurally by the vertex shader. It's interesting that these are predefined because it is really hard to see any repetition.

I also like the way the explosions keep moving after the target is destroyed, and the sparks are thrown out mostly in the direction of initial motion. Excellent work!
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Re: Alien Dominion: The Acronian Encounter - Released!

Post by RobertoK »

Yep, glad to hear that it's hard to see that those are predefined.
There is quite an amount of action going on the scene so the player has minimal time to analyze those. Specially when you get to level 4 or higher...
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Re: Alien Dominion: The Acronian Encounter - Released!

Post by pjcast »

I download & installed your demo. Tried running, but nothing happens. No log file I can see, no errors, nothing. It looks like it just starts and quits really quick.

Windows 7 Ultimate
Dual Core Intel (don't have the specs in front of me at the moment)
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Absolute Latest DirectX Installed
Geforce GT 220 I believe

I have no problems running any Ogre samples (or DirectX9/10 samples). I find it interesting that there are simply no errors reported. Do you write a log somewhere? If you have a Mac build I could try it on a MacBook.
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Re: Alien Dominion: The Acronian Encounter - Released!

Post by RobertoK »

Yeah, it's quite strange that there is no error exclamation or something.
There should be an Ogre.log file in the bin folder, e.g.:
"drive_letter":\Program Files\Alien Dominion The Acronian Encounter\AD\bin\Release\Ogre.log

One solution I was telling people to do when this happens is to just copy the game to another folder or drive and run it there. And it seems to help. Some access policies prevent writing of files under Win7.

Let me know what happens, so I include it in the first patch.

Sincerely,
Roberto
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Re: Alien Dominion: The Acronian Encounter - Released!

Post by jacmoe »

That's definitely the problem. :)
You should be writing stuff to either the %USERPROFILE% directory or the data directory, or both.
Program Files is read-only on Vista up. :)
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Re: Alien Dominion: The Acronian Encounter - Released!

Post by RobertoK »

In that case I have no idea how we did run it on multiple machines under Vista and Win7 installed in program files. It might be that all those were running under administrator privileges.
I had one complaint thus far and was solved by moving the game do D: drive.

Did it work when you copied it to another folder (out of program files)?

Cheers,
Roberto
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Re: Alien Dominion: The Acronian Encounter - Released!

Post by pjcast »

Ah! That was it. If I "Run as administrator" it allows it to run. nice... Will let you know my thoughts when I get a chance to play it.
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Re: Alien Dominion: The Acronian Encounter - Released!

Post by RobertoK »

I'll add that to the troubleshooting section on the web page.
I'll also add that one might just copy or move the game to e.g. "C:/games/alien dominion" and then it can be run under absolutely no privileges... :D

Thanks,
Roberto
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Re: Alien Dominion: The Acronian Encounter - Released!

Post by Ockonal »

What gui system do you use and why there isn't version for Linux? :)
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Re: Alien Dominion: The Acronian Encounter - Released!

Post by RobertoK »

Ockonal, I used a custom UI I wrote. I did not have much time to learn CEGIU for example, so I created my own UI system on the fly.
A windows version is now tested under Wine. Hope it's gonna start working soon enough. :D
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