Category Archives: Game Art

April 27, 2012

Improved Furnishing

By Dan Lawrence
warehouse storeroom

click to enlarge

 

Recent work on Free Company has been focusing on improving the look of the randomly generated rooms by subtly shaping the way the objects are laid out to conform to more human norms of laying out rooms. For example shelves in the game are now no longer empty instead they are filled up with appropriate small objects . The objects as redetermined by the procedural generator-wide tagging system. Objects have tags; levels, monsters and rooms have tags; the generator attempts to assign them to each other using probabilities based on how closely the tags of each align. The way the objects are placed on the shelves is determined by three different algorithmic approaches that attempt to mimic general human behaviour as regards shelves: filling up from the left hand side, from the right hand side and alternately from the left and right hand sides. The quantity of objects on each shelf is determined by a normal distribution linked roughly to the dimensions of the shelf to ensure that the average shelf is about 90% full .

That’s one example, other new strategies have been employed to shape the placement of the shelves themselves and other objects to create the hopefully more believably storeroom like rooms you see in the screen shots on this page. To support these new furnishing algorithms I’ve also been making a whole pile of new objects, almost doubling the number of them in the past week. Some of these can also be seen  in these two shots.

 

click to enlarge

 

The basic warehouse layout and furnishing algorithms are probably done about as far as I am going to take them for the first release all the rooms now look passable and I expect I can reuse the same algorithms for a few other environment variants like the crypt and a new library layout once I create a few more objects to support them. I still have plenty more ideas for algorithmic level generation though and I’d love to revisit this area to try and  make even more believable and varied layouts in the future.

The other new things I’ve done  recently are a few minor cosmetic buffs. From feedback to my last post (thanks Stian!) I’ve switched out the general game font for a more serif ridden fantasy one, I’ve fiddled with a few of the most frequently seen textures to try and make them a little less bland (still a work in progress) and I’ve implemented a more flexible system for testing out lighting changes quickly in game (hit a key to rebuild the lights from the theme data .xml files). The last thing (which just went in today) has allowed me to fiddle with small lighting changes and see the result in a couple of seconds rather than the many minutes it was taking before, so I updated a few of my lighting themes with some tweaks too.

 

Anyway, as usual let me know what you think about the Storerooms or anything else in the post in the comments below.

2 Comments   |  tags: , , | posted in Free Company, Game Art, Programming

March 23, 2012

HUD improvements & Memory leaks

By Dan Lawrence

click to enlarge

This fortnight has been spent plugging all the memory leaks that had built up in the Free Company code base since the last time I went through and plugged them all. The work was considerably eased this time by the use of a new tool I discovered called Visual Leak Detector which makes the process of pinpointing where the leaks are happening fairly trivial by providing callstacks. It also runs fairly quickly in the background so I can leave it on permanently in debug builds to continue passively identifying new leaks as and when they spring up. VLD is super simple to integrate into any project as well so if you are still struggling along with C++ out there I recommend adding it to yours immediately. The only thing it doesn’t catch are Direct X memory leaks for which a more traditional approach, and the debug runtime, is still needed.

Once all leaks were deftly disposed of it was on to a HUD tune-up, something which is still ongoing and probably will be right up until the release. You can see some of the results of the changes in the screenshot above. I was aiming for less numbers & more visual ways of showing what is going on, as well as adding more widgets to give you better control over your whole party of mercenaries. The portraits added back in January now provide a handy way to select a particular mercenary and jump to his current position in the world, and they will  also soon contain a shrunken down overview of the bars on the main HUD for each merc. There are now special pointers for all of the various ways you can control the camera which possibly only I care about. Finally, I spent a bit of time tweaking the colours of various elements to tie the buttons into the HUD better, improve consistency between different elements and generally reduce the ‘primary’ nature of most of the colours I was using before. I’m still not very happy with the layout of the bottom HUD area ( a lot of spare/wasted space, the elements are a bit boring) nor the fairly crappy skill icons but it is coming along all the same.

click to enlarge

While I was fiddling with the HUD I also went through and ticked off a whole heaving heap of bugs with the skill system so that the handful of currently implemented skills now actually work properly all the time and give slightly better feedback when they are being used to boot. Implementing a host of new skills and improving their feedback is one of the big upcoming tasks so I wanted to have the ground prepared for when that is started. And as a final thing I’ve just now tweaked the post effects again to add a vignette.

To give a sort of general picture of where the game is at I have about a week or so’s more tasks listed on my current ‘polish’ to do list to get through before I start on one of the big three remaining tasks pre-alpha release. Those big tasks are; skills, AI & real-time play between combats. I’d welcome any feedback on the changes/look of the HUD in the comments. Or really, any comments at all. Speak your brains internet.

 

2 Comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in Free Company, Game Art, Game design, Programming

November 4, 2011

People are not wearing enough hats

By Dan Lawrence

Hats preview

This week I have been mostly adding; various hats.

 

I had a lovely holiday wandering (and wondering) about the Cotswolds entirely disconnected from computers and the internet. Those times are past now though so its back into the rat race of game development which as everybody now knows is 50-75% based on the creation of hats. You can see a couple of the new hats above, they don’t do that much in the game really, maybe add a little bit of protection here and there, but mainly they are just to add a bit of individual style to your little squad of mercenaries. I’ve made six different hats so far adding a tricorn, wizard hat and another hornless half helm to the three you can see above. I’d like to make it to a nice round number of hats and helms (like say 10) so if you have any hat suggestions that I’ve not already covered then feel free to slide those slices of brain genius into the letterbox of this posts comment box below.

I fiddled about with the UI a little bit too, but its been pretty much hats all through the week. Hat code, hat inventory icons, hat models, hat textures, wearing hats, looking at pictures of hats and striking the soft gently yielding fabric of hats. Hats, hats, hats, HAAAAAAAAAAATS.

 

Hats.

1 Comment | posted in Free Company, Game Art, Programming