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Developer's Blog

Spreading the love with apples
June 12, 2010, 10:01:17 pm by biggeruniverse

So I just wanted to say that I got one of these:

(Yes, for you mac people it is a G4 'Yikes')

...and I will be working on creating a XR RC3 Universal package. Watch this thread for more!

In fact, I'm coming to you live from my Tiger 10.4.11 G4 RIGHT NOW!

12 Comments | Add Comment

A Savage Direction
March 04, 2010, 06:44:31 am by biggeruniverse

So, for those of you who follow XR development, you know it's been going on a long time. You know that there's been issues, bugs, and a general stigma against XR in favor of EX2 or even SFE*. No one who works on the project likes to see their work criticized of course, but sometimes it's criticism well deserved which makes it a hard pill to swallow. I've had my fair share of it too, as the dedicated testers can tell you, and it's been since Dec 29th until now that test is still not fully playable, despite daily work on my part to try and bring it up to snuff.

It's not easy to teach an old dog new tricks. Silverback was not designed to do what I think is the XR team's vision, which is to be a modern competitor in graphics as well as gameplay. The XR developers have discussed this many times, and the merits of other engines, or completely scrapping Silverback and restarting from scratch. I'll note now that many of the people in the community don't see the need to improve the graphics, they are fine playing Savage as it is as long as it's smooth and feels responsive and is generally "exactly like EX2".

My expressed goal, as I've said to many people who work on XR, is to make Savage feel "solid". Solid in the way Quake always felt solid, in the way you could never get inside a wall and see thru it, or bump thru an enemy. The way the animations never glitched or disappeared, the way everything just worked like you'd expect it to. But my implied goal is to make Savage pretty. Not pretty Crysis, but pretty in a cozy, believable way that matches the graphical style and gameplay.

The problem is that I've come to the edge of what Silverback can do. There's only so much an engine designed for simple materials and a single render pass can do to look like a modern game, and XR test has reached that much. Not to say that it isn't a lot better already. Here's a side-by-side comparison of XR testing version (left/top), and XR RC3 at the same time of day (same game, just a few minutes apart):

(right click view image for the full res version)

XR test is showing bloom, per-pixel terrain lighting, dynamic shadows, more realistic lighting model, and improved bumpmapping. That's about as good as it gets, but it's not good enough.

So, I've been planning out a completely new renderer for Silverback, one that can handle multiple passes, multiple lights (for effects lighting), and a much more powerful materials system. With this will come an improved animation system, one that should handle the problems with animations starting when you spawn, so you don't see the behe hit coming, and issues with twisting and stretching. Not only that, but these things will actually improve the framerate, because of the naive way that silverback generally handles things in the current version. It will also remove a lot of hacks, and unify the core engine rendering.

two river objects with a water shader overlay eachother and have a hard time with reflection, demonstrating shortcomings of the materials system

But, as I'm going along with the project that I fully expect to take several months to code and debug, and get to release grade, there's still many things with gameplay, lag, jitter, and old old bugs that will need to be looked at and fixed.

So I'll end this with a request from the community to tell the XR team what it is YOU think is most important to be worked on. What do you think can be done to improve the feel of Savage? This isn't really about changing gameplay, it's more about bringing the gameplay to fruition- removing the quirks and making it feel solid.

What do you want to fix in Savage?

97 Comments | Add Comment

What does savage NOT need?
February 09, 2010, 07:23:07 am by biggeruniverse

It really doesn't need post-processing. Regardless of that fact, I added post-processing anyway.

Post-processing allows for:
  - Soft particles
  - Realistic water (reflection/refraction)
  - Depth of Field
  - Bloom
  - Motion blur
  - various post-processing effects that you see in videos that are mostly useless (b&w, sepia, etc)

So now some screenshots! These are just some simple filters I put together in about 5 minutes to test that it was working

I like to call this filter MadSavage:

And this one is what TombStone mod should probably ALWAYS look like...

Thanks to CrazyMan (whoever you are), Friggin Nuts, U, Cross, Leech, devdas, NotTheMama, mikemichigan, Scout, rift, Captain Underdog, Garrison!, and anyone else I missed for playing a match on Leet US :P

37 Comments | Add Comment

Sometimes the little features
February 02, 2010, 09:30:22 pm by biggeruniverse

... are the most fun. So, I was watching a video for another indie game, and the guy playing it put a smiley in chat ( :-) ) and it appeared above his head. At the time I didn't think much of it but when I played Savage next I noticed that little "i" that always shows up for voice commands. Well then I put the two together and thought "wouldn't it be cool if..."

And lastly, ADM represents!

So now you can do some basic emoting beyond voice commands, something that is visible rather than auditory.

23 Comments | Add Comment

The sky above
January 24, 2010, 03:28:02 am by biggeruniverse

It goes perhaps without saying, but savage is an outdoors game. When you look at a map, there's very little in it that's man-made. Some low huts and old ruins, but that's about it. So, you'd think that the environment would get a lot of attention in an enhancement like Savage XR. Better water rendering, dynamic shadows, a realistic sky. But up to this point, the environment code in Savage XR remains much the same as it was in SFE or even SEP. There's rain and snow (that fall from cloudless blue skies sometimes) but even they are not very dynamic or interesting.

Ah, but the Sun has a lens flare! That's interesting and dynamic! Well, the Sun in my eyes was annoying. More than that, the lens flare effect was doing horrible things to the frame rate.

That's where the story begins. So I took a look at the sky rendering code, and what I found made me cry a little. A poorly implemented sky indeed. Full of unnecessary bits and slow bits. So, I spent some time and cleaned it up a little, and improved it where I could without changing it drastically. Removed the lens flare, changed when and how the screen is cleared, made the background color match the fog.

I'd like to change it drastically at some point, add some forward scattering effects for the sky, real cloud maps for high altitude clouds, etc. But for now I think it will do.

So here is what sky is like in current XR RC3 (sun is off because I'd rather poke my eye out than look at all that flare):

And here are a few examples of what XR Test looks like(first one is a compare with above):

In this last one you can see how the "dust" affects the Sun, at morning and evening the Sun is redder and not so bright compared with this one closer to noon:

So that's a little tidbit on the Sky, I hope you thought it was kinda cool at least. :mrgreen:

25 Comments | Add Comment

Where the files are...
October 16, 2009, 10:15:27 am by biggeruniverse

For a few weeks now, I've been working on new file handling code based on PhysFS (http://icculus.org/physfs/). This is actually no simple task, as the file code is intertwined with all sorts of other parts of the code. But it has its advantages, and that's why I kept going with it. In the process, I revamped the file caching mechanism, and found some existing bugs which will hopefully make Savage load faster and run faster.

Using PhysFS means that Savage now supports some cool things like a single writable directory (not just anywhere on the filesystem) and map files can now contain all the same content as a mod, basically allowing mapmakers to make mini-mods.

Features:

Often-used files are cached to memory
All opened files are left open for a while(10 seconds), in case they are requested again
Memory-only files can be created (loading images from across the network)
The logical FS nature of PhysFS means that multiple mods can be loaded along with standard content, and the code doesn't need to be aware of how it's done
Files not in an s2z can't be used to override the standard content anymore (no unzipping and making .tga files for see-through textures

To go along with that, I'll be adding a handshake process to XR server & client where the client will send checksums of all the mods it has loaded, and the server will check them against the mods it knows about. If they don't match, the server will not allow the client to connect. This should stop a lot of the cheat mods going around, but of course it can't stop all cheats.

30 Comments | Add Comment

New HUD (FPS GUI)
September 18, 2009, 09:04:40 am by Daemon

Hello.

I know, it's long overdue, but it's here: hi-res, scalable, brand new HUDs for both races. The imminent release of Savage XR RC3 is gonna bring it along with a host of pwnage improvements, additions and bug fixes, more or less visible to the naked eye!

GUI stuff coming very soon with RC3:
-2 new graphical race HUDs
-wide screen aware HUDs
-minimalistic & movable HUD
-adjustable alpha for HUDs
-beasts GUI windows frames

Click an image size to display it:

Hi-Res Graphical HUD

Beast: 1024x640 - 1920x1200