3D Ivy Generator 2012 1 Oct 2012 3:15 PM (13 years ago)
First Person Survival Horror Game Shadow of a Soul
Hello folks,
I’ve been wanting to do something for the 3d community for a long time now. Unfortunately, I don’t have enough free time to create anything useful from scratch. I was working with Thomas Luft’s Ivy Generator for some scenes and even though it’s awesome, it was pretty slow to create ivies (it was using a single core). He was kind enough to provide the source of the program so I decided to take a shot at accelerating it.
Ivy generator is now fully multi-core optimized. It is 2.5X faster on a single core and an order of magnitude faster on 4 cores. As far as I can tell it is very stable. I’ve also updated the Qt and OpenGL libraries.
I want to thank Thomas Luft for creating this very useful tool, all the credit belongs to him. He has a donation page here. If you find the program useful, please consider donating.
Notes:
There won’t be a Mac or Linux release
Triangulate meshes before importing them into the app
Independent Horror Game Developer Vivec Entertainment
Latest updates 29 Sep 2012 11:51 AM (13 years ago)
First Person Survival Horror Game Shadow of a Soul
It’s been a busy couple of days. Here’s a bullet-point list of the stuff I did:
- Re-encoded some of the videos. File sizes changed from 70MB to 20MB with no noticeable loss of quality with 3 pass encoding. It’s pretty easy to overdo quality and bitrate settings it seems. Needs lots of iterations. Videos on the blog should load much faster now.
- Updated the release date on the various documents and the trailer.
- Lost half a day of work when Windows 7 boot manager decided to corrupt itself. Lesson learned: keep a copy of Windows 7 on an USB stick.
-Researched into how other companies write release date postponement press releases (it seems games that are released on time are a rarity). Wrote my own. And sent it to various *free* press release sites. I won’t be spending $400-$500 on a single press release ever again. ereleases.com, go fuck yourself! If I wanted to be on Congo Times I could have send them an email myself!!!
- Caught up with my emails. I think I’ve answered all of them but if you didn’t receive a reply from me, please send your email again.
- Learned that raytracer based renderers are better at handling instanced geometry (more than a billion) with regard to memory (5GB vs 16+swapping) than a renderman complaint renderer that shall remain nameless. Although there is a great chance that raytracers fuck up pretty bad when it comes to enabling motion blur in the scene, which usually adds anywhere between 50% to 100% to both the render times and the memory requirements. Still 3d motion blur looks much better than post-production 2d motion blur.
- I’ll soon be releasing a multi-core ivy generator as a tiny contribution to the 3d community. More details follow soon.
- Added some new pictures of Bobo to this post and posted them to Reddit’s aww section.
- Learned a new English word: indelible.
- I’ve talked about myself in the third person and addressed myself as CEO. God I truly hate writing press releases.
- The only game I’m playing is Left 4 Dead 2. Some people turn into monsters when they’re driving. I turn into a despicable horrendous monster of a pitiful human being when I’m playing L4D2. “Fuckin noob”, “WTF!”, “Get the fuck out you noob”, “ffs fucking move!” are pretty much what I always write to other people on a daily basis. Can’t help myself. I got so mad at “noobs” that I got myself a VPS in Germany and opened my own dedicated server (a 512MB server is more than enough) just so that I can kick them without wasting any time. Turns out there are gazillion of empty L4D2 servers out there, mine included. So much for the ego boost.
Independent Horror Game Developer Vivec Entertainment
Announcement 23 Sep 2012 1:04 PM (13 years ago)
First Person Survival Horror Game Shadow of a Soul
Hello folks,
I’ve got a lot of stuff to say about both the game and other things. Here we go.
I decided to postpone the release of the game to May 2013. Why? Shortest answer is: the game’s not ready yet. There are levels left to be done, some character work still needs to be done, and I haven’t even touched the sound part, which is arguably one of the most important parts of a horror game. There were money problems that prevented me from outsourcing some of the work which would have really taken a great load off my shoulders. Those problems are solved now though. Everything’s fine. And, for the record, I’m not talking about your pre-orders solving the money problems. That money is in the PayPal account, and stays there, untouched.
I honestly feel really bad about delaying the game. I feel pretty bad for those people who pre-ordered the game months ago, trusting the release date, and for those who pre-ordered recently, believing they’d be playing the game in a month or two. I’m truly sorry. Because of this, I’ve set up a page for you to request your money back in the quickest and most painless way. Just enter your PayPal email address, nothing more, and I’ll refund your money. No hard feeling whatsoever. Here’s the link.
So, what have I been doing for the past couple of months? I’ve been working on the game pretty much 24/7. Software development is hard, things have a way of getting very complicated, leaving all the plans moot. Art stuff is no different. There are no hidden traps or unexpected complications on the art side (except for the goddamned buggy 3d software packages) but there’s always the problem of getting things just right. Not OK, not this’ll have to do, but just right. And that requires lots and lots of iterations. There is also the overhead of context switching. Working on the multi-threading, in memory databases, 3d math to do this and that on the code side, debugging and then all of a sudden switching to animation, texturing and UV mapping, creating/tweaking puzzles etc. is a little bit disorienting considering the fact that I’m not very bright.
There’s one thing I can honestly say about the game though, I love my story. And what I’ve done so far (in terms of assets and code) is good stuff. I just need more time to make more good stuff.
Another thing that really bothered me during these last couple of months is my “extreme* 1billion“ amount of procrastination. If it wasn’t 100% game-related, it didn’t get done. Whether it was shaving, showering, paying taxes, replying to wedding invitations, making or returning phone calls or answering emails, none of it got done. I was feeling so incredibly overwhelmed during this time by the sheer amount of work left to do, I couldn’t find any willpower to do anything besides working on the game – including the simplest things that would have taken me a minute or two to finish.
But most of all I’m extremely sorry about not answering your emails. There is no excuse for it.
So what happens now? First I need to answer all my emails, then write and send a press release about the game’s delayed release date, which I’ll also modify on the trailer and SoaS page in a day or two.
In terms of my well being, I’ve decided to take some time off, probably two or three weeks, and read some novels, workout and enjoy the last days of sunshine. I’m not remotely burned-out, working on both technical and art stuff is highly stimulating. I’m simply very tired that’s all. Nothing dramatic.
In terms of the game, I decided to stick with my gut and started working on the cancelled second trailer now that I’ve got money and some additional time on my hands. Just search for the keyword trailer if you want to know more about it. Here’s a WIP (work in progress) screenshot from the second trailer. If it’s too dark for your monitor, this one is a brightened version.
Here’s another screenshot from one of the game’s environments.
And here’s another screenshot taken straight from the game. What you are seeing is the woman who’ll haunt your dreams (hopefully!). I’ve just darkened and cropped the image in Photoshop in order not to reveal too much.
And on to the pet news. You can stop reading if you don’t like pets. I love pets and I post pictures/videos of our little ones on this blog all the time. These videos are 1280×720 so you can watch them full-screen. They have no sound; I couldn’t find any music that would go with them because most of my music library is death/heavy metal stuff.
I mentioned this little lady(I call her Rat) months ago in this blog post. She was found near the road in horrible condition. I’ve made a before and after extreme makeover video of her. She has a disease called Leishmania. It’s an ugly disease but we’ve got it under control now. No need to go into any more detail other than to say that she is probably healthier than I am (knock on wood).
And this little gentleman(Snotty) is the latest addition to our family.
Here’s a video of him and Bobo.
That’s about it! I’ll probably start blogging more often after my little vacation with more news from the development hell.
Cheers
Independent Horror Game Developer Vivec Entertainment
105 Days to go 11 Jul 2012 8:29 AM (13 years ago)
First Person Survival Horror Game Shadow of a Soul
Hello folks,
Sorry about the lack of updates. I’ve been away because of some sad stuff that happened in the family which I won’t go into in detail. I was unable to check my emails, the site, etc. I came back and resumed my no phone, no internet and no email life and I’ve been working 16-hour days for the past ten days or so. I want to thank all of you folks who got concerned about me. I’m officially back to the online world and I’m trying to catch up on my emails.
I’ve decided to end writing daily blog posts because it takes me a long time to write even the shortest of them, and lately I just don’t have the willpower to write these things before going to bed. Plus all the high level stuff, be it planning, designing, programming, marketing an indie game, is in the blog written in various levels of detail and lately all my daily activity is dedicated to the nitty-gritty of making the game, which is much less interesting even for this blog.
That doesn’t mean I won’t be posting updates about the game but I’d rather write them in an unscheduled manner.
I had promised a friend that worked as an editor for an indie gaming site that I’d send the first screenshots of the game to him but I don’t think he’ll mind if I release just one in this blog. Besides, not a lot of people read the blog. It’ll be our secret.
Independent Horror Game Developer Vivec Entertainment
128 Days to go 18 Jun 2012 3:59 PM (13 years ago)
First Person Survival Horror Game Shadow of a Soul
I’ve struggled with rendering/network problems all day. I came across this article about VFX of Transformers 3 couple minutes ago, it put a smile on my face.
For a last push on the final weekend of work, ILM’s entire render farm was used for Transformers 3. ILM calculates that that added up to more than 200,000 rendering hours per day — or the equivalent of 22.8 years of render time in a 24-hour period.
Independent Horror Game Developer Vivec Entertainment
129 Days to go 17 Jun 2012 3:59 PM (13 years ago)
First Person Survival Horror Game Shadow of a Soul
Debuged code all day. Damn bugs. I think every programmer should read this quote by Dijkstra.
The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague. In the case of a well-known conversational programming language I have been told from various sides that as soon as a programming community is equipped with a terminal for it, a specific phenomenon occurs that even has a well-established name: it is called “the one-liners”. It takes one of two different forms: one programmer places a one-line program on the desk of another and either he proudly tells what it does and adds the question “Can you code this in less symbols?” —as if this were of any conceptual relevance!— or he just asks “Guess what it does!”. From this observation we must conclude that this language as a tool is an open invitation for clever tricks; and while exactly this may be the explanation for some of its appeal, viz. to those who like to show how clever they are, I am sorry, but I must regard this as one of the most damning things that can be said about a programming language.
Independent Horror Game Developer Vivec Entertainment
130 Days to go 16 Jun 2012 7:12 AM (13 years ago)
First Person Survival Horror Game Shadow of a Soul
I was reading Programming Game AI by Example and found the following paragraphs really interesting, even though they don’t really apply to Shadow of a Soul.
But what is this mysterious thing we call artificial intelligence? With regard to game AI I am firmly of the opinion that if the player believes the agent he’s playing against is intelligent, then it is intelligent. It’s that simple. Our goal is to design agents that provide the illusion of intelligence, nothing more.
Because the illusion of intelligence is subjective, sometimes this takes very little effort at all. The designers of the AI for Halo, for instance, discovered their playtesters could be fooled into thinking the AI agents were more intelligent simply by increasing the number of hit points required to kill them. For one test session they allowed the agents to die really easily (low hit points); the result was that 36 percent of the testers thought the AI was too easy and 8 percent thought the AI were very intelligent. For the next test session the agents were made harder to kill (higher hit points). After just this small change 0 percent of the testers thought the AI was too easy and 43 percent thought the AI was very intelligent! This is an astonishing result and clearly shows the importance of playtesting throughout the game development cycle.
Independent Horror Game Developer Vivec Entertainment
131 Days to go 15 Jun 2012 3:59 PM (13 years ago)
First Person Survival Horror Game Shadow of a Soul
Everything’s going great with the game, albeit a little bit slower than I’d like.
One of the things that I was working on today was laying down my own CAT5 network cables for changing the location of my tiny computing farm. I bought a 100 meter cable because readymade ones are a pain in the ass and expensive. Turns out, cutting your own cables is a pain in the ass too, but I think I got the hang of it after some Googling and testing (read: wasting cables).
Quite a few of the 2d and 3d applications that I’m proficient on make use of third party plug-ins. And sometimes plug-ins are almost as expensive as their host applications. Today I bought myself a $500 plug-in (after a LOT of deliberation) for one of the applications that I’m using. After the purchase I realized that I’d bought a 3d character animation and rendering program called Messiah two years ago for $450! A whole app with shitloads of features. What has the world come down to?
While on the subject of Messiah (and remotely connected to my rant about Diablo 3’s DRM), I’d like to say that Messiah uses a USB dongle protection which you won’t find in games and which I find very ugly and inconvenient because you have to insert the damned USB stick into your computer every time you want to use the app. Curiously, the cracked version has no dongle protection, thus no need for the USB stick. Guess which version I’m using!
Note: If you guessed the dongle protected one, you’re correct, because I looove inconvenient stuff and I’ve never used pirated software in my life. True story.
Independent Horror Game Developer Vivec Entertainment
132 Days to go 14 Jun 2012 3:59 PM (13 years ago)
First Person Survival Horror Game Shadow of a Soul
I lost all my reference image folders when the motherboard went kaput last month so I had to search for reference images on the net again. Reference images help me to model assets and communicate ideas to freelancers that I work with.
This time, however, instead of using Google images I decided to search for a dedicated image search engine. I’ve tried most of them and most of them are pretty much horrible if you need to go over hundreds of images.
I measure the quality of image search engines by two things. One is the relevancy of results and the other – the most important – is the number of clicks required to download an image. Based on these criteria, I think Elzr is the best image search engine out there (and it’s not even in the top 20-30 Google listings) because instead of loading the page that the image comes from, it only loads the image, and it loads it on the same page as the search results, so everything is located on one page. All in all, Elzr plus Flicker pretty much cover all my image needs.
Independent Horror Game Developer Vivec Entertainment
133 Days to go 13 Jun 2012 12:05 AM (13 years ago)
First Person Survival Horror Game Shadow of a Soul
An early post, albeit a short one. I’ll be doing a lot of emailing today, mostly to freelancers that I should have contacted last week.
I’ve yet to touch any of the accounting stuff that I should have finished 5 days ago, so that’s going to be another important thing.
Plus I need to update some of the applications in the farm.
Independent Horror Game Developer Vivec Entertainment