Hi! I have finished my first commercial title and it has been launched on April 5th. It's a very action intense 3D space shooter featuring modern graphics, cool metal soundtracks and a lot of love embedded in creating this title. I recomend to check it out, you won't be dissapointed! http://www.blackfiregames.com/ I would like to hear comments, suggestions etc about our web page and the game. You can download the installer for the game (30 minutes free play!) in our shop page. Take care and enjoy! Cheers, Roberto

Very cool, I especially like the weapons effects and background music :).

EDIT: Grats to a first release.

Thanks!

I forgot to mention that since we are a game-dev community here, everyone is encouraged to ask questions regarding the techical issues of making a game, texturing, art, music...

Sincerely,
Roberto

i once tried making a space game. i used some sphere with a space texture on it for the backround and it looked horrible. but in your game it just looks fantastic! how did you do the backround?

Dir3kt, I used Ogre3d engine.

Bru, the background was created after a looooong research how to create a space env. that blends it with the rest of the scene.

Basically a lot of photoshopping and cutting out fragments from existing photos of nebulas, clouds over the city (yeah, took some photos and blended into the space sphere). Nebulas are clouds. Simple.

If you want a space like that you need to master photoshop and be a little innovative - that's all. Basically I played puzzles with the existing material I had on my disposal. Looked from where the light "seems" to be coming and added a sun there and stuff like that.
Also, the space textures are high-res: 4096x2048. Ok, that's not much from modern standards, but it is much from the aspect that it is an indie-casual game. But, I wanted to make it as good as possible.

If you want to make a good star-map, I recommend that you start experimenting first with small stars only. Just dots. Pixels. Nothing fancy. It will surprise you how good results you can get only by using simple noise functions in photoshop. Once you hit the right amount of stars (if you have too many it's a noise, if you have too few it's black). Check out some SF movie (recommend Galactica - the new version, not the old series) and check out how it looks like. Just analyze and try to draw that in photoshop. Once you get hold of the way how to do it, start upgrading your scene(texture).
I checked out quite an amount of movies myself. Basically, it's dots on the black canvas. Yes, but with the right proportions of blackness/stars.

You will probably toss the first batch to the garbage can, but that's how you learn.
The space spheres I used in A.D. are versions that reach no. 30 (yes, version 30) and up. The first 30 went to the trash. So, don't give up! Just practice!
Hope this gives some pointers. Please feel free to ask me for more if you get stuck in your attempts.

Cheers,
Roberto

sounds like good tips,thanks :) i still got one question regarding the space enviourment. when creating the texture,how do make it fit into a sphere? when i put any texture on a sphere it seems like there is a point where the whole texture is vacum into,and i couldn't find how to create textures that wouldn't give that result.

You need to darken the upper and lower parts of the texture gradually. Not totally, just to some extent.

Also turn on anisotropic filtering to at least 4. The textures at upper and lower sector are quite streched, so an aniso helps to sample those pixels better.

Sincerely,
Roberto

Quote: Original post by Roberto Koci
You need to darken the upper and lower parts of the texture gradually. Not totally, just to some extent.

Also turn on anisotropic filtering to at least 4. The textures at upper and lower sector are quite streched, so an aniso helps to sample those pixels better.

Sincerely,
Roberto

thanks :) good to know. and i probably want the left and right sides of the image to be seamless right?

Yeah, they need to be made seemless. :)