Well I guess I'll start out with the pictures, and hope you'll stay around for the Audio stuff lol.

Respawn Bunker/Forcefield
I literally just came up with this little forcefield effect a few minutes ago, I think it's pretty cool. Basically if you're inside the forcefield you can't take damage but you can shoot out @ people...it's a way of preventing spawn/base camping.

More importantly I've received the respawn bunker from one of my contract artists, David Miranda. He did some work for me on Urban Empires, so I picked him to design the main base/respawn bunker that will be used in the game.

I need to write a custom set of interior shaders / multiple spot light / shadowmapping / etc. for the inside of the bunker...so it will probably be a day or so before I can get some interior screenshots of the bunker.

Here are some shots of the forcefield and the bunker in-game, etc...

*NOTE THESE SCREENSHOTS WERE TAKEN WITH TEXTURES AT 25% RESOLUTION.











Here are some images of the bunker w.out the forcefield...






Here is what the bunker looks like inside the unreal3 engine.



XAudio & Cross platform audio creation tool (XACT)

I've never used this library before but I only had a FMOD license for Urban Empires, not this new project...so I had to switch sound libraries.

Surprisingly it only took probably 4-5 hours to get it into my engine, and take out the previous two sound libraries I had in there.

I'd gone from DirectSound->OpenAL->FMOD->XAudio

I think XAudio is my favorite so far. Though it lacks the incredible functionality of FMOD, the ability to use the XACT tool to author sounds outside the game is awesome. I can test out how the thunderstorms will sound, I can adjust the volumes on different types of explosions...it's really great.

I was planning to go into a lot of detail about how much I love this setup, but I've been working foreeever and now I need to play some Counter-Strike lol :-D

Here is an image of the Cross Platform Audio Creation Tool (XACT), setup for my current 'small project'...


Until next time...

- Danny