A taste of things to come in Warbots BETA 2.0...

Edited Nov.11.2009 - Added a quick aside on Artificial Intelligence: flocking, evasion, targeting, objective/order evaluation, etc. A much bigger AI update will be posted soon...just click the 'Comments' link at the end of the post...then scroll down view early code and debug screenshots. Now on with the regularly scheduled journal update....

Hey guys, I guess I'm reverting to my old ways of one journal update a month :-o I've got a lot of stuff to show & tell lol. If you're on some kind of metered internet access you might want to bail out right about now. [ btw. almost @ 700,000 journal views, thanks a lot guys! ]

Overview
It has been about 3 months since the release of Warbots BETA 1.0 - I'm putting the finishing touches on the Beach Assault map [ I guess this is update part 2 ], and all the new features that will be included in the next public BETA release. I wanted to have it done by the end of last month, so I'm a little behind - but still very happy with how things are progressing.

Here is the list of things I've been working on since the last journal update

- Human Squad AI logic
- Procedural GPU fire rendering
- Robot AI logic
- Attacking robots [blue team ] spawn on landing craft / defensive spawn on respawn pads [ red team ].
- Updated water effect and added 3D 'shore' sea-foam effect to blend water/terrain.
- 'Flipped a switch' and got instantly improved terrain, 4-5 layers with full color/normal/spec including detail normal-mapping. More on this later in the post.
- Dense swaying/animated instanced grass.
- Team switching functionality
- Red spawn points on beach
- Red defense turrets on top of defensive pillboxes
- Human squad rank system
- True per-pixel motion blur
- Optimization of rendering and game logic, yielding net 20-40% FPS increase.
- 1000s of tiny fixes / changes...


I've got most of the low-hanging fruit in the optimization area, and fixed 100s of bugs that were in the previous BETA release already. I've got a full list but I'll spare you.

I will have some HD videos soon + 1920x1080 4xFSAA screenshots - followed by the release of public BETA v2.0 in the coming weeks, so stay tuned!

Now on to the screenshots / individual items I've been slaving over ;-)


Dense animated grass / spawns,turrets,installations / new terrain / etc.
I've made a lot of visual improvements to everything, here is a splattering of screenshots some of the new stuff -

All this stuff comes at a 20-40% net speed increase since I did a lot of optimizations on the game engine....











Detailed terrain rendering/shading ... and how I suck at life.
So this is probably one of the most embarrassing moments of my gamedev life over the last 10 years...apparently as far back as the first BETA release of Warbots all complex terrain shading has been DISABLED, the calculations were being done but not factored into the final output color in the terrain pixel-shader correctly. The ambient occlusion, nDotL self shadowing, and the other minor/ambient terrain elements were being included correctly, just not the normal/specular lighting components ;-o

So one extra multiplication unlocked a world of terrain seksyness...with NO performance decrease since I was already doing the calculations just not outputting them correctly. Ugh. Not my finest hour, but still I'll take it!

Incidentally I was playing around with the recently released Unreal3 Dev Kit[UDK] on one machine/monitor and comparing their terrain to mine when I realized something was wrong with my rendering. I notice they use about 4-5 layers on the terrain in Unreal3, and no specular maps for each layer. I on the other hand use colored specular maps per-layer[ in addition to normal/color maps per layer ], and include an extra layer than they do if my eye is correct. I also include detail normal mapping [ extra tiling / sampling of the per layer normal map ].

The improvements are visible in all the above screenshots, but I'll include a close-up of a rocky/muddy ditch....

For reference the object in the very left side of the screen is a tree trunk base...so there is a lot of detail here ;-) I'll be posting more screenshots of the 'new' terrain as the BETA #2 release nears.





Team selection / Construction Cave finalized
I finalized the robot construction menu ...




True per-pixel motion blur
Based off the GPUGEMS3 article...I actually 'invented' it but then saw the method has already been published. Eh...it works pretty well, but I doubt I'll enable it by default




Human AI Logic / Ranks / Squad AI / etc.
I've made some great advances in terms of squad based AI, and pathfinding...the soldiers will be used to capture command points so their AI is very important. The player can exit their Warbot to capture command points / bunkers - but it's easier to let the AI soldiers do it. There can be up to 1000 soldiers/humans per map.

Since it's kind of hard to show AI via screenshots - I've got some screens of the soldiers [lit/un-textured]. I'm starting to integrate the new animations, they are all in the game I'm just building the soldier state machine to support all types of animations and good stuff.







Misc. screenshots AND INDSIDAR INFOMATION :-o
A new game I'm working on, called 'Reference Texture' :-p Actually this is output of a mode in my game engine where I'll only load a 16x16 texture in the place of all regular textures. This keeps total app memory usage < 256MB. I can see this being helpful to test on low end machines.

Plus I think it looks pretty trippy :-o




Night rendering...artillery coming in, with the spotlights in the background...




Sunset ... more screenshots of the sunsets / beach / etc coming soon




Pause of some action...


First person mode, I ordered the robot to drive through the crowd ;-) This screenshot has the OLD terrain rendering method, for comparison.
Vehicle pwnage...




Until next time. And as usual I could use any feedback on this stuff...

- Dan