game creation talk? :s

General Forums Off-topic Chat
1

Well, im not sure if this would be the right section, but it isn’t related to blender’s game engine etc… so:

I’m going to be getting involved in making a game as a side project (yes, Yet another game project). It’ll probabily take me like 10 years to do <lol> but it’s just something i can do when i open blender, instead of going “hmm, now what could i make”

Anyway, I know games are based around poly counts etc… so you make your characters low poly. but how many polys can you use? whats the recormended amount for characters, maps /elements etc…

I dont intend to have many textures (i.e. images), just block colours, most of which will be part of the model’s base colour. If I use less textures does that mean i can use even more polys in a scene (up to a given max for the Gcard) or does textures not affect the ammount of polys you can use, only the lack of memory to laod the polys you would have from high textured games?

Last question is, you can set procedurals as textures in blender, of course, they usally look crap out of the box and a render is alot better than an in-game engine… but can you get procedual textures from blender into a game, and would they have any advantages over normal textures (such as faster loading time etc…)? or are they just a matter of producing basic texture which tile seamlessly?

If anyone know any link to game devlopment resources in general would be good and thanks for your time =)

2

Well, Games are funny things… It depends… First what are u making ur game in Opengl or Direct X, As u can see doom 3 is made in open gl, theyre adverage poly count for a baddie is about 4000-5000 polys. But then again u gotta think, Will your game be heavy on particle effects and lights?.. If you need help, feel free to email me and talk about it more!

3

OpenGL for sure, that allows more people to be able to play it rather than just windows.

The models shouldn’t need to be as detailed as Doom’s models, i’m not going for the overly complex details, but i’d like the mesh to look naturally smooth instead of the chunky-block effect.

With that said, take doom textures away would the mesh look cunky? i don’t know. i’ll asume 4000-5000 is a nice number to make a complex character with clothing? which should mean a simplyfied character is going to be perfectly fine with nice curves?

Lights? well the game is intentionally RPG style, so it would be a large open map (of course not all of it gets loaded) but it will be a simple day-light structure where everything is pretty much lit, going into night where the town will have a few dim lights outside and ofcourse, the character can use a tourch…

Partical effects? i’d like to atlest make the partical effect such as magic stand out the most, so they will use a substantial amount, but some parts or some magic wont necessarily use particals because its not always needed… so hopfully i’ll be fine? =)

edit: for typos etc…

4

4000 - 5000 polys per character is the right number. Texturing and especially lighting is harder on the GPU, so if you have flat garoud shaded polys, then yes, you can have higher poly counts. But you have to think about how many of those kinds of characters are going to be on the screen. Usually with 4000-5000 poly characters, you can have about 10 on screen, that includes the map (1000-5000 renderable at a time).

But I would highly recommend using textures. Computer graphics is all about faking the way light hits an object. So if you draw the natural phenomenon of light hitting an object, even though there are not enough polys to do that in real time, it will look that much better. you can’t make a fully defined nose that will light well in real time with only a 5,000 poly model.

If you take the normal map texture away (in otherwords, no per-pixel lighting), then it would blocky, especially because I’m sure that they don’t use garoud shading because the per-pixel lighting does the rest.

Doom 3 acheives that through normal mapped textures, which means that they model a 2-5 million poly model, and render the normals to a low 5,000 poly model, which alows them to have a model that has only 5,000 polys, but looks like the high-detai model (check the edges and you can see that it is actually low poly.

Blender isn’t ready to take a high-poly model and create a low poly model with a normal map yet.

As for procedural textures, I wouldn’t use them. I know of a few games that generate some of their textures but they generally only look OK when used on terrain. There is a plug-in that will bake a prodedural texture to a UV map, but it’s technically the same an a UV map that you painted.

And also for speed, dynamic lighting is the most taxing on the GPU, so use dynamic lightsources sparingly. Also, vertex lighting is faster than shadow maps, which is why video games use a lot of static meshes because they can get away with only doing vertex lighting on those, and still make them look convincing.

As for links on game development, the best I can do is give you links on learning OpenGL. You’ll hear people quoting the Red Book, which you can read online.

5

yes i agree, lol nice picks from Unreal 3 Engine, Well see im making a game too in opengl… Mostly in C++ And python… But what im doing its just doing what unreal 3 used… Exactly what Metsys said… Although my game is not gonna be release for about a year or so… so im makinging it quite hi quality…