House Cleaning
We just added a video that got missed on the BFS YT channel about Weapon Customization. It was on Kris’s personal channel so most of you have probably seen it.
A bit old now, but still very cool!
Weapons
Achievement unlocked!
A quick look at some of the new animation and bullet penetration work. Animations are continually being added and refined as well as the transitions between them. This will be an ongoing process until we have everything working perfectly. There is still A LOT of animation work to to, but things are getting there.
Bullet penetration gets some refinement and feature work as well. It still does not take the material into account, but that is coming very soon. The bulk of the work is dealing with the object type (bsp, staticmesh, skeletalmesh etc…) and thickness right now. For characters, player vests will certainly be factored into possible bullet penetration, but we are not exactly sure about pouches and other gear just yet.
Thanks for the continued support…..See you next time!
Smooth and sultry
A not so quick in-game vid to what we have been up to. Both Kris and John give it a go this time around.
Kris talks a little about packaging the build up to something that isn’t developer related as well as some initial work on patches and bullet penetration code. It’s all rough developer stuff but should give you a taste of where things are going.
John gives a peek into how we are now using a Physically Based Rendering technique inside of Unreal Engine 3. This is very similar to what Unreal Engine 4 and the new Metal Gear Solid Fox Engine use. It’s just a quick intro and not an indepth examination of the technique, so we encourage you to do a little research if you are looking for some more information.
That’s it for now!
A new interface to go with the Oculus Rift?
The Oculus Rift development kits have begun shipping to developers and despite the relatively low resolution and missing head translation, much praise is being heaped upon them.
Will Ground Branch be supporting it?
The short answer is, yes.
The long answer is, $#&@ yes.
The Rift brings a lot to the tactical FPS genre, not to mention gaming and non-gaming alike. The only issue the Rift has is that there are no decent interfaces to go with it – we’re stuck using a mouse/keyboard combo or gamepad.
The problem with any new device is getting past the super-human accuracy we are given when we use a mouse. Any non-mouse implementation will either need to match a mouses accuracy or provide a substantial benefit above and beyond this limitation.
You can see an interesting way of using a Razer Hyrda in the following video:
I could see an implementation similar to this that replaces aiming, sprinting, reloading and the like with simple realistic hand movements.
Reload?
Hand to magazine, hold trigger.
Sprint?
Both hands down.
Melee?
Swing weapon out.
Not only more immersive, but faster and with more control then a button press.
Will that be enough to make up for the lack of accuracy?
I don’t know.
I really don’t want to see “no mouse/keyboard” servers, but wouldn’t be surprised if it happens.
Thoughts?
What is old is new again
One thing that can happen with game development that spans a lengthy time period is art done early in the process can start to feel outdated and fall behind the current standards. This isn’t always a bad thing (It’s the gameplay man!) but I felt like the weapon models/textures needed an upgrade since they are so visible. The work previously done by Snowfella was top notch and served its purpose very well. So again, my hats off to him…..and we are still using some of his work in the finish game as well.
So let’s start off with the high res version of the AK-74. This model is used to bake Normal and Ambient Occlusion maps for the in game model. I’ll do some more updates down the road to show some of the process.
-John
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