DudleySoft.org

A quick update today, I’ve created a couple of new models for the game, first up is your support ship, The Xena (an alternative pronounciation of XNA), most missions will start from the back of this ship, currently it’s added as an object on the object map, however it’s not been designed to be used as such so it will vanish under certain circumstances because it overflows a tile. Here’s a view from the deck of the Xena

The next image shows two tank models, the tank is quite complex and probably has more polygons than are really neccessary, however I’m concidering doing this for all models so that if need be I can use them in cut-scenes using the game engine, if I didn’t model them with a reasonable level of detail then they wont hold up to closer inspection. Anyway here’s a shot with two tanks on it, I have to zoom right out to get both on screen, so they’re pretty small, but you can see that they both self shadow, much easier than on the helicopter, due to the speed of the rotor rotations.

Well that’s it for today, I’ll be back later with more shots and progress reports.

Well I’ve finally gotten around to putting together a little video of the game in action, not much to see at the moment, just me flying around over the landscape for 30 seconds, you can see that I’ve got inertia in now, the helicopter takes a while to speed up and slow down.

The speed shown in the bottom left is the actual speed of the helicopter, the scale is 1 unit = 1metre, the speed of the helicopter is calculated in metres per second, the movement uses the current time step times the distance divided by 1000, so no matter what speed the game runs at the helicopter moves at the appropriate speed, every object in the game will be similarly setup so that the whole thing feels natural and maintains a steady pace.

Still haven’t tested it on the XBox 360 yet, should be getting my Creators Club membership on Wednesday, so try it then, I’m not expecting any problems, but you never know.

I mentioned before about adding shadows, well the process went a lot smoother than I expected, after a few false starts I got my models loaded using my new shader, and got the scene to render using the new shader, then I got the shadow maps rendering, finally I was able to combine them and tweak the values until I got something that looked pretty good.

Below are two screenshots that show the new version with shadows, I also added a new title page, I wasn’t happy with the repeated tile filling the background, so I built a little helipad and control tower scene for the title page, with the addition of shadows it looks really good now.

Here’s the first screen (click thumbnail for full size)

And here’s the ingame engine, not a very exciting view, but it does show the new shadows running in the engine.

Next up will be to get it running on the Xbox 360, I dont envision any problems since it supports Shader Model 2.0 and there’s no PC specific code in there, the only question I have is if it supports R32F format display buffers since I’m using one for the shadow map, I dont think it’ll be a problem, but you never know.

Well XNA has finally been properly released, and to celebrate I thought I’d knock up a proper game, I’m putting DiceMan2 on ice for now, and working on a really old idea I had, the game is called HDL (Helicopter Defense League), in the game you play the pilot of a new helicopter, the MRCH-17, which is being put into service for the first time. The game will feature multiple missions all over the world. The HDL are an organisation that runs anti-terror operations wherever they’re needed.

You are the groups best pilot, which is why you were chosen for the new chopper. During your missions you’ll uncover the truth behind the recent increase in terrorist activity and enter the shady underside of government policy.

I’ve got a basic engine up and running, I need to get the models working with shadows, which should hopefully be soon, I just know that it’ll break the engine when I first stick it in, so I wanted to get something working first.

The game also has a level editor built into the PC debug build, the levels are effectively tilemaps, but using 3d models for tiles, there are three layers to the map currently, the tilemap itself, and object map which lays 3d objects ontop of the map, and the height map, which is used to make the levels less flat. The editor currently allows editing of the tiles and heights, objects and entities will come later once I’ve made some test models to place on the map.

Below are a couple of screenshots, the game runs at 1280×720, I’ve not got my XNA Creators Club subscription yet, but when I do I’ll test it out on the Xbox 360, I dont have a HD TV at the moment, so I’ll be able to see how it handles scaling down to SDTV resolutions.

Screen 1: Makeshift Title Page (click on thumbnail for full image)

Screen 2: Ingame test engine (click on thumbnail for full image)

The game is viewed from a topdown view which rotates with the helicopter, eventually the levels will have shadows, and a proper effect for the water (wont be transparent,since there’s nothing below it), for now the water level slowly rises and falls (hardly noticable at the moment), the current tile set is very simple since this is a test, the helicopters rotor blades turn, although it probably doesn’t look like it in the two shots since the blades at similar angles in both. The view actually zooms in and out as you rise/fall, with both the helicopter and landscape scaling in opposite directions, which looks pretty neat.

Check later for updates about the characters, story, weapons and other useless information.