By the calendar, I fixed many obvious bugs in my game engine up to the 1st of March. Since last week, and for hopefully no more than another dozen days, I’ll only be working on game assets.
Guess it’s time to post a pic then – the project still goes by the codename Hairlock - not as good as it used to be since the hairlock incident proper has been moved to a proposed sequel.
I started modeling a couple of months back, among worries that the rendering wouldn’t follow. Now the question is different: can the artwork follow?
One question that comes to me over and over about the artwork is, why don’t I borrow/buy stock models? I doubt whether this would actually be feasible granted my geometry has to stand for (no) textures, and game models following the twist may be hard to find. But that’s not it. Nor taking the challenge (well yeah, in part…). I just have this feeling that even amateur artwork will be more interesting than even professionally produced stock models – granted it is designed to be coherent and originally produced.
Sure I could use borrow or buy artwork for little things – one chair here, a house there, and so forth but…
The actual cost for me is characters. The little guys on the right took me about 15 hours to get done with. And we don’t want to borrow characters, do we?
Artwork is expensive, but we don’t need to pay every time
The bottom line is…
- Since a game is its own universe, it may be a good idea to create original artwork for it.
- Within the game, reusing artwork elements increases consistency without compromising quality.
One of the great advantages of 3D is that 3D is vector graphics. While the cost of a new model is high, dressing up a model in different ways, or just changing it a little, is fairly cheap – if you’re using Blender and you’re out making actual geometry for clothes or hair, retopology may be worth a try. That, and a little patience.
So while I enjoy making new stuff, I also look forward to just pulling models off the hat later on, so I can focus more on story and game mechanics.
About the screenshot…
Here we’re running at around 13 FPS. The models use no textures, so everything you see is (un-decimated) geometry.
- Our little heroine on the left renders 1,588 vertices / 1623 faces
- The wise guy with the bed-head boasts 1,812 vertices / 1790 faces
This goes on top of the 15,836 faces sent to render the environment (hardly any of this actually intersects the viewport) using 7 calls to glDrawElements.
I don’t know about textured scenes – you can do a lot without textures (in fact, a lot more than what is demonstrated here). For now here’s a quick break down of how this renders:
- 36.3% rendering the terrain
- 12.5% rendering actors (frame interpolation doesn’t generate overheads in this particular case since I got the actors to pose for the pic)
- 19% hit testing to keep the camera somewhere reasonable (oh no!)
- 5% running game logic
- 10% (!) refreshing the text box (this gets done quite often just to display the frame rate…)
I’m not worried yet about the terrain rendering time – I might have to eventually. Hit testing overheads are to go away altogether (not the hit testing, just overheads). I’m not planning yet on using distance based LOD – overall, I hope these stats make you feel that it’s possible to run at frame rate with detailed geometry on an iPod Touch, and if doesn’t, let’s wait until we get better screenshots :)
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