Gauging interest in a remaster

Actually, once you are through, your dissertation will not look as frustrating or unappealing. You will remember the hardship but will also be able to take the good from it including lessons learned. You may even want to go back and expand upon your research direction.

What area/field is your research in if you don't mind me asking?

 

Wait, Is this an anthropological PhD or a PhD in Game Design?

 

I've just remembered that I built a mesh of the Masa Science Station (or Beaufort Station) many years ago. If you'd like, you may use it.
https://p3d.in/0Nm9M

 

This is going to mean less to everyone else than any of the previous updates - but the FBX importer is complete, including skeletal animations.
What this means is the last of the code that was dependent on proprietary tools is gone (and since support for the 3DS is no longer necessary there is now support for a silly number of bones). From now on it's code cleanup, after which I can start preparing to upload to a public repository where anyone can view/ contribute to the code.

If anyone has the expertise and time what I could really use is someone on tools. It's not necessary, but if I can't find someone I'll be resurrecting the old IMGUI particle editor instead of the more swanky replacement that was in progress.

 

There are a lot of teething issues, but for the collision (which is largely working, just a weird bug) I've been testing DefinaceIndustries awesome interpid model. You can see the lighting isn't consistent between the two models but it's only test data, the normal maps on the durango needs changing.

EDIT: You'll see no benefit on the screenshots but I also resurrected deferred shading which beyond the obvious of lots of lights should let me experiment with things such as point light shadows which are a pain in standard forward shading. Shadows are ready to go in but disabled as I refactor them to allow more of them (it wasn't likely that we'd want more than one on the previous target hardware), and since they require tweaking for the given environment.

 

So I resurrected shadows - they weren't quite as ready to go as I'd hoped as deferred shading hadn't been used in 3 years and the shadows no longer worked with it. I also massively rewrote the design to be more user friendly, previously it required a lot of special case code to have a shadowed light - now it's just a bool on the lighting component.
Self shadowing is the real test, even small fighters now cast shadows onto themselves. I found a few bugs with model exporter -including the normals which the shadow tests highlighted. I've also been pointed in the direction of a nice model sdk which has wider support (currently only fbx is supported).

Everything needs a bit of tweaking, shadow biases, the material data supported by the deferred shading (this shot is forward shading as it currently has better specular). I also need to support more than one directional shadow and test out the shadows for pointlights and spotlights.
The Intrepid model is causing me some headaches, the winding impacts rendering, shadows and collisions so FekLeyrTarg I'd hapilly recieve your model for testing. DefinanceIndustries seems pretty busy, probably with all the other mods he's working on - I've been teaching myself blender but I'm no artist.

 

Certainly.
As you're using Blender anyways: Would it be ok if I sent it in Blender's own format instead of exporting it?
(Also, it was built in Blender 2.49, so I recommend ticking off "import UI" when opening the model so modern Blender's UI doesn revert back to 2.49's)

 

yeah sorry. A bit snowed under at the moment. I did start bluepoint, but it'll be a bit. I'll fix the normal map on the Durango for you this weekend.

 

Sure thing, that way I can play about with the scale and what not

No problem, keep working on the mods which are actually in full development! This is all preprod. It's unlikely I'll need anything more than what you've sent me this year, although it might be cool to get a low poly collision mesh for the intrepid and fix up the back face issues. After I've polished up a few graphics bits and pieces I'll move on to the collision, and it probably makes more sense for me to start off testing with simple geometric shapes.

 

So Defiance sent over an updated Durango without missing faces and the normals in the correct space for the Usagi engine (not Unreal, there's been some confusion there, it's all custom). Not much in the way of progress, I just thought it was pretty enough to share.

The only technical change you can see is shadows are in place, the Intrepid is shadowing its self (I spent the past couple of weeks adding point, spot, projection shadows and improving the filtering on the directional shadow cascades).
I might use the spot light shadows in the hangar but it'll definitely be nice to have laser bolts with shadow casting point lights attached.

 

The "Rabbit" engine eh? Can't wait to see how it hops to it.

 

I'd originally just called it Clarity 2 (Clarity 1 being my personal project, I'd planned to do wing commander stuff with it and clarity sounded like a good extension of vision) as a placeholder. Then riding the subway returning from the Tokyo Gameshow there were a bunch of people from Konami with Fox Team T-shirts (fox engine is the tech behind metal gear solid 5). The conversation turned into lamenting about how we could never do anything as impressive as that with our small team whilst having to support 3ds and the best tech we could hope to work with was the WiiU.

Anyway my colleague at the end of this suggested we should call it the Usagi engine as its light and quick, trying to outrun its larger predator the fox.

I liked it as I'd always had a rabbit as a kid.