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A little later than I expected, but I'm finished.

A place without frontier.


http://rapidshare.com/files/225973866/Compiled.exe

Warning:
The game contains some strong language and sugestive dialog.

Edit:
I've fixed the problem with game re-starting after returning to starting room. Tha link has been updated.

And here's the patch for people who already downloaded the game.
http://rapidshare.com/files/225974505/Patch.exe

Can I ask for few more hours?

I should finish in two, maybe three hours. I'm sure I will be ready by midnight CET, or even sooner.

I still got some work to do, but If everything will go as planed I should finish in less than 24 hours.

Congratulations SpacePirateCaine. You made a very good game.

I'll try to win another MAGS.

First I would like to thank everyone who played my game. it is my first AGS game ever published, so I was really looking forward to hear opinions of players.

I also decided to write how I created HQ2. If you don’t like behind the scenes stories, than just ignore my post.

When I was designing the game I wanted to show the difference between old and modern game. My idea was to include screens from old game into the new one. At first I was thinking about old poster, or photo. Later I thought about the TV, and cutscene. It caused me a lot of problems. First of all, my computer refused to record a movie from first House Quest. When I finally managed to record part of the game, there was a lot of noise and the edges were badly cut. That was when I thought of home theater. I used partially hidden screen and chair in the field of view to make it look more interesting. I also planned to make it loose focus once or twice, but it would need more time.

Every single frame of the graphics used in House Quest II was created on a single Pentium II 400 MHz computer. At first game was supposed to be made in 800x600, but after rendering first few frames it appeared that it takes 8 to 12 minutes to render a single frame. First calculations were that I would need 1000-1500 frames of cutscenes. It meant 130 to 300 hours of rendering alone. When I finished it appeared that I used in total 2380 unique frames in all cutscenes (not counting EGA HD logo and warning screen) Reducing resolution to 640x480 cut rendering time by 36%. After rendering introduction I realized that there was no way I could finish in time, even after reducing resolution. So I resigned from high-res textures. The ones from the outside of the house were made from 10 MPixel photos. The ones inside are not even real textures, just procedures to imitate them. That is the reason why the house looks better on the outside than on the inside. But it allowed me to reduce rendering time below 3 minutes per frame. (It means 1 hour 15 minutes of rendering for one second of cutscene movie - after all these reductions in quality)

The other problem was character. It was created in different program, and It would be really time consuming to fit character into the FMV. I also had to turn off the antianalising while rendering character, or it would be impossible to fit him into the game without glowing outline. There is a way to get rid of this effect, but again - it's time consuming. The character was created before I decided to change resolution. And I haven't got enought time to rescale character. I will fix this in version 1.1.

It took me total about 8-10 hours to create all 3D models used in the game. Another 15 hours to create textures (including the ones which I had to remove) And finally over 200 hours of rendering.

I also found two bugs. They will be fixed in version 1.1 too. It will be released shortly after the end of the voting.

And here is my game.

http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?wgnnrqjggnm

House Quest II

Featuring:
Brand new Silence Surround Technology (TM)
2 minutes of FMV sequences (One of them is missable)
640x480 EGA HD Graphics
New and undiscovered yet bugs (I haven't got time to test it all)
Everything created on a single Pentium II Laptop!

Screenshot coming soon!

Game requires XviD codec to run.

Edit:
And here is the promised screenshot.

I just updated my work:
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=34542.msg451650#msg451650

Feel free to coment.

What do you mean that we can't cheat with shadows?



I would say that cheating with shadows is much simpler in 3D than in 2D.

I'll post some more stuff in a few hours time, with explanations on hardest spots, and a list of things which you shouldn't do.

My scheadule for work looks about like this:
Phase I
Conception work, minor modeling. About 5 days.
Phase II
Modeling and texturing. I can't completly seperate thease two phases, because sometimes modes must be adjusted to textures. And if you plan to use bump maps (And I do) you must incluse this in the design precess. Estimated Time about 7 days.
Phase III
Final touch.
Adding details, and compiling entire composition into single image. Also reendering and preparing aditional files just for show off. Time - 6 days.

If you don't mind I would prefer to use this schedule. Time line changes are minor, so I hope that there won't be any problems.

It's also partially because I got rather slow computer (Please, don't ask how slow. It can hurt your mental health.) And it will take some time to reender final image.

And why I haven't included lightning in my scheadule? Because in 95% of outdoor scenes I use two light sources, one omni, one directional. It takes about 5-15 minutes to set them up.

I thought about it and I decided to enter the competition. As a lousy painter and someone who can't really draw in any popular (or even unpopular) 2D program I decided to prepare a background using a 3D graphics.
If you have any questions about what or why I do something feel free to ask here, or just PM me.
So let's begin.

Phase I
Design.

First thing is a list of things to model in 3D. I need to prepare:
- Orphanage
- Windmill
- Farm
- Swings
- Bridge
- Sign
- Trees
- Ground
- Other playgroung stuff
- Doors
- Background

The list is not complete yet, but till now it has to do.

So now we can play with our imagination. Let's begin with a House. (Orginal approach, isn't it?) I was thinking about finding a real orphanage, and recreating it, but the only one I could find was a modern green house, with big garden. It wasn't even close. So the next idea was something like that:

Those are buildings designed for the railways workers, build eighty or so years ago. They looked kinda good, but not good enought, but than I remembered about diffrent place. So here it is:

It was an old dormitory block, so I guess It's pretty close to what we're trying to achieve. If you want to see more photos, than I've uploded them here:
http://rapidshare.com/files/115333878/reference_images.zip.html
aprox. 25MB Total 12 pictures, all in resolution 3872x2592. Inside you can find both buildings. One picture is slightly out of focus, and few needs to be rotated but they will help. I also made few more pictures in RAW format. They are much larger, so I will later upload only those which I will use as textures.

Next thing is a sign. In my opinion it should be big, made I'm marble or wood with brass or even golden letters. Maybe with few ornaments to make it look even better.
So here's my first attempt. Wood and golden letters:

I don't know how about anyone else, but for me it looks awful. Wood looks like a small part of some kind of board, and gold doesn't look like anything similar to gold or anything else. Let's say goodbye to standard materials and fix them a little bit. I also chandged the lights a little bit.

It's better, but still not What I was looking for. Let's change gold for copper, and the letters look just a little bit too modern for me. Also the entire sign looks just empty. After few changes:

Smoothed cyliders look almost like a bolts. Upper ornaments are just 3D letters. To create them I used celtic font.

This was probably the easiest part of picture, maybe except for the trees - there is a tool for creating them instantly.

So now is the time to open google for the first time and look for pictures of windmills, swings and bridges. I spent many summers on farm, so I won't look for pictures of it. And for the rest is simple enought to make them without any help. In a nearest future I'll also scan my hand drawn notes to show what I'll try to achieve.
To be continued...

19-05-2008.

I've completed a first reendering of the entire scene. Of course it is not finished yet, but it allows me to show what I'm thinking of. It's in lower resolution than the final image, because I want to save time. Lightning is set, with assigned shadow map - It's much faster than raytraced shadows, and at this stage it doesn't really matter.

Bridge texture will be replaced, This one is only temporary. Just like the sky - now I put there a gradient map with fractal noise applied to it. It doesn't look bad right now, but I can't say that it looks good either.
Of course the boxes wisible on the image will be replaced with buildings. The boxes are made in scale. Pink one is a farm (I will probably add more than one building) Brown one is windmill, and the last one is a house.
And If you want fo comment water than, please say no word. Spare me disgrace.

Meanwhile I made something more. I made bricks... Sounds impresive? I don't think so.

But here's the problem. I'll try to explain it to everyone who never modeled anything in 3D. Let's say that you want to make bricks look real. Let's say that you want not only to have bricks painted to perfectly flat wall, but you want to make them look like the real bricks. The thing which can stop you is mathematics. You can take a wall, use cut toos and them extrude them to make it look 3D, but brick is about 30 cm long and 10 cm high. When you crate three meters long and two meaters high wall it means that you'll need to prepare about 200 bricks. Each brick will have at least 5 Faces to brick and at least 2 more around them. It means 1400 faces on a really small wall. And the result will be disapointing. (Trust me, I've tried it) So let's borrow few ideas from people who make games for PS3 and X-BOX 360. The thing called bump map.
Bump map is a part of shader engine. It changes the way whadows appear on your wall. Maybe insteadof talking I will just show how it looks like.

In the upeer left corner is only a gray plane. In all other reenderigs it has the same shape and size. Tha camera is also the same. Below is the same plane in the same colour, but with added bump map. Right images are with bricks texture added. Upper one is without and bottom with bump map. Sorry for the quality, but my battery is low, and I've got only few minutes left. If anyone wants, next time I can upload maps, but they are quite large (48 MB in 2 files)

30-05-2008

Today update was bought to you by Golden Pheasant (If you don't know what is than either you are too young, or you don't know what great things slovakia makes)

First of all, I think I must expalin why I haven't updated for so long. I was simply too busy. But now I got few things to show.

First thing: The swings.
This is a good example of the limitations of the 3D graphics, so let me write a few extra words about them.
Let's assume that we want simple and relativelly cheap wooden swings withs seats connected to the frame by metal chains. So let's prepare the frame (It's really just 7 boxes - 30 seconds of work in worst case scenario)

Now, let's prepare a chain link. The easiest way to do it is to draw two splines (lines without any thicknes) One in C shape, and a circle. Using loft tool we gat a perfect link.

Can it get any simpler? Let's just copy the chain link, rotate it by 90 degrees, move it a little lower. And we can easilly copy the both links enought times to get a full chain.

Of curse a chain like this could be easilly animated, all we need to do is to attach reactor to it (a phisical engine) choose weight of each link, set up gravity, add wind and perfect swing fuly animated in a metter of minutes! Wonderful? Unfortunetly no.
There is one little problem. Each chain link got in this example 1010 faces (flat surfaces which are combined to create a 3D object)  The entire chain is mae out of 62 links. To prepare four seats we need eight chains This gives us a total of 500960 faces for chains alone. For everyone who are not familiar with 3D graphics I expalin - It really a lot of faces. This means that you will lose a lot of time to reender scene with thease chains. And It your computer isn't fast enought it might even refuse to reender anything at all. And of course the swings alone ain't enought to make a good game background. So the only thing left to do is to delete a whole thing and start again from the begining.
That's one of the reasons why I decided to make a swings out of steel tubes. Seats are conected to frame by steel rods. I "painted" it with awful blue paint used on most of palygrounds in 70's and 80's in all around soviet block.

The only problem is that the description siad barelly usable, and this one looks fine. So let's fix it too.

Now technically speaking it's 50% usable. I tried to recreate the ways they broke down in the real world.

And I also was working on house itself.

I still need to add doors, basement windows, tower windows. Make textures for the roof (both of them) And fix that brick texture. I don't like it at all. I'll probably just make a new one from diffrent wall. (I use real photos to make textures)
The windows look a little weird, but it's because I assigned reflective material to them and it got nothing to reflect. Lights are identical to the ones which will be used in the final scene.

My entry.



Small keep, used mostly as lookout point and base for troops patroling surrounding area.