Effects Manager, Fire Effect

02/28/2013

I have been tasked with setting up an effects manager to handle all the particle effects we have in our game. In the process I helped one of our artists import a new texture he found and make it look like a rolling fire that he can use in some 3D fire pit models he has made:

Xbox Avatar Animations

02/24/2013

Today I imported and tested some new Xbox 360 custom Avatar animations one of our artists has made. I took video to send back to him so he could see if he was satisfied with his results:

XNA Normal Mapping and Lighting

02/16/2013

After a long struggle with trying to get normal mapping and lighting shaders to work in our game I finally got it working where I can show off the results.

I set it up so that our artists will be able to select which shader each model will be drawn with.

For transparency I used our artists transparent shader. For Normal Mapping I setup a Normal Mapping Pipeline similar to the one shown off in the Xbox Live Indie Games Code Samples. One of the problems I was running into was caused by the ASCII FBX exports from Maya. For each model that we wanted normal mapping for I would have to go in and find the section for each model and add a normal map tag, for example:

P: "NormalMap", "Enum", "", "A+U",0, "../SourceImages/Brick3_normal.png"

I would then have to find all other references to the NormalMap and remove them. Once I did this the normal mapping would be displayed. With the normal mapping we have the following variables we can configure; light position, light color, ambient light color, shininess, specular power.

Below are examples of the shaders...

Transparent lamp next to the rectangle:


Normal Mapping on different models:





Example of the same barrel model with Normal Mapping on or off:


Video examples of the Normal Mapping:



Testing lighting so that it looks like the light on the two arches is coming from the lamp between them:

Ninja Scroll Animation (Update)

02/07/2013

I updated the ninja scroll animation. Scrolls can now be spawned anywhere on the screen by giving them a Vector2 location of the top left corner. You can dynamically set the text, and scale of the scroll.

Examples of setting location and scale:

Play Test / Level Testing

02/07/2013

Today we will be doing a play test with the Master students. Our team has been trying to get a big indoor level to work but have been running into performance issues with it lagging on the xbox 360. On Tuesday I was asked to try and get this level working before the play test. I determined that the problem with the level was due to the collision layer, so I spent the last couple of days trying to edit the Maya model and remove as much as possible without affecting the game play.

Here is a video of the lagging performance:


Here is a video where I removed the level's collision layer and added a different level's collision layer and the level runs smooth:


After removing all the models and faces I could from the Maya model it still performed slow. So I started to edit and remove each edge that I could, but performance still continued to run slow.


One of our artists started to build the collision layer from scratch. As he created it I would test it out and find locations where collisions either needed to be improved or added because they were missing.

In the end we decided to scrap this level since it did not fit with our level builder.