Blogs - indefiance11

Hi all,

Last week was a busy one. I finished the dialogue system, and also started to remove and re-add existing code to have a clear code base before start adding new features. These are the major changes:

• I added lots of features and options to dialogue system, including a dozen log features and debug options. The major feature is that now the designer can change the style for both subtitle text and speaker name, for the whole game, and also for each speaker individually.
• The integration part of dialogue system is finished. For now it consists of a sequence action and a sequence event (which manages all of needed events in one SeqEvent).
• I re-added the base classes in a more clear way, and with some features to ease future modifications.
• Also added a couple super classes to have more control on the game (e.g. to control cheats and exec functions).
• I reimplemented the whole save/load system because of some problems. I hadn’t time to test it yet though.
• Added the base classes for Scaleform GFx UIs and also MapInfo.

Also lots of minor changes and a few more additions to code. So far I managed to re-implement about 1/3 of the code base and It will need a few more weeks to be finished.I also spent quite some time trying to build a mac version for the demo. Still no luck, however I will let you know when it’s working.

Thanks and good luck.

Hello everyone. Last week I mostly worked on a new dialogue system. I won’t bore you with details and will go straight to general steps and the results so far.

• Step 1 is to create the main structure for this system. For this I designed 3 rough designs and we chose the one we want to use.
• Step 2 is implementing the actual functionality of the system. So far I accomplished these two steps.
• Step 3 would be creating a few sequence actions and events to control the system via kismet. I’ll start this one in a day or two.
• The last step is polishing, including all kinds of tweaks and fixing possible problems. I won’t start this step at least for a few weeks until we actually start to use dialogue system for the final game.

Following is some of the features so far:

• Main goal for this system was to minimize the manual work needed to be done by one of the team members and the result is pretty satisfying.
• There is a conversation queue in this system that if by any chance the game received request for more than one conversation at a time, we enqueue them and play them in order.
• Ability to control the visibility of subtitles in real time, for example through options menu.
• Ability to change the general volume and pitch for dialogues.
• I also added some properties to help control delay and play time via archetypes, plus some controlling properties.

As I said the main goal here is to minimize the work needed by the one who wants to manage dialogues, and also level designer who needs to handle dialogues in kismet.There is still some features I need to add and after that I will start the third step. I will let you know when some of those are in place.Thanks for reading.

Hello guys,

Here is my first blog and it’s an update about what me and Rob (Project Lead) have done so far on this map. As I said in the title it’s still pretty far from a finished scene but we are happy with the results so far.Pretty much everything in the map is done with BSP and the BSP is almost finished for this map. There is still some additions to be made with lighting, static meshes from the modellers, etc.

The work that I done is almost whole the BSP, whilst Rob has been in and out fixing problems with set up the materials, build of the lighting and stuff like that. As I said up, we’re almost finished with the BSP just yet. We can only see there being minor changes with it. The only thing that we’re waiting for is static meshes and models from the Art team. We’re expecting to hire two more experienced modellers shortly and they will help us and the process of building the game will become much faster.Doing BSP for me is my favourite part of job so I didn’t had any problems at that point, we’ll see in the future job of this map will there will be any major problems, I hope not.

We discussed what we wanted to do with this map, Rob mentioned to me very important and helpful tips because practically this is my first piece of work for the team, so with future work you can expect even better results.Hope you like the results of what you have seen so far, enjoy and have a nice day!

Belmin Kozlić

Afternoon all, (damnation you will read this in the afternoon)

I’m Jack, and I’m the sound designer and composer with 3rd Element Studios, and this is my first diary blog entry.So far I’ve mainly been concentrating on the musical side of things, composing the game’s main themes whilst I wait for an opportune moment to jump into the rest of the fray.

Currently I am working on cinematic music for a promotional trailer due out towards the start of next month, and it is jolly good fun; especially as I am getting back to good ol’ film music way of writing. Ah the ease of linear motion… none of this silly ‘player interaction’ or ‘unpremeditated sequences of events’ to worry about. The clip is only c. 30 seconds long, which seems an easy enough task… however fitting just enough emotion, intrigue and excitement to get an uncommitted viewer to take notice is no small feat. Luckily I am surrounded (via ethereal planes) by a team of rather talented artists, writers, programmers and unsurprisingly, since they do seem to account for a large proportion of the earth’s population, Manchester United fans, whose artwork, lyrical prose, remarkable input and dedication to the red devils leave me with no lack of inspiration. I mainly write in a classical style, drawing influence from classical and film composers, however I have a further penchant for writing weird electronic music, and experimenting with unusual sounds as musical tools, so it usually creeps into whatever I am writing, eventually (and hopefully) creating an interesting original style. I’ll leave you to judge.

For musical tasters feel free to check out my website at jwmelham.com, until I get some sneak preview music uploaded on the website for your listening pleasure. I’ll be back with some more unstructured ramblings about music and sound soon, as hopefully next time you’ll actually be able to hear something too!

Jack

Hi,

My name is Iman Shabani and I’m the programmer and UI designer of Descent game. It’s my first post here but I’ll try to post at least once or twice a week about my progress (or just somethings that may interests you in case I didn’t have anything, haha). Please bear with me for a few weeks, as I’m gonna write most of the basic gameplay classes and that’s not going to finish soon so I can just post some of the less important things I add or change and thats also not so many.Here’s some of the things I did in the last few days:

• Integrate 2 code packages & change class prefixes
• Refactor existing code
• Add some essential code to engine side of unreal script

I also wrote a little win application in the last 2 days called “Basic Refactor”, to help me with re-factoring the unreal script code: It’s far away from a complete solution but it does well the only thing I need it to do right now. So I’m not going to add more features to it at least for a few months, but after that maybe I add some options to it so it can be useful for other developers too.There is a lot of things in my ToDo list right now but some of the things I’m going to do in the next couple weeks are: restructure the code, improve the base classes a bit more, remove unused code, and also try to build a mac version for the Demo.

Thanks for reading and good luck.