Merry Ch… Happy Ne… Wait, What? It’s March Already?
Merry Marchmess people, and what better way to start the new year-ish than with a media blow out and new information. So, buckle up buckaroos, and let’s dive in…
First of all, an update on OverDose progress. As you can see, it has stalled in recent months, with media none existent and news few and far between. Sadly, we hit a bit of a road block code wise with our physics system, and are currently in the middle of trying to squash a rather tedious bug. Yes, one of those bugs that seems to not obey the laws of code. Rest assured it’s being worked on, however. But otherwise progress remains good, for a one man artist anyway. It may look like not a lot has been going on, but here is the latest update on what we have worked on over the last 6 months:
- New physics engine
- New GUI
- New PBR rendering
- Changed every single art asset to work with PBR
- Remade 50% of the media (Models/textures/materials) to current standards
- Added fallback materials for every surface to better work with multiple system configurations.
- Added parallax occlusion maps for most surfaces, as well as fallbacks for lower end configurations.
- Made every model (Thousands) have at least 2 or 3, sometimes more, LOD model alternatives.
In short, this last gap we have been VERY busy, what with going over every single asset and in most cases remaking them, or at least re-tooling them for modern standards. As you can see in the new pics, the PBR rendering alone makes things work a whole lot better. But still, code wise, improvements have been slower, what with us being back down to a single coder while Buzz finishes his studies.
So, as you can see, we still need help. Whether it’s with code, or art, maps, we always need help. Its great being known to everybody as the team that pumps out this stuff with this few people, but I would rather be known as the team that gets things done. I think we deserve it for the time we have spent on OverDose, don’t you?
Same Identity, New Face
Time to spruce things up for the modern era. The old OverDose logo was getting tired. It looked very late 90’s and wasn’t fitting in with what I wanted the game to convey, so I spent a little time researching what I could do to change things, and came up with more solutions than I could hold. Seriously, it’s silly when you think about it, but the new logo conveys lots of ideas. The colours are the good in white (or green in our case but that doesn’t make a very good logo colour, trust me) versus the orange Marauders. The logo splits in two, to show factions. The roughness signals a dysfunctional world. I put emphasis on the “V” and the “S” to show the VS battle of two sides, good versus evil. In short, yes, it’s a logo… But it’s a logo with a story. Everything in OverDose has a story, even the miscellaneous newspapers have legit readable things on them, sometimes silly, sometimes a little close to home. Nothing in OverDose is just made at random. But anyway, enough blabbing. I present the new OverDose logo:
But that wasn’t all. I always disliked our Team Blur Games logo. I tried my best back in the day to ape off the developers I liked, but went with something that was very “Bungie”. It didn’t sit with me, or what I wanted to achieve however. So… Again I went back to the drawing board, and came up with something a little more “us”.
Website?
The website is still coming. I haven’t actually got around to getting a new host yet, as I’ve been toying with what’s best for us in our current position. I will however be trying to get in touch with whoever the kind soul is who updated out current website to show concept art and link to ModDB. So if that was you, please drop me a message, as I want to thank you and talk about what I can do next. But rest assured, the website, and yes, forums, are coming.
Donating To The OverDose Project
If you like what we are doing on OverDose, why not donate? Nicolas always needs new shoes, and my CPU is from 1994. Donating helps us keep things going smoothly, and allows us to attract new talent. Every donation received is noted, and will appear in the credits of OverDose, so that when it’s completed your grand kids can see you were a good guy. Not you, you will be long dead by then. But hey, it’s party time for all the little worms!
Gavin Stevens
Lead Designer for Team Blur Games [TBG]
Looking really nice, probably a good thing you decided to go for a PBR rendering pipeline, most modern tools are built for it and the results are very nice.
What physics engine are you using?
It’s a derivative of the doom 3 physics library, cleaned up and retooled. It works more than well enough for what we need, allowing rigid bodies, inverse kinematics etc. I mean let’s face it, you’re not doing physics puzzles, you’re going to be having players with one foot on a step while somebody kicks a box... Not exactly taxing.
However at this moment in time we have a math problem that’s causing a huge head ache for us, where sometimes, boxes will land and then... just keep going. Or barrels will spin on their ends forever.
I would said it’s turned Nicolás’ hair grey, but he’s been grey for the last 97 years :)
We already have a few things from the doom 3 source, meaning a doom 3 licence would required if we ever go retail, but we knew that anyway. Just because we made things our own way, doesn’t mean we don’t credit the original.
does doom3 do rotational drag? if nothing else that could be a decent hack
Yeah, it does, in a way. Its not exactly as perfect as you would assume, and seems to be done on a per model basis, i.e. barrels have their own version of it. So yeah, you can knock a barrel over and have it roll down the stairs, not just bounce down. This isn't implemented yet, but its on the ToDo list and isn't a massive job, its just as I said we hit that snag that sucked our development code time down.
I think its worth mentioning as well that the physics in Doom 3 are now 15 years old or so, and that its actually still a fairly decent system. If we were making a big single player experience, we would likely have a much more in depth physics implementation, but we don't really see any benefit in a game such as this.
Cool to see progress on this... But is it really worth rewriting id tech 2 in 2018? UE4, Unity or Cryengine have all the fancy rendering tech you'd want, and physics too, you could spend way more time developing the game than playing catch up and fixing up old engine bugs. Not to be super negative about your efforts in this, but wouldn't you save a lot of time and headaches just by switching over to a modern engine?
Quite an easy answer for this. The engines been done for a long time, and we all have a history with id tech. No history with unreal engine. I mean, aside from a few missing shaders, there's nothing left for us to add to the OD engine at this stage that's missing in UE4.
There is one huge benefit though...
See UE4 is great and all, Unity and Crytech as well. But they are full of bloat. They are catch 22 engines, meaning that they try to do everything. It would actually be just as much work to get UE4 to where we need it, because there is just so much jank in there that's not needed. Take a look at Player Unknowns Battlegrounds. It uses UE4, but runs like ***, looks like *** because of the performance, and even now they struggle to get it running anywhere near decent. Yet we can pull 64 sample shadow mapping, something that's just a pipe dream, quickly. Why? Because our engine is custom built for what we need.
Old engine bugs are a little bit of a strange one, as engine bugs that were actual problems were fixed years and years ago, and some were not so much bugs, just incomplete ideas, or misconceptions. Like for example how sometimes you could jump a bit higher with a certain frame rate? The beauty of us making this thing from the ground up means we bypassed a lot of those issues.
So like I say, really, we only have a few missing shader effects left to go. Which to be fair, because of our shader system, wont be a big job (and as such is reason its been left until now).
So I fully get what you are saying, and in some ways even agree. But we even made our own toolset and level editor custom built for OverDose's custom engine, to make converting model formats and mapping a breeze.