Space Shooter - WIP

[Hiredicespecter]

Thanks.

Recently I got asked several times how I did the trails on the particle effects.


I used a ribbon typeData as a typeData module for an emitter
Details can be found here:

http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/Parti...on%20_TypeData

[Hiredicespecter]

The landscape/terrain shader got slightly improved. Using blury mip maps really helps.

Too bad, it couldn't hide all the tiling as the textures used seam to emphasise the tiling effect.



This is NOT the moon map from a previous video^^

[stevelois]

Great work as always

For the tiling, you can look at this well made "Distance based texture blending (UE3/UDK)" tutorial just release by my buddy

[Hiredicespecter]

Thanks for the link. I ll try it sometime. Currently I'm busy with my bachelor thesis.

Currently I am using the distance to fade out (high) detail textures, but lerping to another (big) texture seems like a good idea.

[badchopsuey]

Bro, you are pretty epic

[mAlkAv!An]

Currently I am using the distance to fade out (high) detail textures, but lerping to another (big) texture seems like a good idea.

Hi, you don't need a real big texture, just keep the texture size and use more tiles. Usually you won't see the difference between just 1024²px or a huge 16x16x1024 texture (for example) at such a distance.

[Hiredicespecter]

@badchopsuey: Thanks.

@stevelois: Your buddy's tutorial gave me the idea I needed

@mAlkAv!An: I reused the near distance texture to reudce the textureSample count as I have 3 layers for my landscape^^. It looks decent. I will upload a vid when I finished the fine tuning.



Featuring a new ship, a bomber called Phantom by Niklas1723.
The station has been enriched with additional props & decals.
The shaders got some improvements as well.

[Hiredicespecter]

Phantom Bomber in a Space Station - Improved



In response to various feedback, a video showing what was improved.

Thanks for the ideas:
Pra3t0r5 - Micro flash/ignition spark for thrusters
MarvDesign - flames fadeout & font
Niklas1723 - distance fog
BigTentacleEnt - doors conveying scale

[Jetfire]

We are watching with interest, the world needs more spaceship shooters.

[Hiredicespecter]

Rebuilt the landscape shader. Now it's damm close to what I want it to be.

3 layers, supporting ANY visual range.

[DennyRocket]

impressive stuff

[stevelois]

Damn, love the last video, awesome !

[Hiredicespecter]

Thanks guys.

This time I applied my landscape master shader to the moon map.



The close up details need some tweaks, otherwise I am completely satisfied.

[Private Tux]

This is great! Slot 5 (Moon Map 2) makes interesting.

[Deathstick]

I love the look of the last vid you posted, keep it up! (also I'm a sucker for moonlight sonata)

[stevelois]

The applied landscape master shader on the moon map look fantastic

Awesome

[Hiredicespecter]

A new video: Weapons now apply recoil force to the ship firing them. The hangar got an upgrade during the meantime.

[Farseer]

Oh no, the competition is catching up!

[Hiredicespecter]

I have written two small tools to clear my head and aid in further development. Suprisingly enough, GIMP as well as Photoshop make it very difficult if you want to paste an image into the red channel of a picture. The same is true for the route back. Saving the blue channel as a grey scale image is a challenge. Thus two tools were.


RGBA Merger can merge grey scale images, using them as RGBA channels.

RGBA Extractor can extract RGBA channels into separate files.

Both require .NET 4. I have hosted them at http://sourceforge.net/projects/rgbamae/

[aRny]

video is looking interesting, just a small suggest would to have the atmosphere surroundings outside more dynamic, more things moving, perhaps more rocks, meteors.
They must not affect the user or gameplay, but atleast happen in mid-long distance to give it that feeling things are moving and happening.

[Hiredicespecter]

Interesting thought. How do I make rocks in mid distance that don't affect the player? The player could fly to them and expect interaction/collision. That combined with the limit of ca. 3000 rigid body asteroids per map make additional rocks not worthwhile to pursue in my opinion.

I could add something for the eye in long distance aka outside of the map i.e. in the area players can't enter. Currently I have background explosions that I can place there. Perhaps having a meteor flying in the distance every 5 minutes or so might be feasible. Anything else that could happen in long distance?

Or any other suggestions to make the scene more 'alive' while keeping things realistic?

[White Paper Games]

Visuals aside,, I always think that sometimes sound can be a more powerful tool, if you include the sounds of these things happening rather than being able to see them (it might be a faint sound in the distance) it could impact your world quite a lot with less work for you do to!

[Hiredicespecter]

Sounds like a great idea (pun intented). I'll note it on my todo list.

I have made a meteor and a big flashing star for some background details. In addition I have reworked my sky shader, no more blurry colors. I'll post a vid of that soon.

[Hiredicespecter]

I have decided against posting a vid of the comet/meteor in the background. It's basically just a shooting star in front of the sky, nothing flashy.

I just released another little helper tool for UDK. SpaceScapeToUDK renames and rotates the skybox images exported by SpaceScape to fit for UDK's TextureCube. I wrote it to assit me in reworking the images for my sky materials.

[Hiredicespecter]

I used my tools to experiment with the settings for images used by my sky shader.

Space skyboxes get blurry in UDK thanks to its compression and the images very rich number of colors.
My first tries focused on the pure image. I used TC_Default, NoMips, CompressionNoAlpha & LODGroup_SkyBox.
These were not helpful in reducing the blurring. But I noticed that 4096 px edge length just look like 1024. Nice.

After that I extracted the R,G & B channels of each image in separate grayscale images (TC_Grayscale). The 3 resulting grayscale cubes are merged by the shader after being multiplied with the respective color. And... it wokrs. It is due to the fact that TC_GrayScale does not compress. Thanks to the tool I previously wrote extracting the images was easy, but took some time. In the following I'll label skyboxes based on this method "single channels" to distinguish them from the "normal" ones.

Concise results
normal, 4096 px, ~160 MB
normal, 2048 px, ~80 MB
normal, 1024 px, ~40 MB
single channels, 2048 px, ~300 MB
single channels, 1024 px, ~80 MB
single channels, 512 px, ~30MB

It is nice to note that to can go even down to 512 px with the single channels method. Then using 3 images instead of 1 doesn't hurt memorywise. I haven't tested a normal skybox with 512 px.

Some images for you to judge:

Spacescape
How the skybox looks in spacescape


4096 px, ~160 MB


1024 px, ~40 MB


single channels, 1024 px, ~80 MB


Single Channels, 512 px, ~30 MB

[thetruth233415]

I am an intern who is creating a whiteroom for a space shooter game. I am trying to create a skybox and hopefully other people viewing this thread are trying to do similar things. After using spacescape and creating a scene I open up AMD cubemapgen. Next I have been using bixorama to open up the cross skybox and generate a panoramic photo. I have been getting this from the following great tutorial:

http://www.vixensfromouterspace.com/development/?p=256

Unsolved issues are:

a). The tutorial leaves off before explaining UDK import, I have been assuming to import the panoramic as a 2d texture, to create material for skybox/dome.

b). When in AMD cubemapgen (it looks beautiful), but i dont apply a strong filter the stars look awful,huge and extremely pixilated in the UDK, only option i have found is the CosinePower filter, which blurs the image very well but removes the stars (removes all nice details and it all looks like a blurry painting). So I am wondering what are good filter settings?

C). I have been taking the generated crossCubeMap into bixorama and exporting it to longitude/latitude in a picture of about 2048X1024. When i bring 6 photos into cubemap it says that they are 128X128, and asks to adjust from 512X512 environment, so I do so. I figure the stretching is why the picture looks bad in UDK, but all skyboxes I found are using 128X128 6 sides, so Whatsup with that?

[Hiredicespecter]

You are trying the complicated approach. There is a far easier one.

1. Export the skybox from spacescape
2. Use my tool to rotate and rename the skybox images properly.
3. Import each image to UDK.
4. Create a TextureCube using the imported images.
5. Use that TexturCube in a material similar to the one I posted some time ago.

a single skybox with a "StarMask" in the alpha channel. Although the use of multiple skyboxes would have been possible.
The sparkling effect is archived by applying a panning noise map to the star's brightness. Here’s a screeny.

[thetruth233415]

Disregard last post, it wont let me delete.

I am working in a space area with a zero gravity volume in place and I am wondering about what is the best way to make a hovering platform (mesh or csg)?
I am thinking of just faking floating with kismet, although I dont understand what a zero-gravity
volume really does, bc things inside of it do not seem to float away.

[Hiredicespecter]

A physics volume will only affects things that can move on their own like pawns, vehicles and rigid bodies.

Whetever to use a RigidBody (KActor) or Kismet to move your platform depends on the type of movement and its freedom. I recommend Kismet for very resticted movement possibilities and KActor for realistic and good looking ones.

[thetruth233415]

For anybody out there; just trying to keep up the discussion and I know there are others who have space questions. What I am wondering now is about making my floating kactor almost boyant like. I have just enough gravity applied, so that large objects like my kactor slowly float down. Actors w less mass like me , will continuously float steady, just to provide a picture. I am thinking that since my kactor is actually a large ship mesh(acting as floating platform)-that drifts; that I can animate move forward w kismet as the ship floats. My last thought is that if the ship floats to far up or down(z axis) that I am wondering how to make that call the impulse function to push down or up to re correct. If you get what I am trying to accomplish u may know a better way?

[Hiredicespecter]

Sounds like you want to have a kind of 2D space game. Every actor that diveates from your desired height level should gradually move back to it. Is that correct?

In that case you should have a look at the whizzle creation document. It describes how the movement of a RB can be limited to 2 axis, in its case to x and z, where you would want x and y.

Here is the relevant snippet from the whizzle creation document, page 8:

simulated event PostBeginPlay() 
{ 
local RB_ConstraintActor TwoDConstraint; 
              
super.PostBeginPlay(); 

// Create the constraint in the world by spawning it. Self is used to set the Owner of the constraint to the ball 
// We want to Spawn it at the same location as the ball, which is stored in the Location variable and no rotation 
TwoDConstraint = Spawn(class'RB_ConstraintActorSpawnable', self, '', Location, rot(0,0,0)); 

// bLimited is set to 1 by default, so turn it off for Y and Z to allow Y and Z axis movement TwoDConstraint.ConstraintSetup.LinearYSetup.bLimited = 0; 
TwoDConstraint.ConstraintSetup.LinearZSetup.bLimited = 0; 

// Don't allow the ball to swing, which would make it move along the X axis TwoDConstraint.ConstraintSetup.bSwingLimited = true; 

// Initialize the constraint and constrain the ball to the world 
TwoDConstraint.InitConstraint( self, None ); 
}

I'd prefer that to applying forces/umpulses to correct the height of an RB if I were aiming for a 2D game.

[thetruth233415]

You are really great man! I did mislead BC this is not 2d, I just need a floating platform( kactor) , to use as a base for the level. The player spawns on the platform (ship mesh)and then enters their vehicle to do obstacle course. For examp, It should share some similarities to your indoor space map, the one w the teleporting checkpoints.

1. Now I have been trying to make a 3d skybox (simple just a few billboards and blackness). This 3d skybox is placed outside of player boundry, in between player boundry and regular skybox. I have tries changing blend and transparency, but the 3d skybox obscures the view of reg skybox. Maybe I could have material say, "black equals clear" resulting that only 3d skybox planets are visible, but there's complications involved, plus Idk how to do that yet. Can anybody guide me around this?

2. Hiredice; slot 5 looks really cool, i will buy it!... I am curious how u created the teleportation between those checkpoints on indoor, just kismet teleport? Also are they teleporting between maps or jst multiple play areas? Don't feel too pressured if you don't want to give things away. I am just trying hard to get and stay in the game industry from this intern experience, as hoped for. Thanks for your support, I plan to create amazing stuff like u in a few who knows :-D

[Hiredicespecter]

1. You need to learn about shader/material transparency and overlay in UDK. Checkout UDN, UDKC or search this forum.
Alternatively you could just place some particle emitters between the player boundraries and the sky box.

2. The teleportation is done with the default UTTeleporter and a custom mesh. You can find tutorials online.

Don't get me wrong, I like to help. But you gave me impression that you didn't take the effort to search for a solution (much). That's why I refer you several good places with lots of tutorials and information.

edit

A great place to start is hourences' site. There a lot of great tutorials on materials and other UE3 related stuff. I recommend you to start here, as the tutorial are basic and easy to understand.

Another good site for reference is the wiki of beyondunreal.

But the best tutorials for UDK a from 3DBuzz. They cover nearly every aspect of the UDK editor. I started with them.

[Hiredicespecter]

It has been some time since I released the last video.

Now I managed to code a mutator that mutes all sounds when the player's ship is in space. I call it 'Silent Space'.

[thetruth233415]

Just stopping back to say thanks for those resources Hiredicespecter

[Hiredicespecter]

You're welcome.

[Hiredicespecter]

I redid the navigation lights. Now they look decent.
Different sizes for the exhausts have been introduced.
Furthermore I added anamorphic lensflares to the engine exhaust and headlights of the ships.

[Hiredicespecter]

Bug fixing keeps me busy. As a proof of live some dogfights using my modifications to the UDK musics system.

[Hiredicespecter]

I finished the swarm missile launcher M3 with Itano Circus like trajectories. M3 stands for Macross Missile Massacre, of course.
The ship with this missile launcher, the Phantom is a bomber hence its armament is primly effectively against stationary targets.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lOA8Twl76Y

If youtube is still processing the video, you can view it on moddb.

[YakZSmelk]

Can't wait to see this project completed, it's looking really awesome. I don't know if you ever played Silent Death Online but it was a pretty fun space shooter where you could upgrade your ship, might wanna check out some of those mechanics (if you haven't already thought of this). But awesome work!