Still got them, problems

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So it's been awhile yet again since my last post.

Been working on a shader to replicate an old CRT for HLSL shader model 3 for XNA 4.0. There's of course some strange stuff that I didn't know about XNA 4.0, such as if you make a shader that only implements the pixel shader, the spritebatch (which I am using for this shader as it's all post processing) will make a ShaderModel 2.0 vertex shader to pass things through. This wouldn't be a problem if there wasn't s 64 instruction limit on pixel shaders math calculations. A shader I found to base myself on for the start of the scan lines goes over that limit and of course the poster even said, "Fixed it by putting it on shaderModel 3."

Now the problem with that is if you just put your pixel shader on 3.0 and still don't define a vertexShader of 3.0 as well, XNA will give you a compilation error which basically says "Fool, you're trying to mix a VertexShader of ShaderModel 2 with a PixelShader of ShadeModel 3...You duuuumb."

I had to search for a couple different things to finally come across a way of just passing everything through the VertexShader to not affect the outcome of the post processing (if you try to just do something like pass the input position to the output in the vertexShader, it will give you a one color screen instead of what you want.).  Thankfully someone has already done a great service by figuring out a way to make a pass through without affecting the actual image (much, he claims it might make it a bit blurry but I don't really see it)

http://gamedev.sleptlate.org/blog/165-implementing-a-pass-through-3vertex-shader-for-games-without-vertices/

A few lines of code later and you've got a model 3 vertex shader that passes through and doesn't mess with your pixel shader.  So I got that working...And then I found out I needed to actually be working on this for GLSL so here goes nothing (with learning GLSL/OpenGl) and trying to paste some shaders together and check their performance

UNITY PROBLEMS

Something else that has popped up is Unity and XML reading. Now I figured since we're using the C# scripting it would be just regular C# that I could use to read it all in and work with it. I figured hey, I like LINQ and I've gotten quite a bit of experience working with it and XML together in my P90X WoT  project so we'll just use that for our localization and be done with it.

Oh How Wrong Was I. Unity doesn't use a high enough C# version to access XDocument which is what I had done all my previous work with so I had to scour the internet to find a new way to do it and after researching...and, you guess it, PROBLEMS GALORE, I finally have it working.

One of the pages about XML loading and Unity I found was this,
http://unitynoobs.blogspot.be/2011/02/xml-loading-data-from-xml-file.html

Which almost worked for me. Some of the code was needed for me to get it working again but one of the lines that did give me errors no matter what is this one

 Line 29 xmlDoc.LoadXml(GameAsset.text); // load the file.

I found a bunch of things about how when you save XML as UTF-8 it sometimes adds a BOM (Byte Order Mark) which Unity reads as white space. It's supposed to be in there to let things know what the endianess of the code is but Unity just reads it as white space and will actually just say, "NO".  So after probably a literal hour or two searching and trying different solutions all to no avail, I tried something else which I originally didn't know was there....

If you do xmlDoc.Load(GameAsset.text);

It will go without a hitch and load it. Strange but it works and I curse it every time I look at it.

LOCALIZATION PROBLEMS

I'm just starting with localization for the first time and we're going to be developing a text heavy game (dialogues for characters and their actions and progress reports etc. etc.) which has to be localized from English to Dutch, French and German as well...Now that the XML is loading finally we can start on things because we felt that we had to get this in place before we even started developing the game. I feel it's a good thing because if I would have to go back and change all this stuff to load different things based on languages I'd probably rip my hair out and throw myself through a wall..

But anyways, that's all my problems for now.

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Oh long and busy summer...

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Oh long time no write.

So it's been quite a while since I posted...sorry, but I have been pretty busy as of late.
Since it summer, it is my time to work..as much as possible. This summer I'm being a pipeliner in the oil and gas industry (yeah, makes sense right and isn't a complete and polar opposite of what I go to school for right?) which is a definite go go go job most of the time, 12 hour shifts for 21 days straight...so you can see why I've been busy.

But anyways I have been doing some Youtube videos here and there throughout the summer as well as semi-"apprenticing" a few people on 3D techniques and the work flow for making game ready models (sometimes it's pretty hard getting ideas through haha)

I figured I would make a small update about myself to make sure that anyone that does happen across this doesn't think I'm dead to the world, because "I'm Not Dead Yet!" (Quest for the Holy Grail - anyone?)

Some stress outside of the work is looking for the internship I'll need in my second semester this year so I can end up graduating from ma, edu-mi-cation ;)...I've been finding it's next to impossible finding an internship as a Technical Artist, which is somewhat disheartening. Might have to go for 3D or gameplay...or even just tools dev I guess, we'll see what ole fate gives me.

If for some reason you can't find my youtube channel, you can find it at
http://www.youtube.com/user/TJE3
 where I uploaded some stuff I did this year as well and some videos that I've been uploading about some 3D tips/Tricks (and a forth coming series on the quick and dirty workflow )


Well I guess that it's for now,

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Some updates

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So I wanted to do another blog post a little while ago but just couldn't get what I wanted to say, down in text. This time it's a bit different haha, this is some updates about life in general I guess and some other things as well.

One thing I wanted to talk about is the new program I put out, P90X Workout Tracker Program.
You can find it here P90X Workout Tracker Program

PWT is a program to be used with P90X the crazy home workout program.  With P90X it's pretty much drilled into you that you need to record your results so you can see what you did last time to improve the next time.  In my Tools Development class I had to make a program that fit with a lot of C#/WPF principles (MVVM patterns and LINQ and such like that) so I decided to make a program that I would end up using later, the PWT.

Having just started up P90X again today, I came across one thing I need to update in this version (as a minor tweak) and that's make it so the program will accept text and not just numbers in the reps area so you can say how many kg's/lbs or what color of band you did etc, so that will be in a update pretty soon I hope.

Other than that, it's been some updates to my portfolio site as well as making a spot to host the program.
I've been kind of educating some people on The Dead Linger forums on how to model and texture things better than they currently have been which is kinda fun cause I get to see some results already as they progress.

I'll post when I make updates to the program as well as other stuff I remember I wanted to post about, later on.

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Finally Catching Up: Pt 2

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So, in the last post, I covered the 3D stuff I've been up to, as well as shared the game that I helped make with other members of my team.

Now it's onto some other stuff where it's been more organizing and talking...and talking...... .... and talking that I've been doing.

RADIO SHOW:
I actually just realized that I never did write the post that I thought I had about the radio show so...this is a little awkward since I thought I had posted about it. But here it goes, a little selfish self promoting is in order!

Last year I was approached about being the host for a radio show here in Belgium to which I obviously said, "You want to put my silly ass on the radio?" and even after that they still wanted to.  Although the radio show we do is completely different from the original show that was mentioned to me (interviewing other foreign people like myself about their time in Belgium and travels etc) it's been fun just getting people to come around and talk about games and trying to make people actually think about the games they are playing (or even not playing).

So the Radio Show goes by the name of LEVEL UP. You can find our facebook page here


https://www.facebook.com/QuindoLevelUp

This is where we post our teasers, photos and other stuff that pertains to Level Up. Since we are about to air our 9th Episode (Yea I'm that far behind on actually documenting it here that I even had a show...that we're now about to air the 9th....) that means you've missed out on the last 8, which you can never hear unfortun...JUST KIDIIIIING, you can still hear them because we put them online on MixCloud as well

http://www.mixcloud.com/search/?mixcloud_query=quindo%20level%20up

This is the link to find any of the previous and upcoming shows. I hope that people enjoy the shows because it has been fun making them.  Really, I never thought I would enjoy talking for so long on something that people could actually hear me on...It's one of those things I've always been kind of weirded out about haha, but anyways it seems to have passed.

The fun part for me (and also the hardest and most stressful part) is trying to get a hold of industry people for Industry Talk. It's fun talking to the professionals about our topics for the show and seeing what they think cause sometimes you receive even more thought provoking things such as on the Game Addiction Episode when I got to interview +James Portnow , a game designer and writer for Extra Credits over at Penny Arcade.

But anyways, I guess it's time to do the brief part of the post about the last little project that I was doing for the last year and a half now which has also grown to be bigger than I initially planned.

STUDY NIGHT:
So Study Nights...It's exactly what it sounds like but since DAE didn't have a formal study night for people to kind of come together and give opinions on projects, work and socialize together (which we ALL benefit from) which I still don't know if it's because of DAE's kind of "recluse" nature that the students end up with because of the amount of work and projects that are due or what, but, I decided to try and bring people together.

Study Night actually started out last year (in my second year, 2011/2012 year). I decided that since, now that we were the second year of the international classes of DAE we should help out the new first years to hopefully help them pass with a higher ratio than we had. Since we (And I) still think that one of the reasons we didn't have a good ratio is because we had no one above to help us really as we were kind of  like the smelly kid in school, the Dutch classes didn't really want anything to do with us because they thought we were doing the English side for special treatment (Even the teachers thought it too, whether or not they will admit it though...) which we never received.

Anyways, As I said, I was trying to just make the Internationals look a little less bad cause our pass ratio sucked ...real bad in the first year of it running.  At the time, I did have the odd Dutch side person that wanted to come but I decided that if they wanted to treat us like we were different in the first year, we could do the same with our new Study Night  as well. They never made the effort (for the most part, as there of course is some of the Dutch side that were and still remain to be really cool about us being in the other class) to include us in stuff so I wasn't about to do the same for them AND MAINLY because I didn't want to plan something for a ton of people, we had about 45 people with the first and second years.

I saw that this had actually improved the pass rate (whether that year just had better and more studious people, I'll never really know cause I can't run the same people through it twice ...and I lack a Time Machine (although I do have a book on it now.. <.< >.>)) of the people that attended because we could help the people that needed the help.

This year (2012/2013) I decided to take the plunge (mainly cause I'm kind of an idiot and in the intro day of the year, I was giving a speech with our program coordinator, Rik Leenknegt and I meant to actually just say that the internationals in the room (as the plan originally was that the Intl and the Dutch would be two talks and I was to talk to the Intl's...but they put them together...), I was going to run the study night for them again...but I didn't have the heart so I said I would try to run it for everyone this year...I cursed myself later for saying it and not checking into anything before hand...) and try and run it for everyone. I tried a few times just doing it where we had always had it prior, The Studios. This proved to be pretty ok for about 2 sessions then it started to grow..and we ran out of plugs and chairs.

So at this point I didn't have much choice but to ask Rik if we could hold it at the school and he pointed me to the head of infrastructure at Howest and we arranged to have it in the school cafeteria since it has lots of space and we can take the plugs from the art room to make it accessible for more.  I was approached by a few people that said they wanted to help with Study Night so I said ok and now the team consists of two teachers and two students.

Stijn Grooten and myself were interviewed by one of Belgiums Newspapers about Study Night and why it seems that it had to be started by a Canuck and someone hadn't already started it.
(http://www.nieuwsblad.be/article/detail.aspx?articleid=DMF20130107_00424985  Here's the link but it's in Dutch just saying)

Now we run Study Night every week and try to also get more and more teachers to drop by when there are big projects coming up for due dates to give last minute feedback and it seems to be pretty appreciated (which is all I can ask for I guess)

I must say that I'm just happy people like it and find it useful.

Well now that that is all rambled out. You're pretty much caught up with my last semester and year of stuff I guess.

Thanks for reading/skimming.

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Finally Catching Up: Pt 1

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Soooooo...I was going to update this a bit ago...then I got into school work, the radio show (having to not only do the show but try and coordinate with industry professionals to do the Industry Talk portion of it...not the easiest thing..) organizing Study Nights for the whole of Digital Arts and Entertainment...Yea it's been busy.  Now that I have some time with the new semester start (and a bout of a throat infection, bronchitis and only 2 days of school) I can catch up with what I've been doing since the last one...Buckle up. It's going to be a long one. Think I might split the updates into 2 posts (at least)


3D 

3D wise, here's what I've been up to. I finished this vehicle for my exam.

Before the Vehicle project, we had to make a gun, originally we were going to have to make a gun based on designs from the art side of our program and right before we had to pick it was opened up that we could do either (as some of the art designs were ...*cough*unrealistic and stupid *uncough*).  Anyways, I chose to go with the artist design and it was fun to do. I had to make some modifications to the original design due to how the gun itself is actually put together but overall it was good.

The tri count might be a bit high on it but it was also modeled to be snapped open and reloaded (instead of just shoving the harpoons down the barrel with the charges attached  (which doesn't make much sense to me but hey, never know I guess)

And unfortunately I didn't make this little cutie, this was made by my buddy and team
Fluffy
Animal
Projects  Artist - Brent Rombouts and I just couldn't help but share her with you guys. This is ChiChi, our intelligent guinea pig with.......a JETPACK!!!1!11one!

We had to make a level for a game and we chose this as our heroine. We got the level done and you can actually download and play it if you'd like. I have the installer on my dropbox, so feel free to just download, do the small install and give it a shot. Just make sure you check out the help section for controls and such.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/31340003/UDKInstall-AMothersFury.7z

And onto the Next Part!

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Time for an Update

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Well it's been a while since I did a post (sorry, been busy with school and some side projects) so here's an update for things that I've been doing recently.

In school I've been learning more about normal mapping and making good normal maps. The first project we had to work on was just texturing a pre-made hatch after we baked the normal map and diffuse map from it (Diffuse maps make it easier to select pieces from a model as they are baked out with the colors, so you can just select the color pieces you want to work on in Photoshop).

I ended up with this. So it's a concrete door (obviously would have hydraulic assist from the inside for lifting the door) and it's been open to the weather for a while

Next off we had to make some sci fi style props, A floor, wall and roof tile. Out of the three I did I like how my floors turn out the best so here's a viewport grab of it with the Xoliul Viewport Shader.
Basically the topic was sci fi for the new DAE building called The Level and I figured what better way to have a call out to gaming for floors than to have D-Pad style floors.


















Next thing we had to do was make 2 more props, same style but a simple and a complex one. My simple prop was stairs, not staircase in it's whole, but just the steps. This is what I came up with, this is a grab from UDK.

So this next one is the "complex" prop which was a sci fi Computer. I decided to make a projection style computer that would project from the red ball in the middle onto the screen between the 4 corners. The corners can be tilted like any regular screen as well. 

And finally, this is just me doing some concepting for the Chainsaw Katana project that I somewhat started a while back (but decided the original drawing I was going to go off of wasn't that great...so I'm making my own concept for it now).

This is just the hilt, but the throttle for controlling the chainsaw speed. I've thought about doing it more of like a gun trigger as well (which most chainsaw's are in) but thought this would look a bit more clean and neat when actually modeled. So it's more up the alley for a motorbike throttle, this would be the one turn able part on the hilt while the rest is quite static. Either way, it's a WIP.


Thanks for reading, hopefully I will update a bit more instead of so sporadically...

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Unity...

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Soo...the last two weeks of class have made me start using Unity.  Now...I'm going to try and not rage to hard at it cause although it has proven me wrong in it not being a bad engine (completely) it has also made it very hard to not hate it while just making a small Asteroids Game for my Integration Projects class.

So last week we had to make a "mod" for the ole Asteroids game. I threw a few things into mine (as the base game we made in the first week was just a ship that could shoot at different sized asteroids) such as
-The big asteroids would spawn smaller (anywhere from 1-4 pieces) ones when you killed it, the big ones also took 5 hits to kill and all asteroids did a "camera-shake" when they died just for a little effect.

-The controls could be done by mouse and keyboard or by 360 controller (which after some help from others and tutorials I got it figured out and must say it was decently easy to set up in Unity)

-A shield power up that you could pick up from the small asteroids sometimes (would possibly spawn them and not all the time) which would have 2 uses per pickup that you could run into asteroids and not die

-After you got a certain amount of points you would get a 1-up.

So although it's not a ton of stuff it was enough to make me rage a lot at Unity and C# scripting as I'm new to both haha and it really seems like putting those two things together makes it very hard to encapsulate properly (compared to C++ at least..)

Next up is making a prototype in Unity for a game, we'll see how much rage I get out doing that project.

Unity isn't really a bad thing but it is a lot to get used to and kind of just be dropped in and told to make stuff haha.

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