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[ucupumar]

Wow! Game looks super fun, and the new environment and earlier mock up looks wicked!! :D

Good work!

Thanks for your kind words.


I'm now testing Blender cycles baking. It's really cumbersome works, because there's a lot of setting to setup. To simplify thing, I will create an addon to automate those tasks. I had write some of it's early code. After unwrapping using texture atlas, just press one button and the addon will produce something like this:



It still haven't got proper UI, but it already does the work.

[Low_Chance]

Great concept. This game seems perfect for me, as I am always always on the prowl for good new local MP games. Will be following this with interest - let me know when that demo is available!

[wiwing]

after I've seen the game on the community gathering earlier on our city. The game is really exciting and I'm really looking forward to this game. I hope you guys can release the playable demo ASAP.
I have some suggestions for further development:

• Create arenas with different unique effect on each one of them
• More variations on the arena's level design, at least don't always designed it completely a plain square arena (without any obstacles)
• I have suggestions for the name but mostly the names have already taken by old flash games or individual's nick name such as BattleRaft, BattleBoat, Raft Wars then I will give you another suggestion. How about Canoeneers, it's a combination between Canoe (type of row boat) with Cannoneer

anyway keep up the good work guys and please build it for mac platform as well so I can try it on my office with my team

[ucupumar]

Great concept. This game seems perfect for me, as I am always always on the prowl for good new local MP games. Will be following this with interest - let me know when that demo is available!

Thanks, we hope we can really give you the best we can. For the demo, we can't exactly give you a promise, but it's estimated available in next month (or two). There are still a lot of work left to be done.

after I've seen the game on the community gathering earlier on our city. The game is really exciting and I'm really looking forward to this game.

Thanks for your comments. Just don't spoil too much here.

• Create arenas with different unique effect on each one of them
• More variations on the arena's level design, at least don't always designed it completely a plain square arena (without any obstacles)

We got some plan for that, the obstacles will be specific on each different arenas. I'm afraid we can't give much detail now. For prototype demo, we are still focusing one arena first. This demo will updated frequently, so don't worry.

• I have suggestions for the name but mostly the names have already taken by old flash games or individual's nick name such as BattleRaft, BattleBoat, Raft Wars then I will give you another suggestion. How about Canoeneers, it's a combination between Canoe (type of row boat) with Cannoneer

Good suggestion, we'll take that into account. We're still open for name suggestion.

anyway keep up the good work guys and please build it for mac platform as well so I can try it on my office with my team

Thanks! We still haven't got access to mac platform yet. But we'll get around that.

[ucupumar]

Lightmap updates!

Writing lightmap addons for Blender isn't that easy. For few days I figure out how to create addons which produce lightmap that can be easily tested and use for Urho engine. One thing to get tacked on is lightmap format. Before got into that, lightmap is a texture that store diffuse light reflection for objects on the scene. On blender, after unwrapping all object on one texture, if we bake direct and indirect pass and add them, we will create lightmap texture like this:


We can use lightmap with multiplying it with albedo color of object's surface. Something kind like this:



Looks awesome right? But wait, what if compare lightmapped scene with actual cycles render? 



What happens? It looks different. To be fair, I exaggerate sun light power to highlight the difference. If you look on tile texture on bottom left, cycles render actually brighten the texture, while tile texture on lightmapped scene looks as if it's original texture.

The explanation of this problem is because texture/image that store our lightmap with RGBA color value clamped to 1.0. This will cause lightmap can only darken the scene, not brighten it. There are some image format that doesn't clamp color, like HDR or EXR. But there are two problem using this format. First one is size problem, an 1024x1024 image can takes 8MB of storage, that's really huge for one texture. The second one, Blender still clamp color if we test EXR/HDR lightmap using Blender viewport.

The solution is using RGBM compression. This technique will compress HDR image to fit size of standard RGBA8 format like TGA, PNG or block compressed DDS. Like it's name, 'RGBM', this technique will use alpha channel for 'M' or multiplier. RGBM had been around for around 5-6 years and used by Unity to store it's lightmap, you can find more detail of this technique on this post.

After compress to RGBM image, we can decode lightmap on runtime as easy as this:



That's perfect!

For the addon itself, I had created UI like this:


It's become part of already avalable Texture Atlas addon. So, I don't reinvent automatic uv unwrap part. For testing purpose, there are button for previewing the lightmap itself on Blender. Here's the picture of our arena using the lightmap on Blender:



I haven't create shader for Urho to read RGBM lightmap. So, that's will be my next target.

Sorry for a bit lengthy post.
Cheers!

[ucupumar]

Updates!

After days of trial and error, lightmap now succesfully implemented to Urho3D.
I've attached screenshots for comparison.

This is taken from Blender viewport:


This taken from Urho3D engine:


Urho3D screenshot looks a bit blurrier because it seems to be engine bug on anisotropic filtering.
And, I've tuned water tint to look brighter so it's matched to the lightmap.

That's it for today.
Short update keeps the doctor away. 

[ucupumar]

Arena update!

Actually I kind of dislike of previous results because of it's dull and boring color. I experimented change of direction of light to more exciting highlight on the arena. It's still had it's dull color, so I need to add HDR pipeline to our render path. I'm really new to HDR pipeline, so there are some trial and error. After few days experimenting, I end up with pipeline showed below.



I use Uncharted 2 tonemap. It's bundled with Urho3D installation, but I end up modified it so it's properly use linear color. This tonemapping process will map color on the screen so it's don't get overbright on bloom pass. Bloom pass is usual threshold, blur, and add to frambuffer. It's nicely bundled too in standard Urho3D installation. The last step is color correction using texture lookup using this method. As usual, the implementation is already on Urho3D installation too.

Higher resolution results using this pipeline:







That's it for today!
 

[karlozalb]

Looks fun and polished, specially the water :O 

[quixotic]

Oh wow. Your game looks ridicously good. I was worried at first that the game might feel a bit static without strafing, but seeing the gifs of the combat highlights I'm not worried anymore. Are you planning to put out an alpha soon? Would love to play this with some friends already now.

[tfmcmahon]

Very interesting read regarding the tonemapping process, thanks for sharing!

The gamma on the boats feels a little weird after all of the processing, any thoughts there?

[Yxven]

This game looks great. I hope you guys are planning some environments that don't look like urban hell though.

[AndrewKennedy3D]

I really like the renders, your materials look super nice!

[ucupumar]

Thanks for all the kind words everyone! 

I was worried at first that the game might feel a bit static without strafing, but seeing the gifs of the combat highlights I'm not worried anymore. Are you planning to put out an alpha soon? Would love to play this with some friends already now.

We are still experimenting with camera movement too. We hope this game won't feel static. For playable demo, we are planning this end of the year, but we can't really promise the exact date yet.

The gamma on the boats feels a little weird after all of the processing, any thoughts there?

I forget to mention that the boats still have generic diffuse material. I will experimenting to fix that soon.

I hope you guys are planning some environments that don't look like urban hell though.

We are planning to add more arena in the future, we already got arena plans in mind, don't worry, some of them isn't urban. But for playable demo, we're still focusing this arena first.

[danieru]

Wow nice job on the color correction. The game looks very inviting and warm 

[ucupumar]

Wow nice job on the color correction. The game looks very inviting and warm  

Thanks!


Update #12
(Yeah, it's already 12th update)

I implemented (physically based?) wet surface for side of the pool. It's inspired by Sébastien Lagarde's blogpost. That blogpost has source code shared if will you want to know more about this topic. For reflection, I can't just use water reflection buffer because side of pool has more complex normal and shape. So I was using box projected cubemap based from Martins Upitis implementation.

These are the results:








I originally created the cubemap for character reflection data. But for sake of testing, I had an idea to use them for create those water puddle. Thankfully, those 'test' effects cause the arena more wet and convincing. Next, I planning to give the characters some cubemap love.

That's it for today. Hope you like it.  

[danieru]

Nice  :beer., I'd love to see what it looks like from the player's perspective. Will there be dynamic wetness from splashes?

[dukope]

Your latest shots look fantastic, but I have to wonder how this work relates to making a fun 4-player battle arena game. Some of my wondering:

1. If I've learned anything from other local MP battle games, it's that the framerate is absolutely critical. The work you're doing with subtle shader effects is trading framerate for fine details that are not meaningful to the gameplay and may not even be visible at the normal zoom distance.

2. The environment feels thematically wrong for cartoonish renaissance-looking characters in little cannon-armed paddleboats. I would've expected something more in line with that time period (small dock off an island paradise, in a mediterranean port amongst larger ships, etc) instead of a post-apocalyptic swimming pool.

3. I don't predict much strategy with a wide-open pool. Do you have plans to add obstacles or other interactive elements to the play area?

I don't mean to get you down though, I really like this project.

[Mittens]

Game looks really fun,
I wanted to suggest a mechanic.
The boats could have a sharp front.
If you are able to ram the side of another boat with speed it would split and sink them.
If two boats ram one another front-on then they would bounce/divert or otherwise be nullified

[crusty]

this looks hilarious to play

[ucupumar]

Thanks for all of the replies.

Nice  :beer., I'd love to see what it looks like from the player's perspective. Will there be dynamic wetness from splashes?

Actually, wet effects is really subtle if seen in gameplay match perspective. You can see in screenshots below. For dynamic wetness, we haven't thought of that yet, maybe we'll look at these in the future.

Your latest shots look fantastic, but I have to wonder how this work relates to making a fun 4-player battle arena game.

I apologize if recent devlog is really focusing in graphics side, not gameplay. But, the graphics side is really haven't finished yet, I'm planning all of these shader reusable in every other arena so I can really focusing on gameplay in next iteration.

1. If I've learned anything from other local MP battle games, it's that the framerate is absolutely critical. The work you're doing with subtle shader effects is trading framerate for fine details that are not meaningful to the gameplay and may not even be visible at the normal zoom distance.

I guess you have the point. It sucks to play multiplayer with low framerate. In that case, next week, I plan to optimize those effects so it can run smoothly on our fairly old target laptop. It's necessary because Warboat will attending local game expo in next two week and we can't bring our PC.

To be fair, all of these shader actually really cheap to compute because most of them are pre-baked except dynamic water reflection. For now, the real framerate killer is HDR framebuffer, because it require twice of memory bandwidth. I had some plan to overcome this.

2. The environment feels thematically wrong for cartoonish renaissance-looking characters in little cannon-armed paddleboats. I would've expected something more in line with that time period (small dock off an island paradise, in a mediterranean port amongst larger ships, etc) instead of a post-apocalyptic swimming pool.

If you see earlier screenshot, the arena looks closer to medieval/renaissance theme, and then suddenly, it was on urban site. It's happen because of our earlier technical limitation and confusion to choose proper theme. But after so many internal discussion, Warboat likely won't stick to one theme. The characters and arenas will cross over generation, culture, and place. It's kind of like Smash bros, but with no Nintendo characters.

That renaissance characters actually haven't change from the game jam times. It's just temporary character for almost six month with no replacement until now . And if anyone didn't notice, it's poorly copied from Zelda Windwaker character Nudge  .  Don't worry, new replacement character is in development now.

Oh yeah, I forget to tell that Warboat is actually continuation of our internal game jam happen in end of May 2014.

3. I don't predict much strategy with a wide-open pool. Do you have plans to add obstacles or other interactive elements to the play area?

Another good point, open pool surely won't give much strategy. It can be solved in other arena design, but for prototype demo, unfortunately we'll stick to this arena. We already tried to solve this problem by adding power-ups. We'll show you in next few updates.

I don't mean to get you down though, I really like this project.

It's okay, we are happily accept all feedbacks from others.
Anyway, thanks for following this devlog, dukope! Your Obra Dinn demo is really awesome!

Game looks really fun,
I wanted to suggest a mechanic.
The boats could have a sharp front.
If you are able to ram the side of another boat with speed it would split and sink them.
If two boats ram one another front-on then they would bounce/divert or otherwise be nullified

Thanks for your suggestions! It's really good idea. We'll see if we can implemented this.

this looks hilarious to play

We hope so. Thanks!


Update #13

Short update! Boat and character shader is mostly done. I'm using same cubemap as water puddle. It's subtle at far zoom, but it's better than use just flat ambient shading. Here are the results:





Oh, dat Nudge character looks so baaad.
I hope I can show you the replacement soon.