Fallen Empire: Legions

Mark Frohnmayer live chat

Who is Mark Frohnmayer?

You may know Mark back from the Tribes days.  He's got quite the background so here's a bit of his bio from his GarageGames profile.

"I have worked at GarageGames since the start, having co-founded it with Rick, Jeff and Tim. Back before we were a big boat with a big idea we were a tiny life raft with a big idea, and so I have had a chance to wear many hats: engine programmer and architect (on the original Torque), game designer and programmer (on Marble Blast and Zap), producer (on MBU) and even executive (as the President of the company from mid 2005 through the end of 2006 ). Currently I am working on a variety of interesting projects.

Before GarageGames I was employed by Dynamix (a division of Sierra, which was first a publicly traded company, then a division of CUC International which merged with HFS to form Cendant, whose financial chicanery caused them to divest of games selling Sierra+Blizzard+others to Havas, a division of Vivendi). At Dynamix I did general game technology programming as well as design and programming on the Starseige Tribes and TRIBES 2 games. In an odd coincidence of timing Sierra shut down Dynamix on the same day GarageGames launched the Torque Game Engine (our first product; then branded the V12) into the web."

Mark Frohnmayer will be chatting live this Thursday, April 10th, at 3pm PST.   Get all those questions ready, because this is a once in a lifetime event!

For more information click here!

Swords will cut you wide open

Hey guys-

I was asked my the marketing department to make a first post here, and I generally like them and don't want them to cut me wide open with swords I'll talk about something.

So with the players in the game, we want nice looking characters, but you can see very VERY far. This means we need to implement Level of Detail on almost everything, mostly generated by hand. This means it's a huge pain in the butt. This more or less invisible to the end user because by the time it switches to a new level of detail the character is small or smaller on the screen, so we don't need as much detail as if it was up close. Here's some images that demonstrate the various levels of detail on the players. 1 is if the player is really close, and 4 if the player is minuscule on the screen:

So, with art, one of the most annoying parts about making a that is generally outdoors is the lighting. Normals, woohoo! Yeah, that's great if you have a few point lights. Outside, the sun washes everything out. So to tackle this approach we do a few different things with our character lighting. Here's some knowledge, illustrated by use of the special Legions Developer Team skin.

First the mesh is rendered with just geometry. From this geometry, we can apply a specular highlight to the model, as well as cast simple shadows, as well as some self-shadowing (ie arm casts shadow across chest, etc). Overall, it looks like a huge mass of clay but it's being lit properly.

From here, the next step is to take a normal map, which we've generated from a high poly model in 3D Studio Max, and apply it to this shape. This normal map can also read the light direction and properly light the small details within the normal map with specular lights and shadows. We also use a black and white specular mask to control how shiny parts of the texture are, and generally how they shine.  Now that lump of clay is looking like a lump of clay with some details. Check out those metallic man nips. Yeah!

From here we need to add some color data and generally surface texturing. We do this through the diffuse texture. We create a new texture that contains all this information, and this is applied with the previous normal map, specular, and shadow data and we have something that resembles a character in a video game:

So this is how the players are lit in Legions. Hopefully the marketing guys will get someone in here to talk about something more fun, but at least I can talk about art. In the meantime, I need to get back to work to make sure this thing doesn't get off the rails!

-Tim