Development Updates

[serene02]

Ah, bare brick walls, nice

J

[serene02]

The walls really make a difference

J

[Zippy]

@serene02 that is one fucking amazing friend you have there!!!!!

Yes @johnparker007 I am talking about you!!!!

[serene02]

Yeah, he’s lucky to know me for sure.   I have to check his bags when he leaves,  just in case he has stolen my cat!!

J

[serene02]

I imagine dirty verns has sexiest posters adorning the walls.  A women eating a banana or straddling a motor bike in a mini skirt

J

[johnparker007]

Glad you like 'em   Went with bare brick, as I had these decent textures - so while the wall is a perfectly flat plane, it looks more 3d - specular map, normal map, depth map.  Once I've done the occlusion mapping I might see about improving the ceiling to match...

[Zippy]

1 minute ago, serene02 said:

Yeah, he’s lucky to know me for sure.   I have to check his bags when he leaves,  just in case he has stolen my cat!!

J

With the way he is moving he will have implemented your cat into his simulator ffs

[Zippy]

1 minute ago, johnparker007 said:

Glad you like 'em   Went with bare brick, as I had these decent textures - so while the wall is a perfectly flat plane, it looks more 3d - specular map, normal map, depth map.  Once I've done the occlusion mapping I might see about improving the ceiling to match...

Your mind is swimming atm and you are going to come up with all sorts of other shite, mint JP, friggin mint lol

[johnparker007]

The real issue that my mind is swimming around: I've still not been able to figure out a way to do 'lighting'.  If the level doesn't change it's standard and easy - but for games like this where the user can make the level as they wish and place/move objects/walls anywhere, it's not possible with Unity to have baked lighting.  As the idea is usually that I the programmer 'bakes' all the lighting for the levels in advance, using the game engine.

So you end up with no shadows, a bright recesses and other issues... I've had a partial idea to try fake it, though it may end up coming out a bit shit and patchy - it's a real oversight for procedurally generated games in Unity engine... plenty of forum posts from programmers in the same boat.

As an example - unlit on the left half (everything is very 'flat'), baked lighting on the right half (lighting/shadows adding lots of depth):


Ah well - it won't be the end of the world, and maybe something can be figured out that won't look terrible and get part of the way there (blob shadows is my main idea at the mo)...

Edited May 11, 2021 by johnparker007

[Zippy]

3 hours ago, johnparker007 said:

The real issue that my mind is swimming around: I've still not been able to figure out a way to do 'lighting'.  If the level doesn't change it's standard and easy - but for games like this where the user can make the level as they wish and place/move objects/walls anywhere, it's not possible with Unity to have baked lighting.  As the idea is usually that I the programmer 'bakes' all the lighting for the levels in advance, using the game engine.

So you end up with no shadows, a bright recesses and other issues... I've had a partial idea to try fake it, though it may end up coming out a bit shit and patchy - it's a real oversight for procedurally generated games in Unity engine... plenty of forum posts from programmers in the same boat.

As an example - unlit on the left half (everything is very 'flat'), baked lighting on the right half (lighting/shadows adding lots of depth):


Ah well - it won't be the end of the world, and maybe something can be figured out that won't look terrible and get part of the way there (blob shadows is my main idea at the mo)...

I see what you mean but some might prefer that so options would definitely be a good thing and it won't be long before you figure it out, suppose that is also on the 'to do' list besides something is better than nothing and I suppose you'll be giving updates for bug fixes and improvements much further down the line.

Why is Mr Potato Head peaking through the window

Edited May 11, 2021 by Big J

[serene02]

Is pre-baked lighting a preferred solution compared to dynamic lighting? is it a resource saving way of lighting a scene?

J

[johnparker007]

Quote

 

Is pre-baked lighting a preferred solution compared to dynamic lighting? is it a resource saving way of lighting a scene?

J

 

Pre-baked lighting is really fast to render.  But it can't be baked at runtime (it's very computationally expensive for one thing) - in Unity at least it has to be baked in the Unity Editor (might take an hour for a single level) before you ship the game with its fixed levels.  Realtime lighting is basically ray tracing - available on the very newest graphics cards like nvidia 2080 gtx etc... but we need something that works on cheap graphics cards.

I think the lighting issue will get put off for now until after alpha as it's not essential to playability.  Like the occlusion mapping system I did, I'm probably going to have to make a completely custom lighting system for our user-creatable arcades (with the objective of running on cheap graphics cards).

Edited May 11, 2021 by johnparker007

[serene02]

Thanks for the reply mate.  Interesting stuff.   

So say I want environmental reflections on glass, is that more a reflection map?   Sorry mate, I'm not clued up on this stuff but would love have glass reflections as an option, in time of course .

Really appreciate all the work you are doing on this amazing project !

J

 

[johnparker007]

Ideally you'd want to see the other machines animated lights reflected in the glass - this is going to be expensive (free with RTX).

Realistically we're more looking at static cubemap on-the-fly - making a set of those in a grid across the arcade could then mean you see other machines reflected that are nearby, but they'd be static.

Other options are like GTA5 distance lights, where you have blurred colored particles, and if you have neon lights around the ceiling you can re-render a reflection of those too.  The colored particles could be tied to the lamps of the nearby machines, so it'd give an out-of-focus (but animated) effect.

Another option is to render a camera for each glass - with this there'd be some time-saving techniques - identifying which machine glasses will actually capture the glass of another machine, and only do those.

There's a lot of ways to do do the effect basically   Again, it'd be a low priority as not required for playability... though the 'camera per glass for machine glasses that will reflect another machine's lamps from the current camera position' is probably not too long to implement (but would need a decent graphics card).  It would be fully animated however, which is appealing  

Another option could be a shader to render second copy of any lamp... there's really a ton of ways to go about it...

Edited May 11, 2021 by johnparker007

[Ginge]

Love the brick walls only problem is there`s no door to get in on the bright side at least it will keep that @Big J out he`s well known for emptying machines .On a serious note you are one clever man @johnparker007 nice to see this project progressing and thank you for all the updates you must go through some  or the amount of hours you put in to this .

[Zippy]

30 minutes ago, Ginge said:

on the bright side at least it will keep that @Big J out he`s well known for emptying machines

You wouldn't be complaining if we were going halfs eh Egde

[johnparker007]

2 hours ago, Ginge said:

Love the brick walls only problem is there`s no door to get in on the bright side at least it will keep that @Big J out he`s well known for emptying machines .On a serious note you are one clever man @johnparker007 nice to see this project progressing and thank you for all the updates you must go through some  or the amount of hours you put in to this .

Haha yeah, it's a small arcade from which there is no escape... or is there - perhaps you can, erm, walk straight  through the walls at the moment   I use that 'feature' (not done wall colliders yet) in this next vid  

...

Update: Not done the code I was gonna do tonight, but done work on a better ceiling (plus made walls look a bit better from a distance) -vid here:
 

 

Edited May 11, 2021 by johnparker007

[Zippy]

@johnparker007 don't make jokes like that when I am holding a alcoholic beverage, things get spilt if I lmfao and I will have to end up billing you for dry cleaning costs

[johnparker007]

Quick and dirty experiment with realtime point light effects (as can't do baked light) - all very neon  

 

[slasher]

Nope. No covid screens. Totally unrealistic  

 

Seriously though, joking arise, it's looking great!

[Zippy]

Seriously Mr JP that is off the fucking scales, it even notes who did the layout when you approach it, jaw dropping skills is all I can say!!!!!!

I suppose you will want face masks next @slasher ffs.

Edited May 11, 2021 by Big J

[slasher]

11 hours ago, Big J said:

I suppose you will want face masks next @slasher ffs.

Only see through ones so the deaf (like me) can lip read

[Zippy]

2 hours ago, slasher said:

Only see through ones so the deaf (like me) can lip read

No point, too many people on this planet talk shite anyway.

[serene02]

Wow, this is awesome.

I can try to get cab dimensions for my Miami Dice, Monte Carlo BWB vid screens?   Think I asked but how will they work in the sim?   They seem to be emulated in mfme and mame now.   Would love to see one running in the sim.

J

[johnparker007]

7 hours ago, serene02 said:

Wow, this is awesome.

I can try to get cab dimensions for my Miami Dice, Monte Carlo BWB vid screens?   Think I asked but how will they work in the sim?   They seem to be emulated in mfme and mame now.   Would love to see one running in the sim.

J

Thanks man, those cabinet measurements will be very handy   Getting video + lamp based machines is a bit further down the line (probably after I've got 'pure' video machines running, like MAME video games).  But should be possible, I did get a pacman (with a 1 frame delay) running from an early test ages back.  

I've added you to the cabinet modelling section of my todo list.  Had a look on youtube, and from what I can see it doesn't look like too complex of a cab, some nice simple straight edges on it