Playing around with Crysis 3 assets

I've been browsing through Crysis 3 pak files and there seem to be quite a lot of stuff we can use in our level. Below is a reference image from google earth and a scene from Greg's map in the same place using some of C3 assets. Once we have proper buildings this should look pretty good.

Also, if there's time, I think it would be cool to have some details on the map which are associated with the campus like a rusty UoP sign or something.

 

Coding progress update

I've finally got a working top-down camera in place. It is controlled by mouse, spawns at the top of the player and follows terrain's elevation to stay at the constant height. It also provides limited zooming in/out functionality with a mouse scroll wheel. Overall works pretty well.

The main problem was the fact that CE3 provides multiple systems for the same tasks (and all of them equally undocumented) E.g. for the input there are high level Action Maps, which use XML to map input types to in game actions, CryInput module which provides device independent input abstraction, and low level hardware access classes. In Game.dll for some reason there are also two camera systems (PlayerView and CameraManager) which seem to do pretty much the same thing (it looks like they were in a process of moving from PlayerView to CameraManager which provides some more functionality). Anyway both of these classes seem to be designed for a player-following camera (1st of 3rd person) and so after a while I gave up trying to modify them for our needs.

What I ended up with is a completely new TopDownCamera class using only low level input and basic ViewParams struct to implement camera functionality. It may not have some of the fancy features of the higher level solutions but it seems enough for our current needs and still much better then flowgraphs. I also think this is the best approach for creating new stuff, i.e. building it from scratch rather than trying to modify existing code.

Outfitting

Progress could be better, but it's getting there:

Update 2:

Reservoir wall

Little modelling update. more to come, but I was quite pleased with this. i intend to have the tower on the left fallen into the first two segments of wall to create on entrance into the reservoir behind it, making a nice opening to the top right spawn area.

There is however an exporting error with the tower... something along the lines of degenerate faces... faces with 3 same coordinates so perhaps that's a question for Ewan. I've tried the clean-up and merge verts/edges functions so it is an odd one. although I've noticed that extruding in two directions (once inwards once outwards) on the same side of an object (but a different face) seems to have some odd effects with the faces I've divided with the interactive split tool.

HotW on GitHub and new CryEngine

I have created HotW public repository on GitHub which you can access here:

https://github.com/jholownia/HotW

This makes it easier for me to work from multiple machines and also if I screw up (which has happened) I can go back to an earlier working version. If you ever wonder all my changes in the code are preceded by // (jh) comments so they are easy to find. If you open Visual Studio solution there is also hotw filter were I place all additional classes. I should probably make a separate folder for that.

Also github offers free hosting of project pages so unless there is a better option we can use that for our website.

Finally the new version of CryEngine has just been released and I've almost painlessly migrated our level and code to it.

CryEngine 3.4.5 Download

Website Design

Jayden says he's better at the development than the design, and I've always enjoyed the design more than the development... so I thought I'd have a go at designing the website. Jayden's already emailed around the first prototype, and it's looking good. I feel like I'm betraying my design training by wanting gimmicky features (what with one of the first rules of design being - simple is better).

Crude design made in Paint:

I've also created a more complex design template in HTML, although it is difficult to take a printscreen on account of the relative dimensions. If anyone knows of a quick way to take a panaramic screen shot of a webpage - I'm all ears.

26/02/13 group meeting

We are piecing together all of our components together this session. Thus far we have a white boxed map, a basic UI into the engine and a custom camera in development, the character is yet to be animated but the basic model is made.

My (Greg's) first model of the Brunel labs seems to have corrupted, but progress shouldn't be a problem from here on. The plan is to make a base frame for each building to a reasonable quality, then to look at texturing the core pieces of the map as portfolio pieces and to bring to life the tutorial area of the map. Destroying the buildings will come after completing the map, as having a playable map that is less destroyed is better than partial rubble.

Links:
http://www.creativecrash.com
searching for fracture scripts: a way to decompose my constructed buildings into ruins without manually doing each.