What week is it again?

All the weeks are blurring together. At least six people have greeted me with 'you look like crap' instead of the traditional 'good morning'...thanks guys. I spent this week doing various odd jobs, as promised I painted the texture for the fence.

I painted a poster to help explain to the player why the world is populated by floating, shiny jam tarts. These were an idea I came up with way back in the level planning stage as a way to help guide the player and allowing us to get some more of the book into the game. This and the pick up is a reference to this poem: 

The Queen of Hearts

She made some tarts,

All on a summer's day;

The Knave of Hearts

He stole those tarts,
And took them clean away.

Hopefully on her way to the palace Alice will find all the missing tarts and be able to exonerate the Knave, saving him from a rather ridiculous and clearly bias trial.



The last few days of term were just small jobs, fixing assets, tweaking textures and correcting a couple of collision meshes.

The team got together to organise what was left to do in the level. Things like a menu system, controls. We decided how some of the cutscenes would work and discussed a way to make use of all the parts of the final garden. I suggested having a guard at the locked gate having broken and lost his key so now the player has a reason to complete the large fountain jumping puzzle and visit the other gardens.

"Can I interest you in a microtransaction?"

There was also an industry visit this week from Creativity Assembly about their summer internship which sounds like a dream offer but I've already set the summer aside for sorting out a proper portfolio and website. I did however download one of their mobile games to get a look at some of their work and long story short I developed a camaraderie with the Ninja who is now slowly draining my bank account with micro-transactions....and couldn't look more pleased about it if he tried.

There's also critical studies work to be done over the Easter, first off a essay about our career aspirations and progress this year which I'm not eager to get on with. I am not the greatest author the world has ever seen, so that should be fun. There's also a presentation, 3 minutes on anything we want, so I also have to locate something to talk about to an audience while using all the willpower I have in my body to not throw up.


Well lots of work still to do over Easter but first, sleep.



    

My Kingdom for a coder right now

Towards the end of the week I walked into class for my team mate to tell  me the level was broken but he said it with a smile so there was a good two minutes of awkward blinking confusion before I realised that the level was in fact broken. Not the 'there's problems here, here and here' broken but the 'This isn't opening correctly and even if it does open it crashes when we try to change anything'. Yeah, that kind of broken.

Luckily before we gave up and reverted to an older save file or more likely, all jumped in the river Soar it was discovered that it turned out to be mix up with level streaming and ignoring the 'fatal error' messages we get that we're currently pretending aren't there that got resolved but that doesn't make us problem free. Issues in the level are still springing up, mainly with the frame rate which has been an thorn in our side for quite some time now. We're getting 15-25 fps and lower at times like when you're standing in the woods.

Speaking of woods, tree time. I've been putting this one to the back of my asset list as long as I could manage but at some point I'm just going to have to suck it up and get it done. Tell the hedges I'm sorry for the things I said about them, at least they aren't trees...well they are trees but you caught my drift.

 So my tree from the list of native UK plant life I researched was a crab apple tree which not only grows very densely with lots of little leaves but also likes to bloom with bright pink or white blossoms before it grows it's apples. Basically I had no idea how to approach this. Trees can turn very high poly very quickly if you don't watch your modelling and it's a tree that naturally grows dense so my options to me seemed to be, number 1 which was lots of alphas, a whole bunch of them or number 2, which is to put more leaves and branches on the alpha. I tried method 2 but it looks really odd when you look up at the branches. So now there's option 3, which is try to find a balance between the two first options and hope for the best.





As I thought I would, I did have trouble getting the density I needed but a move annoying issue I had was that I can't get the blossoms to show up against the green of the leaves. I make the branches with a high ratio of flowers to leaves, I've tried the flowers in different shades of pink but the green always overpowers it.

I plan to leave it for now and return when I've gotten some of my other assets done because it's started to drive me a little bit mad.

I hate trees

Back in the Hedgerows I go

Ah those hedges again, they'd been so well behaved and out the way I was beginning to forget about them but time to pay them a visit again but for something more interesting this time at least.

Well first there were some changes to make. Since the gardens are pretty much finalised now it's easier to have the hedge walls as a solid mesh rather than all the separate modular pieces so a quick export from Unreal as a reference so the scaling would be right and a few tweaks in 3DS max, followed by the traditional needless crash for a menial task again the first job is quickly done. Then it was onto something more interesting.

Hedge shapes! These were actually a lot of fun to make and the shapes were based off the historical gardens from the British library pictures.

This was mainly all spline work, some of the more swirling patterns were extruded along a spline but with the slightly blocker shapes like the middle on I'd made flattened silhouettes of the shapes from the books and drew around them with a spline and extruded from it instead. While this meant an accurate shape it left a fair bit to do by hand to bring down the try count and clean up the topology.

Once all that was done I then just started playing with the symmetry modifier to see what interesting shapes I could get out of three basic starting pieces.

Mark also added a fence piece running along the outside which helps further separate the cared for gardens from the forest left to it's own devices. 

  

I should really stop modelling and do some texturing

This week I modeled the palace again, and some fences and a collectible jam tart...they'll get textured I promise.

In fact the tart is already textured. It doesn't look as delicious as I was aiming for but then again it's a collectible pick up so even if it did look good enough to eat Alice shouldn't be eating off the forest floor anyway. I tried to get sub surface scattering in the engine to make the jam look a little more transparent and make the material a bit more realistic. I did succeed but there was a side effect of it glowing purple which was just a bit hard to overlook.


Over with the others in the engine file a lot has gone on and things are looking good.

While I'm really missing working in the engine it's always nice to get a look at it after a little while and see everything that's changed and watch it slowly come together.

As I mentioned before I made a fence which I'm currently avoiding texturing as I hand painted some bark a couple days ago and my brain has yet to recover from my fools decision to be ridiculously detailed about it so just a model for now. Mark then told me he'd like to be able to set up areas of broken fence in places so I went in a pulled some parts out so he'd have a set of more versatile pieces.