Mirrors Edge Low Poly
polycounter lvl 20
Bout time to make a thread of its own here.
Started showing some stuff off in the what are you working on thread earlier this month, finally just about got the first level wrapped up and gameplay is starting to take shape.
All built in unity, Most texture sizes are 128x128 with none exceeding 256x256 (except for lightmaps, still working on getting those to look nice at a reasonable size, rite now they all sit around 512-1024)
Once again, much thanks to Zwebbie for his awesome character model.
Next big step is to take care of the background buildings, and get some better building exterior textures in there
Started showing some stuff off in the what are you working on thread earlier this month, finally just about got the first level wrapped up and gameplay is starting to take shape.
All built in unity, Most texture sizes are 128x128 with none exceeding 256x256 (except for lightmaps, still working on getting those to look nice at a reasonable size, rite now they all sit around 512-1024)
Once again, much thanks to Zwebbie for his awesome character model.
Next big step is to take care of the background buildings, and get some better building exterior textures in there
Replies
Are going to emulate the gameplay?, just dont emulate the combat if you do.
Rite now the gameplay is focused on simple multiplayer time trials and vs. mode intel grabbing, so i havnt really even thought about combat.
I'm no programmer tho, so this is a learning process, the ease of unity definitely helps. So far i've got quite a few features working
One thing I would say is that the environment is not exactly low poly. You appear to have fully modelled railings and chimneys and so on.
Maybe it would be best, now that you are using an engine, to set yourself a tris limit for the viewport and stick to it. Try and imagine what platform the game will run on and look into the specs you can get away with. Unity is very friendly in this respect and has some features for telling you when there are too many tris in the scene, what textures will look to pixelated and so on.
I should really get around to finishing up the Celeste texture and throw that your way so you have a runner to evade the cops.
[edit]Did some touchup and mesh tweaking. Calling it done for now. Sorry bout the UVs, they're a bit sloppy.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/778345/me-celeste.zip
Hawken: You're absolutely rite about the railings and pipes, those can definitely be toned down, i wasnt thinking too clearly just how much i'd be reusing those particular props. In the end it'l just be a standalone release for pc/mac but i want to stick with handheld specs for portfolio sake. I thought bloom was for pro only? that'd be sick if i could get that in there
Lotekk, Looks awesome! thanks a lot.
When you say the panel divisions look too dark, do you mean the ones for the facade of the actual buildings or the ones on the rooftop buildings? or both?
Edit:
Some textures and props
Before I forget: love the prop work.
Lotekk: i'm gonna try playing around with the darks/lights a bit tomorrow see if i can get it a bit more uniform, had to take a break from it today so i could rig your model and get on some animations
I might have missed it in the previous posts - what did you render the color bleeding bounces with? Looking so great in that 4th screenshot!
(flat plane without shading gets one pixel)
and overlapping
but thats a lot of hard work
you could also make a lightmap tileset and fake the lighting with smart mapping
i would consider writing a tool, that scales the lightmap sections given the frequency appearing on it
(like change from onte to another pixel saved and added to the whole, the whole finished vareable is the index for the amount of frequency in the section, if its 0, it gets 0 space (1 dot) otherwise you scale down the rest procentural of the field with the highest frequency (which is actual size) and then pack the uvmap again, so you have frequency aware lightmapping
Cholden: Thanks a lot for the feedback. I was noticing that too especially on the green and yellow banners, i'm gonna have to work that a bit. It just wasnt popping on the somewhat light colored background of the banner.
Arrangemonk: Thanks for the ideas, a bit of that flew over my head, but then again i've only been awake for about 30 minutes so i'l get back to that heheheh
One thing jumped at me though... and I understand why you did it... but... I might rethink it.
I'd cap the bigger cylinders there, the smaller ones won't ever be seen, but if the camera is going to be seeing the bottoms of the biggers ones then... I'd cap it.
The only other thing that really jumped out at me was the giant red tarp things... (also seen in that picture) the resolution of that texture for how big it is just doesn't cut it IMO.
The whole scene is around 20k with players and accesories, but most of the time the onscreen count is around 2k
LlamaJuice:
Yeah i noticed that after i took the shots. That was one of the first props i did and i still wasnt sure how i was going to be handling the camera angle so that will be touched up in the coming days. As for the tarp, if i have time i'l redo that at a higher resolution, Thanks for the crits
Finally got around to finishing up the weights on LoTekK's awesome model. And today i threw together the messenger bag wich will be used for one of the game modes
Trying to get most of the essential background stuff wrapped up by wednesday so i can call this quits for a bit while i work on some other pieces for my portfolio
Uh, no pun intended, honest.
As there's already been a lot of great crits I won't bother repeating those but I hope you get round to the skydome for it next so the next set of shots have a background!
Carlo_C :
Yep, got most of the background blocked in, expect an update soon as soon i get some other things wrapped up
Any chance for a gameplay prototype?
StJoris: Thanks man, gameplay is very basic rite now, so it may be a couple months before i release something that i'd want others to play, but we'l get there eventually!
Thanks again to Zwebbie & LoTekK for the great player models, couldn't do it with out you guys!
When you say 2000, is that 2000 before or after backface culling, ie 2000 on screen or 2000 rendered.
What's interesting, is with these polycounts (20000 per level and 2000 per frame) my Flash 3D engine could handle this level
What are the poly counts per character?
At this point its gone a bit beyond 2000, i cant really say off the top of my head what it's at, but i'd wager it to run a bit slower on a flash engine.
I believe both players sit just under 500 tris
No doubt - Flash isn't even close to the speed of Unity, because it's 100% software (and basically, isn't designed to do 3D), I was actually curious though, because your poly counts are closer to what's achievable in my 3D engine - which has DS/N64 capabilities.
I was wondering why you were aiming for such a low poly count though, as it seems unity is capable of pushing far more polygons. For the challenge/stylistic choice? Or to make sure it ran fast on any machine?
From the Unity demos I've tried so far, the performance is strange. The Unity team's island demo runs brilliantly, as do the other first party demos, but some of the other 3rd party demos I've tried run ridiculously slow on my laptop. I'm not sure whether it's some horrendously bad programming, or possibly using shaders that are beyond the capabilities of my GPU.
Either way I'm interested to see your game in action
rumblesushi, this all started out just to see if i could translate a piece of mirrors edge concept art to hand held specs, this was the result:
I was having a lot of fun keeping it low, so i just kinda kept the same theme when i moved on to the outdoor environment
[ame="
ikuru, someone here had pointed that one out to me shortly after i started working on this, its not the same tho, mines just a fan made prototype kinda deal. Mine's a bit more free roaming instead of just a side scroller
I'd love to see the results, I stumbled onto this by accident and made an account just for this thread!
Looks great!
I'm currently working on a similar-ish game idea, however I'm not an artist so I'd love to get my hands on those pre-baked textures if they're not in use!
It's an HTML5 webgl/javascript game using 2D physics (Box2D) rendered in 3D:
HelloWorld playable level here:
http://onedayitwillmake.com/ChuClone/dev
Let me know if that's an option - or if there's anyone interested in collaborating on this project send me a PM.
PS: Sorry for the slight spam of a first post!