June 15th
I've been busy getting screen shots off for Interplay marketing and making sure the trailer for SFC2 is ready soon. I will give you an update on myself later.
Today, we are going to highlight what one of our artists has been doing. Bradley Schenck sent me the following update.
-Josh
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Apart from some minor web site updates, I've spent most of the week in the
glamorous world of high-poly modeling: one of my favorite places.
In addition to the in-game art assets (ship models, planets, space
backdrops) there are a few parts of the game where we get to do some
pre-rendered scenes. Several months ago I did the single player campaign
images for the Mirak homeworld, Colonies, and Frontier, and it was loads of
fun. These are screens that appear in the campaign mission selection
screens and are meant to give the player a taste of what part of the galaxy
the mission's taking place in; near home, in settled territories, or way the
heck out there where the purple people eaters live.
The other thing we do with these images is to release them (eventually) on
the SFC web site as desktop wallpaper. So we do them in a fairly high
resolution - 1280 by 1024. Because we render them in that resolution, we
need to model and texture the objects in those images with a good deal more
detail than you see in the low-poly models that the game engine uses.
So early this week I finished up the ISC Homeworld picture, and I'm now
nearly done with the ISC Colonies image. For the homeworld screen, all the
modeling is new; Dave Potter started the model for a large building, and I
picked it up where he left off and had a chance to go a bit crazy with the
architecture and textures. That one's gone off to Paramount for their
approval.
For the colonies picture I needed to take the in-game Starbase model and
recreate it the way I thought it would have looked if it had, well, its fair
share of polygons and larger image maps. This is a little touchy since
people tend to look at me sideways if I make up a lot of detail that isn't
suggested by the original model - but on the other hand, there's not much
point in doing the same level of detail - just with thousands of extra
polygons!
So I do what I think is appropriate, and someone gently tells me to tone
down the Bradification, and eventually we have an image. We'll have one of
these soon, anyway.
I'm not sure how interesting that stuff is; what I can definitely tell you
is that it's a real joy to be able to pre-render some art. I get shadows,
the occasional reflection, transparency, tons of mapping options, and I get
to put my lights where I want 'em 8-). Oh, and did I mention polygons?
Someday something like this will be possible with realtime engines, but in
my book that day's still a long, long ways off.
Let's see; elsewhere in Artland I know that the guys are retrofitting the
old Star Empires' user interfaces - in SFC II you can command a captured
ship during a battle, and one side effect of that is that every user
interface needs to have control panels for every possible system and weapon.
That's a large chunk of work that I'll probably be joining in on soon. In
addition to the system panels there are other tweaks to the existing
interfaces. The Shipyard, Spacedock and Vessel Library screens, for
example, all need substantial rework. We sometimes curse the fact that we
have all of these user interface styles to deal with, but it undeniably adds
to the flavor of the game. All the same, we do tend to groan when we hear
about changes to existing interface panels. No matter what we do, we have
to do (now) eight times.
In the long run that's been slightly mitigated by the addition of the Common
Interface; that's a separate style that is used for game mechanics (loading
and saving, selecting a game) and other screens that lead up to your
becoming a Mirak, Gorn, or what have you. We won't need to create new Star
Empire versions of those screens in the future, but of course the common
interface itself has been a large task. I worked on that during April and
May, mostly, and now that the programmers are bringing it to life I go back
to make alterations from time to time.
To make a long story short (too late!) that's about it for now.
Brad
