War. What is it good for?

rubicon — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 13:19:06 +0000

Unnamed war game

In our case, a big publishing deal and a shitload of happy fans. Well, hopefully one day…

It’s been a while since I posted anything, so here’s a quick screenie of the turn-based strategy game we’re currently trying to develop with internal funding. If we can ever get that upgraded to “adequately funded”, then we have big hopes for our little war game. Target platforms are initially iPad and PC with others to follow.

When we decide on a name and grab the URL, I’ll start maintaining a blog/development diary and try to post regular progress reports.

How much are the green fees ?

rubicon — Sat, 01 May 2010 12:58:34 +0000

Grass n Weeds

More progress! Some sample weeds have arrived and everything has moved on another notch generally. I’ve almost finished with the grass now, barring stuff like adding real wind turbulence instead of some dodgy sine wave motion. Must get some trees in soon too – I need to do something to drop the frame rate below 150 after all…

Mowtivation

rubicon — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 10:26:41 +0000

Grass

Made some progess. We now have variable density (for paths, areas under trees/weeds/etc.) and also the ability to paint on it. Also, the LOD management is finally working well – there is a LOD break right through the middle of the pic; bet you can’t spot it ?

Grass me up? Well, okay then…

rubicon — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 12:07:40 +0000

Grass

Early days, but here’s a quick screenie of a new grass rendering system we’re incorporating into our Raz0r engine. When complete, entire fields of high definition grass/corn/etc. can be rendered at useably fast frame rates even on DX9 era hardware. More to come later as this project progresses – I just wanted to put something out there at this stage…

Deeply Dippy

rubicon — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 11:10:43 +0000

Deep Parallax Occlusion

As a bank holiday time filler, I’ve just added “Deep Parallax Occlusion Mapping” to our Raz0r engine. Given it’s multi-pass, cross-platform nature, this was quite an effort and I’m pretty pleased with myself!

This AAA technique throws mud in the eye of traditional, low rent bump/normal mapping and the picture speaks for itself – the walls and floor are flat polygons lit by a spotlight.

Push it real good…

rubicon — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 13:04:14 +0000

Push It!

Our brand new self funded title “Push It!” is almost ready to go live on the Antix AGP player system for popular cellphones and other embedded devices. “Push It!” is our take on the classic Sokoban gameplay, with a few new twists of our own. A dedicated page will be forthcoming…

Who’s for drinks?

rubicon — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 21:20:22 +0000

Cocktail

We’ve (well, I’ve) been working on a new self-funded development for a couple of days now, and the first pass of some graphics have arrived. Very early days yet, but I thought I’d post this for posterity and comparison with how the game finally ends up.

It’s a time management game where you play the part of a harried bar tender trying to please a never ending parade of ever more demanding customers.

Raz0r update: PSSM

rubicon — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 17:04:26 +0000

Single Pass PSSM

Raz0r, our internal games engine, has had directional light shadows for a long time, but the shadowmapping implementation was far from cutting edge. This has now been addressed with the addition of a Parallel-Split Shadow Mapping technology that makes directional light shadows appear pin sharp, even when used in massive worlds.

The attached pic is obviously a test scene that’s not trying to push the envelope in terms of visuals, but it does display a large outdoor environment with plenty of instancing and a nice crisp shadow on the ground wherever you look.

The method runs in a single pass (both when generating and later when reading back), storing 4 levels of splitting into the R,G,B and A channels of a standard texture at full resolution. The whole effect runs well on the DirectX 9 pipe, supporting down to shader model 2 which is our minimum spec.

SSAO Tutorial Added

rubicon — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:21:50 +0000

It’s quick and dirty, but I’ve finally posted a first draft of my tutorial for performing screen space ambient occlusion using directx 9

Baddabing

rubicon — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 09:21:25 +0000

Our new look site just went live. Please bear with us as the entire site is still under construction and a lot of the content is either placeholder or missing completely. I’ll be addressing that over the next couple of days.