Trick or Treat

[John DiCamillo]

An early Halloween handout: some work-in-progress pics of Magic 2.0

The main four-way view


Perspective view close-up


Material Editor (also good for skins!)


BMP/JPEG/PNG/TGA Texture Support


This new version of Magic is a testbed for the new DirectX 9 rendering engine I've been building. Having the modeling program use the real game engine will give a better sense of what the ships will look like when they are loaded into the game.

Moving to DirectX 9 has required a from-the-ground-up rewrite of the graphics engine, and the modeling program. DX9 just works differently than DX7 did. As a result, most of the actual modeling operations aren't implemented in Magic 2.0 yet. I've just been concentrating on the advanced material and UV editing features that I will need for the next release of Starshatter. I won't be releasing Magic 2.0 until sometime after the next release of the game is fully completed. However, I just got the shadow volumes working last night, and I wanted to share...

Hey you kids! Stay offa my lawn!

[Pheonix Starflare]

Veerrrryy nice, milo!

I must say I'm impressed that you're totally re-writing all the graphics, but it's obvious your work will pay off tremendously.
To me, the shadows cast by the arials on the 'nose' of the Spectre to be particularly cool.

Keep up the awesome work!
(and keep posting WIP pics, please?)

PS SOX WIN!!!!!!!!!!!!

[DamoclesX]

Holy chirst.. way to go milo... did I read that right in assuming now we can have glows spec and bumps all on the same surfaces?

what is emmisive, power, and brilliance?

This is awsome news... it looks like I"m gonna have to start getting the p7 ships ready, I used a lot of texture files.. so they need to be broken up and such.. but wow man.. you are -so- the man!!

[John DiCamillo]

*sigh* had a huge response to this, but the forum ate it.

Ambient, Diffuse, Specular, and Emissive values are floating point numbers that control the brightness of each of those components of the material. Setting any of these to 0 means that there is no contribution from that color to the final output. Specular=0 means the material is matte. Emissive=0 means the material has no glowing bits. Note that you can set these values to positive or negative values. You can create some interesting effects by using a negative diffuse value.

The Bump value controls the amplitude of the height map. Zero means no bumps at all. The bump map texture is interpreted as a monochromatic height map (red channel contains the height values). The D3DX library converts the bump map into a normal map at run time, using the bump value to control how high or low the bumps are.

The Power value controls how shiny the specular contribution will be. Values around 10 give you a rough metallic look like unpolished brass or steel. Values around 100 give you a very shiny substance like a billiard ball or polished glass. Power values less than 1 give you some rather weird effects.

The Brilliance factor is not currently used. It is analogous to the specular power, but for the diffuse color equation. I may add anisotropic lighting in the future, but it would require a special vertex shader instead of the fixed function pipeline. Not sure if it's worth it.

You can see some good examples of different material values on this web page: http://www.anim8or.com/manual/10_materials.html

[DamoclesX]

Awsome milo, I"m already drooling over what we can pull out with this....

Is that Emmisive goign to have that glow effect?
Second
Any chance on that enviro mapping and alpha, I know alpha is used a lot for stuff like support girders and the like when you want to save polys, and enviro is just cool:)

I guess enviro would have to be cheapened, its not like you can dynamically change the enviro map based on whats around you like new ships and stuff

So very cool, sooo veerrryy coool.

Must...stop...salivating.

oh one thing, is your shadow mapping going to need anything special done to the model? I know the HTL engine needs all the objects to be solid, so you couldnt like delete a face off a box that is hidden.

[Lord QDaan]

Milo: that's why I learned to type the big stuff in notepad first. [:D]

[TheDeadlyShoe]

That's pretty sweet. I really like that profile shot of the Spectre.

[DamoclesX]

agreed, it looks a lot more.... real.. I like it, and those shadows are too cool

hey milo, do you have a --very-- ruff eta about what time this could possibly be ready... not to hold you to it, I'm just wondering if its gonna be like 3-6 months, no idea how long it takes to re-write code

Only reason I"m asking is I have some people at hlp breathing down my neck for dilgar war ships and I could probably get the whole mod done in that time using the current features then move onto my other project full time using the new features.

[John DiCamillo]

Well, I started the re-write at the beginning of August. So far, the first four phases of the project plan have completed on schedule. The trickiest coding is already complete, but the heavy lifting is still to go.

The original codebase has always used a lot of 2D rendering that is all but impossible on DX9; everything needs to go through the 3D engine in order achieve parallel execution on the CPU and the video card. The net result is that every single menu screen (all 52 of them) needs to be redesigned and rewritten almost from scratch. Since I'm doing that anyways, I will also be supporting both fullscreen and windowed execution with a resizable window.

Anyway, to answer your question, the remainder of the plan calls for an internal milestone by the end of December, a beta by the end of January, and a gold master by the end of February. I'll keep you all posted if there are any significant changes to that plan.

[DamoclesX]

Milo, this is just an off the wall suggestion, but wouldnt it be best, considering the work you are doing, to push this into ss2? get some money and another product out? ITs going to look SO different and unless i'm worng your going to need to re-do all of your ships as well, I dont see how they would work in the old magic format, not to mention it would be a total waste of the awsome features you are adding not to implement them in your own engine on your own ships.

maby adding a few of those suggestions I sent alone with that plan file lol(ya I know years of work lol)

actually... on that topic.. since the people who WERE Suppose to be on my commercial project seem inable to do anything other then talk..btch.. and pretend they will work but dont.. if you want help with ships, new models, re-imaging re-texturing or stuff give me a shout... be more then happy to help you out.

I'm more based towards 3dmodels and textures then anything like 2ddesign and what not, the dilgar webpage is pretty much the max of what I have been able to put out so far with 2d interfaces, have not put a lot of work into it.

Since I know the timeline tho, i'm gonan hit this battlestar mod for starshatter, but include the bump maps and such so it can be ported to the new engine really easy!