Plan for Brett Fattori

NOTE: Please try to envision really cool graphics amongst all the placeholder artwork! ...gracias



It's been a little while since I last posted a .plan so I thought it was about time. This will be a quick journey through my latest additions to dRacer, with some nice pictures to boot! I spent a lot of time building a decal system that can apply decals to oddly shaped surfaces. The built in decaler would only create planar decals, so I had to try something different. The shadow code was my starting point, and from that spawned a very nice system. The decals come in two flavors: Spot decals show up as a single instance of a decal. They are meant for things like arrows on the road, grafitti, impact marks, and more. Linked decals are specifically designed for the skidmarks. The decaler will automatically attach decals together to form one larger decal.

The track, being a custom object, was inserted into the lighting system but wasn't affected by point or spot lights. The only light that contributed to the lighting on the road was the "sun". Recently I got an itch to add additional light processing to the track, so I implemented a really simple vertex lighting scheme. Using this method, I was able to add pretty colored lights to the track. I'm also able to attach lights to objects (lamp posts, buildings, etc) and have that add to the track, blending it into the scene better.




After seeing some imagery from another racing game I decided that the racing map needed some positional indicators. The colored dots were nice, but they didn't give that feedback necessary to know what position am I in?? So I added numbered and colored dots... I know, not very cool but hey -- little things excite me... I'm an excitable person.

This next image displays a couple of things. I added brakelights (not breaklights - Joe chastised me for this one ) and back-up lamps. This is just a nifty little immersion effect. The engine has all sorts of these things. Stuff that just makes it feel more like you're there. The second thing you'll see in the image is position flags. These billboards float over the cars and let you know that you suck... err, I mean... let you know what position you're in.


Finally, because this is being done in TGE we don't have those nifty, cool, all-the-rage shaders to give our cars that glossy look. Well, after some prodding and pulling I was able to wrench this back into the engine. We now have glossy cars... Now, you might say to yourself, "but TGE supports environment mapping out of the box you idiot!" To which I would respond, "To make this engine perform at top speeds and be as light as possible, Clark Fagot trimmed a lot of things from the rendering pipeline. He eliminated a lot of the excess things to speed up the display. All of this makes the engine lightweight, and also reduces state switching (I just found out about this today -- not state switching.. that the engine has been modified to minimize it!) So, without further adieu... a glossy placeholder.. err, car by Joe Maruschak.


So, that's what I've been doing with my time. Hope y'all enjoyed this little trip.. And if you didn't see it in Joe's last .plan, there is a new video (also in MPEG2 high-res for those who are tech weenies like me)

- Brett