New Product: BAG_BP2: Modern Cityscapes

We're excited to announce the release a new pack for T3D: BAG_BP2: Modern Cityscapes.

Spoiler Alert: Its a sequel to BAG_BP1... actually its a prequel. In fact, this pack offers a whole city's worth of new shapes and the two compliment each other perfectly.

Not to confuse things, but you also get another shape pack FREE when you purchase BAG_BP2! Its called Roadpack1, but if you want to get technical, it's streets. So yeah, lot of shapes and assets (if you get my drift).



Conception
BAG_BP2 first came about as a project idea when our man across the pond, Andy aka Fenix, took a stab at following the style of construction laid out by Moe, lead artist on BAG_BP1. Andy wanted to apply the idea of carving dif-based (.map) buildings from photographs to larger scale structures, like skyscrapers. He went on and on about making the skyscrapers to be modular and stackable.
In the end, that's just what he did.



Production
The original buildings for bp1 were done in by Moe in Cartography Shop with the old Sickhead Games "Torque Pipeline" exporter. FTW! The other shapes, the ambient city stuff, was mostly built in Truespace with a few pieces done in other apps like milkshape3d, fragmotion, and UV mapping done in Ultimate Unwrap3D. For BP2, Andy used Hammer for the 11 modular skyscrapers. Fortunately, we were able to convert the original .map and .csm files to proper 3D shapes with great success. At first, the process was not easy to pin down, we had to try all manner of indie dev voodoo.

Conversion
Its a bit hazy now, but I will jot down the few notes I remember in case anyone NEEDS to know this! (or I need to Torque search it someday).

Import a .map file into Cartography Shop (4.1ish). There's some way to setup CS4 with .X export, along with .map export. Was that the "Torque Pipeline" exporter from sickhead unlocking those? "Import .map" might not be active by default either...Last time I tried to recreate this pipeline, I couldn't.

But it was something like (1) import a .map (from Hammer or Constructor) into CartShop4 and (2)export an .X file (microsoft dx format). (3) Open the .X in UltimateUnwrap3D and save as your preferred flavor of shape... Seemed really cool at the time!

Modernization
We wanted to take full advantage of T3D's power really show it off in this pack. Thanks to some great advice from Russell at Sickhead, we created a library of grungy, city decals which really sets the pack off. I can't even imagine the build without those 50+ great decals created by Andy. We also played with transparency and color speculars, and included a generated terrain with high quality diffuse and detail textures.





Optimization
This pack also led us to a very enjoyable first use of PerfHUD on a product. This began with a simple test... Does it work in T3D out of the box? Sure did! Next we hit the books and read much of the documentation along with Eric Preisz's great writeup on optimizing Marble Blast. The first obvious step was to "balance our loads" and get the textures safely on the GPU. DDS to the rescue. Then we began to analyze and compare graphic elements. This process led to the discovery of many unsavory mesh pile-ups, and improperly built faces originating from Truespace in the ambient shapes. Once identified as bottlenecks, these were easy to sort out. I'm not saying we mastered PerfHUD by any means, but it certainly helped us improve performance, drastically. On my box, it doubled the average framerate.



Another great aspect of building this pack was working with GG's QA dept. and Chris who runs the Add-On Store. We had pushed the rock as far as we could when we initially submitted BP2 to GG. Chris was kind enough to point out that "the rock", in fact had to be pushed further to yet a higher elevation. In other words, the pack wasn't approved, immediately. Not a big deal, or so it seemed, but it was at this point of putting the pack down, taking a big break from it (couple months), and then picking it pack up with a constructive feedback list, that we really started to do some of our best work. The take-away from this is: "Listen to your feedback, and run with it...(especially when its a publisher or your customers)". Thanks to the fact that GG was raising their standards with art assets, it forced us to do the same or fall by the wayside. Glad we listened.

Conclusion
Its funny how these projects can start so innocently and, become such behemoths, by the end. We found that keeping our scope narrow (avoiding feature creep) and just sticking with it months/years after the light at the end of the tunnel flickered and faded out, we were able to finally reach a successful end point.

It was great to watch our team come into maturity working on these packs, each contributing in our own way. We'd like to thank Chris Tauscher and Derek Bronson at GG, as well as Russell Fincher at Sickhead. Thanks for the advice and guidance, guys.

I hope this was somehow informative, if not in a technical way, then anecdotal.

That's it! Enjoy the pack... more pics here!

Jondo