8 replies to this topic

[COfenberg]

Description
Here's a status update of the PixelLight dungeon demo.

Changes:
- Mesh optimizations
- Performance improvements
- Added more scene decoration
- Tweaked torch light animation
- Added torch fire & smoke particle effect
- Added another SSAO algorithm for better performance
- The two doors within the wine cellar are now interactive
- Added a colourful line particle effect within a corridor
- The dungeon demo has now own options within "Dungeon.cfg"
- Fixed some problems with the GLSL shaders when using a NVIDIA graphics card
- Added cave with heavy demon model from Nick Zuccarello and plant models from "Irishlostboy"

Direct link to the current dungeon demo V1.2:
PixelLight dungeon demo (Windows)
PixelLight dungeon demo (Linux)

There are also new videos at PixelLight's YouTube channel:
PixelLight dungeon demo V1.2 - Cave
PixelLight dungeon demo V1.2 - Impressions

[tadastalalas]

Hi, I'm just a newbie here and I want to ask. Is this whole work is yours from 0?

[COfenberg]

The engine was written by Stefan Buschmann and me... we started in 2002 from 0.

The dungeon demo consists of 3d models created by Jens Dörholt and other free usable 3d models, textures and music/sound I found scattered over the internet (see dungeon demo readme for detailed credits). The composition etc. of the dungeon demo was, due to the lack of artists, created by me.

[rouncer]

Looks great, if only it was a real game already...
the skeleton dancing made me lol. :)

[tadastalalas]

It sure looks like 2011 year game. You are masters of creating games. I didn't thought that there is a forum where real experts communicate, I always thought that the teams who are creating games are closed themselves and not showing up to the world, just create best commercials games and earn a lot of money.

[COfenberg]

rouncer said:

Looks great, if only it was a real game already...

I hope that the day will come when people start using the PixelLight engine for games - this would be really cool. That's one reason why I keep pushing the technology.

rouncer said:

the skeleton dancing made me lol. :)

For me, a dungeon without a dancing skeleton is no dungeon at all. In general, that's the reason why skeleton animation was invented in the first place, wasn't it? Or did I miss something? ;)

[COfenberg]

tadastalalas said:

It sure looks like 2011 year game. You are masters of creating games. I didn't thought that there is a forum where real experts communicate, I always thought that the teams who are creating games are closed themselves and not showing up to the world, just create best commercials games and earn a lot of money.

Thanks for the motivating feedback. I thought that I just reached the year 2007 regarding to graphics technology.

As for me, I'am not really a professional, I'am just a student with a spare time eating hobby. I have no idea how many professional game developers are within these forums. (hands up, please *g*)

"Earn a lot of money" - as far as I heard, the games industry isn't the best paying industry, at least not in Germany. When looking at the extreme production costs due to constantly increasing required level of detail I can't understand how it's possible to make a living with it at all. But on the other hand, nowadays, game technology is also used for something called "serious games", for simulations and sometimes even in the movie industry.

[TheNut]

The dancing skeleton was a nice touch :) It looks like you put some effort into the environments, but I feel the cinematography does an injustice to your hard work. There's basically two ways to sell an engine. 1. Building games with it or 2. Machinima. I think if you focus on adding cinematography features to your engine such as transition effects, camera queues and angles, and throwing a simple story in there it would do wonders for your demos (think nVidia techo demos). These are pretty important features too, so it's not all just for marketing. This is just my humble suggestion because I've seen your previous work and it's nice, but lacks life :(

[COfenberg]

TheNut said:

The dancing skeleton was a nice touch :) It looks like you put some effort into the environments, but I feel the cinematography does an injustice to your hard work. There's basically two ways to sell an engine. 1. Building games with it or 2. Machinima. I think if you focus on adding cinematography features to your engine such as transition effects, camera queues and angles, and throwing a simple story in there it would do wonders for your demos (think nVidia techo demos). These are pretty important features too, so it's not all just for marketing. This is just my humble suggestion because I've seen your previous work and it's nice, but lacks life :(

Thanks for the feedback and ideas. The term Machinima is new to me but sounds really interesting. For the next PixelLight release I'll add support for Lua, JavaScript and Python (three to get the abstract interfaces right :) - looks like this is now the right thing to do to get some life into the scenes without the need to write everything in C++.