Happy 4th!
for those of us in the U.S.A. ;)

[img]http://i.imgur.com/asCgjNA.png[/img]

Hehe... Trying to get the Particle FX to work with Phisics made me think back to my 1st try at making a Water Fountain that has a ball at the top that spins as the water hits it. and it sorta spins around. ;)

[img]http://i.imgur.com/S2xpbva.png[/img]
video: http://youtu.be/-2pSMWacsv8

Fun times. :|
No.. not Really! :/

Wonderful! Amazing! Stupendous!!

ok, I admit I kinda like it a little.........

*Hooves of applause*

MWM Nice touch. And you got a thumbs up from my 4-year old. 238 years later and we are still kicking, I bet the founding fathers would like it too. Great job guys!

Not only did the fountains lighting worked on the statue in the fountain, The fireworks also lent a hand.
Awesome work.

CrownArts wrote:

... After watching videos on the capabilities of the new engine, I was expecting a bit more that department. ...

Allot of people will say that, but this wasn't geared to show off the Unreal 4 engine. I like to think of this as 2 or 3 Devs that got together and said to themselves.. We Want to try and get better with making Cut scenes in Matinee, and we cant take more than 4 days on it. AND BAM!!! This is what we got! ;D

So take a chill pill. If it wasnt for peoples expectations (like you noted), we might see MORE DEV Behind The Scenes! >:(

This progress is making me proud.

I suppose this is me being picky. I have higher expectation for this group and this game to get to gitty about this video. There's been other videos that gave me a better sense of joy. I'm not a game designer, so I can't truly understand. Having said that there still is a level of detail and quality that excites me. I never bashed the video, I just stated I was all that impressed, which I wasn't. I suppose my opinion isn't valuable. I love visuals and updates, it's why I'm here. Next time if I don't like it I won't say anything at all.

Well in that case if you want someone to pick on I'll continue. I just didn't want to seem like I was being a pain and not grateful for what is being attempted.

CrownArts wrote:

I suppose this is me being picky. I have higher expectation for this group and this game to get to gitty about this video. There's been other videos that gave me a better sense of joy. I'm not a game designer, so I can't truly understand. Having said that there still is a level of detail and quality that excites me. I never bashed the video, I just stated I was all that impressed, which I wasn't. I suppose my opinion isn't valuable. I love visuals and updates, it's why I'm here. Next time if I don't like it I won't say anything at all.

If you want to see the real progress, you'd be disappointed. For example, our player model right now has big gaps between the segments because they're part of the polish. We don't have finished animations in the testing environment, despite it being more advanced, again, because they're part of the polish.

What people expect to show off progress is actually the least part of the work. The fireworks there are a prime example. They were odd looking crosshairs until 20 minutes before we shot the footage for them. Why? Because to set up and evaluate we did not need finished looking assets. We got the system running, then in a last minute push flipped them from the crosses to the finished.

Here, I'll show you.

Like I said I'm no designer, far from it. The closest I've came was concepts. While that may be mountains of writing lore, and theory of HOW I THINK it will work, what you all are doing is truly amazing. You all decided to do something and put it to action. For the most part I'm a person of detail, at least with my work. I'm excited about the possibility Titan, and thus want to see the best possible. I understand it's a work in progress and there are so many fundamental aspects of this that out way the visuals. I understand what was being display, I guess it wasn't pretty enough for me. I can be a fancy like that sometime.....don't mark me with the Red "A" just yet.

When I was younger my cousin and I worked for months with RPG maker. It was simple yet that took a lot of work, and it doesn't compare to what you all are doing.....So i get it.

Just to give folks some perspective on what was, in fact, actually involved. None of this is "pity us" or "look how awesome we are", just trying to give the folks who wanted a bit more perspective a chance to see some of it.

[list]
[*]Approximately 2 weeks, including one weekend (remember, most of us work day jobs, and are lucky to *maybe* get four hours in on a weeknight). So roughly equivalent to one long-ish "normal work week", *at most*, per person.
[*]Scratch that weekend, because it was more or less entirely eaten by a nasty engine bug where things that were built correctly did not work, for no externally apparent reason, nor did they show any error indications. This only became clear as I rebuilt a simplified system from scratch to post to the support site, and found that I could not replicate the problem in a fresh system (mind you, same editor loading the original system, it was still broken).
[*]To the best of my knowledge, prior to this only two people on the team had ever worked with the UE4 particle system *at all*, and one other had worked on particle systems in a more general sense. Neither of those two people had any extensive experience; most of it consisted of "well, I know X does not actually work for doing Y".
[*]Did you know that aerial shells all exit the mortar at approximately 225mph, regardless of size? I certainly didn't, until a week ago, and I've had a passing interest in pyrotechnics since before "the web" existed (I was one of four folks who maintained a copy of the rec.pyrotechnics FAQ, for those have have a sufficiently powerful way-back machine).
[*]Warcabbit was only partially right; some of the effects were timed to go off at the apex. Others, however, are actually *sensing* the apex of the arc, and will do so correctly for any arc that goes upward before dropping.
[*]The logic driving the placed effects is split into a standard object-oriented hierarchy internally, to permit reuse: there is a basic "fireworks" parent, with a child for all ballistic-arc fireworks (the only sort we implemented for this video), and *that* has a child for aerial burst shells that takes care of firing off the burst particles.
[*]The ballistic arc setup is written to be reusable outside just fireworks. If it in fact must come down, once it goes up? We've got code for that now.
[*]Gravity works!
[*]Actually, for various technical reasons, what really happens is that things start off with physics simulation disabled, have it turned on at the instant that they're launched, and gravity is applied directly (they have 'apply global gravity' disabled).
[*]Oh, and to get the timing and apex height right, they also mimic aerodynamic drag. Yes, really.
[*]We couldn't find a way to really show it off properly, but at one point while working with the system I tweaked something wrong, and found myself with somewhere between seven and fifteen *thousand* particles on my screen... and it did not cause my video card or my CPU to go into fits. We avoided using the GPU particle system (which can go up to the several *hundred* thousand range) because we need more complex particle behavior than it can give you. To give a sense of perspective, setting the particle count to two hundred on a certain game that produces shell casings as a power side effect -- the most that game can handle -- is enough to leave you wading in them up to your ankles. Seven thousand is enough to look like a confetti factory exploded in the middle of a hurricane.
[*]In fact, I wasn't the only one this happened to. One of the other artists with a fairly low-end rig managed the same thing, and it didn't melt his down either.
[*]The reason that we could hand it all off to one guy to place and organize is that the assets were built to be "point and shoot" -- you drag it from the asset browser onto the level, then tweak a few settings that control what specific behavior you want. Assuming that you haven't made a copy with that specific behavior already selected.
[*]When we say 'there were sounds', we actually mean at least five distinctive mortar launch sounds, six to ten aerial burst explosions, and a handful of other sound effects, *all* of them tied to the rest of the system so that they are correctly synchronized, internally. And can overlap each other where appropriate (one mortar firing does not prevent using that sound for another mortar firing a half second later, something that actually happens in a lot of older engines due to how the audio pipeline is typically set up).
[*]The demos you've seen of UE4 are generally constructed over a period of several months to a year by full teams of experienced professionals paid to work on them more or less full time. They also generally have the entirety of a corporate asset library available to work with. Sure, we have access to the things that ship with UE4, but part of the point of this exercise was to see exactly what we could or could not do *without* relying on external / pre-built assets, so that we can usefully evaluate "how much will it cost to buy this, compared to making it in-house?" The first number is easy to come up with, the second not nearly so much.
[*]The NVIDIA demos you probably saw with this last round of game conventions? Those aren't even in the engine proper yet; they're running a heavily customized, internally-extended variant of UE4 specifically for building those demos. I really, really want to get my hands on the revised soft-body and liquid physics stuff. We have... uses... for such things.
[*]The physics are sufficiently accurate that if a character was flying over one of these as it launched, and it hit them (at least if it hit them in a way that didn't deflect upward) it would immediately go off.
[*]The 'star' particles would also then bounce off.
[*]No, we didn't bother to make them Congreve rockets. We did consider it, but ran out of time. Another couple of days at most.
[/list]

DeathSheepFromHell wrote:

(Just pretend I quoted a huge post for no particular good reason.)

Q.E.D.

Posted 'cause I wanna look smart.

/docemmettbrown.jpg

P.S.

Quote:

... to look like a confetti factory exploded in the middle of a hurricane.

I smell Hurricane Atlas reenactment.

I had been wondering where this weeks update was, since mostly you'd been having them around mid-week.

This was worth the wait.

And it didn't scare the cat as much as the ones going off locally did. ^_^

Shadow Elusive wrote:

I'm guessing you've watched videos on their particle system and wondered why the fireworks look blocky, instead of each spark beautifully flying off. I'm told the original is like that, we can only surmise video compression as the culprit. I'm sure we'll figure out a way to export without this sooner or later.

Video compression is definitely one factor; when we put up the internal version for first review, done with a lower quality world render *and* a higher compression ratio, it was *bad* about artifacting. As in "looked like an out-of-sync TV signal" bad, at least for those of us old enough to remember what those look like... oh, and for the vast majority of folks who haven't worked with video compression: very small, extremely bright, fast-moving, intensely colored stuff moving against a nearly-but-not-really black background is one of the "you're kidding, right?" cases. My video camera has an entire mode dedicated just to fireworks so that it can get anything at all out of them.

As for video not being the best way to show a bunch of intangibles... unfortunately, all too true. Also part of why I posted the list I did. Of course, I forgot to mention one additional bit: the things we were aiming for were well above what we achieved. Not "what we expected", mind, just "what we aimed for". Things that didn't make it into the video due to complications or time limits include stuff like smoke trails, lingering smoke, true lighting effects (as in the lingering smoke being lit by the particles), color accuracy against standard pyrotechnic colorants in actual use (plus a handful of deliberately impossible ones), several additional types of firework that are less commonly seen, audio that would in fact have scared the cat, some particle systems running at "human scale", at least one thing I'm not going to spill the beans on, and... okay, let's just say that one of the ways to hit a high goal is to aim even higher.

I honestly don't even know what it would look like once we find out what will actually be available in the "fire and smoke" goodies (the stuff you've probably seen as the 'dragonfire' demo). But I'd like to find out. You've seen some of the other 'evolution over time' videos, consider that this was pretty much our first non-trivial attempt with particles. I look forward to doing some sort of video demo six months down the road of whatever particles we're working on then and saying "Wow, that first one was just... yeah. Wow." History so far actually indicates there's a pretty good chance of that.

I thought it was a cool and cute video showing your respect for 4th of July but in the meantime showing us a little something

I think those people that werent that impressed with the video might want to see something along these lines...
[img]http://i.imgur.com/XZo4oQb.png[/img]
...even though it doesnt have much to do with the Lore/Mechanics/Programming/... or a number of different things required to make a whole mmo game. ;)

Oh well. :)

I cant wait for this game, really I cant. We need a new place to call home, and Titan City looks like the only place for us now. The game is coming together, and it looks beautiful. I cant thank you enough for your hard work and dedication. It means so much to me and all of the community.

Same here, I said out loud, "...What is this?..." The skinless lighthouse, plain open water that would be the default landscape in some editor, etc. And of course after reading more, I realized how important this update is. Displaying actual mechanics that you guys made is really great imo. This is no where the same thing as designing/rendering an animation clip--so it can't be critiqued as one. Also, upon reviewing the video several times, watching the glares in the phoenix statue, the detail in the clouds, night/day cycle, it helps me imagine my character in the world. As simple as the graphics/physics were, they actually look amazing, and has added to my excitement/anticipation once again. Thanks :D