Lots of things done,

First of sorry for the delay in updating the blog i have had a lot to do the last week.
The time since the last update i have been spending with Lina going through all the models we have made cleaning them in 3DSMax from leftover cylinders, correcting the pivots and position of the models and just giving them a rough look over for model or texture errors. We have then exported them as FBX files, imported them to our Unity project. Structured them after what they are and their materials, adding new materials if one model has several different. Setting so all the materials use the correct shaders.

After everything that we had was important i started making prefabs, a prefab in Unity is a neat thing. For example if i take a model of a crate i have imported and drag that into my scene i will have a crate and not much more. If i want the players to collide with this crate i have to add a collider to it. Now, if i have dragged several crates into my scene and i remember they need something else for example a script to be able to destroy them, i then have to go through all crates and add them to each single crate.
Instead i create one crate, attach a collision box, make all changes i want to it and then drag it to a prefab. Now instead of dragging the crate model into the scene i drag the prefab of the crate. And if i want to change anything on all crates i can just do the changes on one prefab and press an "Apply" button and all other prefabs of the same type will get the changes. Sweet :D

On the terrain i have imported and set up all the correct terrain textures, grass textures and tree painting models for our level with the correct shaders.


Altogether this is around 500 different files, materials, textures, 3D models and prefabs so it's been a lot of renaming, checking and catalogue structuring

I promised you a picture for this time and here it comes, it is the most recent take on the level design. It has gone through 4 iterations since the first one i posted a couple of weeks ago. The main things that have changed is that we will have no inside of the castle, we want to put that time into making the outside scene look better then to have essentially two levels that are not of as high quality as one.
The other changes has been shortening the map a little, this because the larger map we have the more time it will take to make every part of it look nice. As you can see on the picture there as certain key areas of the map but i don't want to reveal to much details, that you can experience when you come play the game at GGC.


See you next week /Viking

Level Design

Last week i have been developing the level more than the very early paint versions.
I went trough abunch of information with the rest of the group in regards of gravity, scale and animations in Unity and we ended up not mixing with the scale cause there were incidents when the gravity or animations went haywire. I have also started designing the special events that will happen troughout the level and i will go into those more specifically this week.
I will also design the exterior of the castle closely with Lina and then more on to designing the layout of the interior of the castle.
Anyway here is the mockup of the level, remember i am using placeholder art and textures for everything. It is just showing what is supposed to be where in roughly which sizes and so on.

Shaders.

More shaders. We discovered that Unity's builtin shaders do not cast or recieve shadows so we had to make something up that works ourselves.
As you can see in the picture unity's own transparent shader makes the blood recieve no shadow so when it is in a shadow it looks quite bad. Unity has a second shader group called transparent cutout and what it does is that it cuts all the pixels above a certain alpha out and renders them. There is no halftransparent pixels, either it is rendered or it is not. This gives a really sharp edge on everything and we also noticed weird delay when we were moving the camera around. As thou pixels from the previous frames were showing and it looked quite odd.
So i worked up a shader of our own that does exactly what we want, it does not render transparent pixels but it does render pixels with some transparency.

If you have any questions don't be afraid to comment.

Shaders.

Have been working with Unity's built in shaders recently and have had a couple of issues with how they work.
In Overkill we want the player to be able to walk behind buildings and then those buildings will turn halftransparent while they are obstructing the view of the avatar.

First problem came when we discovered that the specular (reflective glow) and transparency were both taken from the Alpha channel of a texture. In a specular texture you define what things on the texture will reflect light by making them more white, so a black part will not reflect any light at all. In transparency black means 100% transparency and white 0% transparency. So what happened when we walked behind a wood building with windows was that when the building were to go halftransparent it vanished complelty except the windows. ( since wood = no reflection = black = 100% transparency)

Second problem was that the shaders did not take into consideration what parts of the building were closer to the camera then other parts in it. So when rendering the house it showed us all the sides of all the parts in the model and that makes it look really weird. We dont want to see the wall inside the building facing us when its transparent, we just want to see the front of the model as transparent.

Everything might become clearer if you see this example on the knight model.
The feathers in the hat don't reflect any light and therefor they instantly vanish if we turn on a transparent shader.
The shoulders show the problem with considering on what depth the parts rendered.

It is now fixed after hard work, testing and research. First and foremost learning shaders scripting, Unity shaderlab and then getting it right.
End result is a shader that has a separate specular texture. Alpha channel on the main texture alpha and it also considers the depth when rendering.

Enjoy.