Another technical stuff

Well I will be sincerely: like always in such a weeks I struggling with writing post for you. And it's not because we didn't done anything in this past week it's complete opposite. We done a lot of really cool stuff like:

• continue discussions and designing of remake,
• upgraded layers on levels,
• improved code for rendering,
• created nice system for building of externals libraries,
• ported project to vs2013 the way that vs2010 still is usable,
• some refactoring in core of game engine,
• removed some bugs from code,
• and a lot more small stuff.

I think that for project this was even better week than few previously ones but still writing this post is not easy task. 

Mostly because how to write about stuff that are not easy to explain to normal people ? I see this really well when I write about stuff I do in coding to Alejandro and he just answer me: I don't understand what you writing to me.

If artistic side of project is easy to show the technical one is the problematic. Like in all kind of works there are different kind of tasks:

• There are stuff we want to do for comfort of our work. 
• There are other which are preparation for some bigger stuff.
• There are this which we must to do.
• The last one are this which are just cool and we want to do them :) 

Difference is that even if there is big change it may end in hard to notice results. So we could of course show you version of game compiled in vs2010 and vs2013 (even the 64 bit version for 2013) but what is the point? They look the same.

The same with rendering stuff. We done better resources management and manual synchronization of GPU and CPU. This sound cool and have a lot of nice things to offer from technical point of view but at this point this is hard to notice in video (To be funnier at some point it could be noticeable in slower FPS but we already fixed that).

There was also building of external libraries :D this one is hard one. I spend more than 4 hours to find a way to compile visual studio project with dependencies using msbuild tasks. Then I spend another few hour  to figure out how to set pdb file name for bullet physics using cmake (without modifying original config file). All of that resulted in one script which I call and it build and redistribute projects for vs2010 and vs2013 in 32 and 64 bit version using original not modified source code of libraries. I'm personally really proud of final result :]

So as you see we can write really a lot about stuff we do even in weeks like that. But is this interesting for you? I'm not sure but well maybe I'm wrong.

Greg

Blueprint returns

Some time ago we were writing about blueprints. We shown then remade pharmacy rendered from blender. This wasn't for sure the best representation how game will look but it allow us to quickly shown you what level we want to create. This time we will explain why we use blueprints.

So let's first start from the interesting part:

If you compared original blueprint with what you see in this movie you will notice differences. Some of them are visible some other not so much. The one which is probably not so obvious is size. What you see here is 125% of original blueprint (Sadly I forgot to record version with original size but well you need to believe me).

We decided to resize it because previous size was dangerous for gameplay. AI and physics don't like cramped places and prefers more spacious environment. So we just increased size of building and here came with help blueprint construction. 

Blueprints like we mentioned previously are:

They are simple representation of world and they will stay like that for some time :)

When we starting redesigning of levels we had big problem with creating anything. We couldn't start at all. After talk with few friend who working on Level Design (LD) professionally I decided to try really naive approach. We created everything from boxes of different colors. 

Results were great. Quickly we forgot about all this technical aspect of modeling and jumped into designing levels. What for some were few green boxes for us were trees, bushes, blue boxes created walls and so on and so on. 

The best was speed with which new levels are created, speed of changes in design and the fact that finally we could start writing story of game. What will happen, how player can move around, what will be vibe of location, what kind of person living in given house.

In the end some of you may be afraid that because all this changes this game won't be LBA anymore. But I can assure you that we put really a lot of effort into having the heart of Little Big Adventure into it.

Greg

One Man Project ...

Last months bring a lot of changes to Little Big Adventure Remake. About some of them you know, other are still secret. But all of them giving hope on quicker finishing of project. 

This post bringing another good news. I'm glad to welcome in coffemonsters team:

Alejandro Machado

He is really skillful artist who will take into his hands 2D side of the project, designing of character and universe. If you don't believe me that he is so good check Concept Art in this post that he done especially for this occasion :) I seen already more of his works for project and I need to tell you that I'm really excited about what coming.

Thanks to Alejandro help I will be able to focus more on programming, modeling and generally more technical aspects of project.

So summarizing  Little Big Adventure Remake as one man project no longer exist :]

Greg