242 on 14/8/2007 at 07:58
News From the Team #7
The seventh of the weekly series of development progress reports:
Time flies very very fast, and already the Game Convention is looming on us. Like all developers, we are hard at work preparing for it.
Notable things:
Unlike E3, where we showed an action scene, the Game Convention will see a real STALKER demo. The events will occur on the Swamp level, with the classic STALKER gameplay, where we will show a small part of the Faction War simulation gameplay.
The level is very atmospheric (screens will be shown already this week). I think that STALKER fans will be happy.
Some of the main sweets you will get a taste of at the exhibition (we are, like, bragging a little):
- Dynamic Abmient Occlusion
- Depth of Field effect
- Volumetric lighting and effects
- Soft Particles
etc
- New weather cycle
- Inverse Kinematics
- Improved animation (attachment of 4 bones per point)
- Improved use of cover - shooting from the left, right, or top of cover
- New monster - swamp creature (a kind of bloodsucker)
- New PDA interface. The choice of assignments is now combined with the map.
- Fires burn only at evenings and nights now.
- Flares
- A bit of the Faction War gameplay
This is all I can tell you about right now. We will show more than this.
Regarding the patch 1.0004. I would like to remind you that 1.0004 is the patch with the current fixes, which is a bit late. The large update with freeplay and the new difficulty level is the 1.1, and will be released later. Considering the delay with acceptance of patches, I am seriously considering the idea of releasing 1.1 not as an official patch, but as a mod from developers. Possibly, this will also allow us to work with fans in real time on release of beta versions, their testing and fixing.
About 1.0004. Today we have recieved a reassuring letter from THQ QA:
We'll put this latest build into test this morning. We're pleased to report that the Agroprom crash is no longer occurring for us - thank you for the fix. We found gameplay to generally be stable and smooth on RC9.
If no new problems come up, the patch will be released already this week.
Anton
clearing on 14/8/2007 at 09:29
Interesting, what is a Dynamic Ambient Occlusion?
Trappin on 14/8/2007 at 23:25
Looking forward to the 1.00000004 patch :eww:
Banksie on 15/8/2007 at 01:24
Quote Posted by clearing
Interesting, what is a
Dynamic Ambient Occlusion?
My guess is that it should be when objects occlude the predominant source of ambient light. Most ambient lighting in games is a quick hack assuming one source and uniform accessability of that light to every surface in the frustrum. They then layer the direct point sources of light in and do the shadowing of those.over the top of the ambient lighting pass.
Obviously real life is more complicated than that and ambient light can be occluded from reaching everywhere. Presumably they must then be treating the ambient light source as a point source, generating a shadow map from it and then using that to weight the contribution the ambient lighting calculation then gives.
This then allows objects like people, crates etc to then block the ambient light and dim the whole room.
Thats my guess anyway.
clearing on 15/8/2007 at 15:05
Quote Posted by Banksie
This then allows objects like people, crates etc to then block the ambient light and dim the whole room.
Cool...
Phatose on 16/8/2007 at 05:02
If it's like typical ambient occlussion, they're tossing rays off of the surface in every direction, and only ones that hit the sky give ambient light.
242 on 21/8/2007 at 18:03
Russian patch 1.0004 is released.
GRRRR on 21/8/2007 at 19:44
Lotsa quest fixes woox.
Plus they fixed Bes being unhealable (Take medkit option missing)...too late for the one in my current game tho, shot him XD
D'Arcy on 21/8/2007 at 21:45
Bah, Bes is so dumb that most of the times he ends up dead inside a burning barrel in the Army Warehouses area.
Toxicfluff on 21/8/2007 at 22:07
Ah, good to know, especially the FPS increases. Bit of a double-edged sword for me though, as I've spliced a couple of mods (free play, sanex) together to have A-life running on a longer leash, drivable vehicles (which actually add a lot to the game I've found), sleep if you're not too hungry, a re-enabled assortment of zombies and monsters, recruitable NPCs who'll take simple orders and actually follow you from map to map etc, etc,
Splicing that lot back together with the fixed scripts that'll be bundled with 1.0004 will be a nightmare.
