The 3DGS Nerd

Progress

I just installed Windows Live Writer again, as it technically “encourages” me to write more often. It’s just simpler to open a program and start blogging than going to the website every time, wait for the slow AJAX interface to load… blah. ANYWAY. As my first post back from the grave (and, Yes, I know I’m saying this already for the 4th time) I would like to get you all up to date with Portico.

Let’s start with the voice for the yet-unnamed-AI. I have now a definitive WIP voice.
The voice actually should have been female, but my voice actor vanished, so I have to do all the speaking for now. Here’s a little excerpt:

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As I said in the forums, I had to revamp the entire first level. It turns out to be a bit of a kick into the right direction as the level right now looks better and runs and compiles faster than the first version. Also I learned how to make models in A6 better merge into the environment (at least static models):

Invisible blocks that generate a shadow. It’s an old trick which I never actually ever used, because I never thought that some simple shadows can make models look so much better than the dynamic “cutout” shadows. But it indeed is effective!

Also there are lot’s of different textures (even though you can’t see much of them in the current screenshots) and then even of the same texture different variations and variations in size (from 32×32 up to 512×512) so it is possible to always apply the right texture for the right level of detail in order to get max. FPS.

Here’s a little excerpt from the textures folder for “Chamber 00”:

Last but not least, there is also a lot of code involved and also a lot of shaders. Even though I don’t like shaders like most people know, but sometimes you can avoid it. Nevertheless, knowing that I am not the best friend of shaders and only have a crappy video card, people with older PC’s can be sure that I am doing a lot to make it possible to play Portico even without a top-notch-high-end PC Gaming Rig.

Over the time I will make more posts about Portico, eventually even dedicating posts to the separate systems themselves so you get to know more what is going on behind the curtains of my mysteries.

Oh, and yes. The portals work.

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