Star Wars: The New Era - Developer Diary

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TNE Dev Diary - 1 - Ammunition

By Lindsey
Published: June 25, 2008
Updated: June 25, 2008

The first video dev diary, about ammunition pickups, including the design process, ingame shots and early concepts. Narrated by Jean, team mapper and Zaswed, team render artist/modeler.

To watch in HD at 720p, click here: http://www.vimeo.com/1226696

TNE Dev Diary - 1 - Ammunition from Jean Dellac on Vimeo.

View Comments (3)

Phil999 - September 21, 2008
yes, it looks promising. Would like to join and help, but I'm not qualified yet.

Aero - June 27, 2008
Excellent work.

Brisk - June 25, 2008
Good stuff. Looks really good ingame. Looking forward to other videos.

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Creating a 3D scope

By Millz
Published: March 17, 2008
Updated: March 17, 2008

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Hey folks, I'm Emiel Regis - The New Era's coder. Although there are many things I work on, I'd like to share my experience with dynamic scope system I finally got to work lately.

Dynamic scope means that there is a texture in appropriate place in the viewmodel (the scope of course) which is a render target. What does that mean? The current view of the character is drawn dynamically into the scope, which, combined with ironsights, gives a very realistic feel for zooming with scope-equipped weapons. Instead of just drawing a full-screen zoomed overlay, you see a realistically zoomed image appearing on the three-dimensional scope.

Question arises - how to do it? I started with MirrorView article on developer.valvesoftware.com. Theoretically, the code there would work for scopes with only little modifications. The reality proved otherwise - after many hours of coding, changing the render target texture (which needs to be compiled with an external tool) and cursing over, it became apparent that the method lacks a certain detail - initilization of the very render targets. Without this, a purple checkboard or just a plain black texture would appear on the scope. After searching the MP SDK which TNE is built on I was quite puzzled: There wasn't any reference for render targets initilization in the code - but it must be done somewhere, otherwise things like water reflections would not work, while they did.

At this point I started asking fellow coders from hlcoders mailing list. It was not until I joined their IRC channel and talked with guy named omega, who happened to have working render targets in his mod and willing to share - huzzay I thought 8-)

After another few hours of work and cursing, the thing actually started to work! Here are a few screens of dynamic scope on the A-280:

Looks cool, doesn't it? The obvious disadvantage of this method over a simple overlay is that all pixels in the view need to be drawn twice - however, with current optimizations of Source Engine and moreover multi-threaded Orange Box code, which is out there and waiting to be merged with existing TNE codebase, the problem does not seem so acute anymore and peformance decreases only slightly.

View Comments (6)

grim_mind - May 16, 2008
"Looks nice.. however.. why does the edge of the scope look like aluminum foil xD"

'cause it was just a "prototype" i guess.. anyway, nicely done..
I just hope that the method you're going to use in TNE is even better...

MindHunter - March 18, 2008
Looks awesome. Can't wait for trying it in the real game.

Darth.Hunter - March 18, 2008
thanks, but unfortunately, no use for us. They're using an entirely different method of rendering the scopes.

Jaze - March 18, 2008
i made this for insurgency mod isit any use? to help you
http://img509.imageshack.us/img509/6007/insadvancedshottingrangmh5.jpg

MadMax - March 18, 2008
Yep.. was wondering the same thing :P Good job though.. and by the way; make sure to make a diary for the lightsaber development(whenever that is).. im curious as hell about how your gonna do that

Yzmo - March 18, 2008
Looks nice.. however.. why does the edge of the scope look like aluminum foil xD

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