Game Engine Design & Implementation - Blog#1

                    Hi, this is my first blog for Game Engine Design & Implementation aka GED. In this blog, I will mostly cover my GDW progress up to this point.

                    Since GED is going to be a hard course this year, I want to get things clear and working for my GDW game early . So I started to work on the design of the game with my fellow teammates yesterday. This year, we want to make a game similar to GTA (grand thief auto series), and sleeping dog. Of course we are not going to make a game as polish as these two, but at least have an idea of what we are doing and heading towards to.

                    So it started off with the design of the city. We wanted to have a 1:1 ratio city in our game and major reason why we wanted 1:1 ratio was because last year, modelers made models in different sizes and it was a pain in the butt for programmers deal with. So we thought of building everything in 1:1 ratio would be easier.

                    So we came up with a very rough sketch of the city, 1km by 1km. The middle is the dowtown of the city surrounded by 4 districts.

Then it looked something like this in Maya.

Then we created a 1.6 meter height cube to represent our character and it looked something like this.

See that little box in the center? That's how big the character is in the city. If we switch  to the perspective of GTA or sleeping dog, the map is going to be HUGE! With a huge map like this and we wanted to build everything 1:1 ratio with proper measurement on all objects (width of roads, sidewalk, building, etc), the design of the map is going to be important and it seems kind of hard to do it. We tried to make the same size image in Photoshop, but of course it crashed because the image is just too huge for it to handle. Then we decided to use 1 pixel in Photoshop to represent 1 meter in Maya. We drew 1 pixel straight line on map and here was where we ran into another problem.

A 100 pixels wide straight line drawn in Photoshop. Looking good.

The line lines up perfectly with the blocks like we expected. (we divided the 1 km by 1 km by 10, so each block is 100 meters wide and there are 100 blocks across the city).

But then when we zoomed in to the character, the 1 pixel line took up 4 blocks on the grid (each block on the grid is 1 meter wide and we set it in Maya by default) and at this point we were all confused. Despite the mystery of the line somehow enlarged itself in Maya, we were not able to figure out why Maya cannot render the solid line in Photoshop; the line became blurry. We tried changing the scaling settings in Photoshop, the rending settings and the texture resolution setting in Maya, and the line still stayed blurry.

                    At one point, I was thinking to make the city in a relative small scale and then once it is finished, we can scale it up to the actual size. However, a fellow team member pointed out the since we are using the Havok physic engine and the gravity setting in it sets to 9.8 m/s. When the size of the objects in the scene changes and the gravity remains the same, weird things might happen. Unless we play around with Havok to change it to the way it allows us to do so. We will continue this idea until we have better understanding of the Havok engine.

                    We tried another method of creating a city, which is using scripting in Maya. We used a third party script and we ran it in Maya and this was what we got.

                    It looked pretty nice despite there were a lot of polygons. However, we found that this is not every flexible as each unit is set to be built within a plane; no building can be bigger than 1 plane. Also, we were not able to use our own models to replace the ones the came with the script. Due to all these reasons, we moved on.

                    At this point, the method of creating our city remains unknown. However, after some brief discussions with fellow team members, classmates, and professor Fullerton, it seems like we can use a third party engine called Esri - http://www.esri.com/, to create our city efficiently with our own models. The only problem is the issue of licensing. Since it does not seem like they are giving out student licence, we might have to figure out something else or we have to buy the full licence for a couple thousand dollars. Hmm, fun stuff.