Picture of the Day!

Let us celebrate our time at EA Games with this lovely picture of me and Ross sharing pure joy and happiness. It's the way it was meant to be!

Nostalgia

After almost 10 years of providing, nay inventing online team based epicness, the people of Vivendi games have decided to pull the plug on Tribes.

Whilst 2 alt master servers exist, this really just means its a matter of time until there is no more tribes ... evar! Some would say its been dead for a long time, some would say its time to move on - and maybe it is (its not) but that means the Tribes community is officially now a gaming community without a game. I think this is something well see more and more of and kind of a testament to the impact one game has when just its memory is enough to keep a fan base together. Here is a list of things in current FPS's that we take for granted that tribes invented:

1) Large scale team combat
2) Vehicles
3) Simultaneous Outdoor and Indoor Environments
4) Commander roles
5) In game lobby's / brower (with built in IRC)
6) Deployable's

I cant go on ! Noooooooooooooooooooooooo Tribes - I hardly knew thee - its seems like only yesterday! I haven't even started on the things you did right no ever game has done yet.
Maybe I should take Adams advice and get professional help. If Tribes was a person, our relationship status would be "complicated".

OK OK - back on track - This and a conversation about Iguana (Forsaken!) and seeing Goldeneye got me thinking about nostalgia. Is it that these games were so awesome because A) there was nothing like it at the time which makes them much more epic? yeah I think thats probably it.

Today we were visited by Alex from NC Soft. He had some interesting thoughts on MMOG's and especially the different types of player. It was also interesting to hear him mention Facebook because it must really be having a big impact on the games industry. Initially I was a hater but tbh if it keeps the focus of some games (Second Life) off socializing then i'm all for it.

Gamewise today work progressed on the art side of things, environmental assets got textured, more NPCs were added (96!), Player Character was finished to a sufficient level for the internal showing oh oh and we made this:



Cool eh ? ^_^ - thats our island

Alot of this morning was spent burning stuff to DVD for our Art Deliverables and chatting to Alex. The tables being set up in readiness for our pitch and todays deadline is a sad reminder that Dare will soon be over. Things are coming together, and who really knows whats going to happen but its been an awesome journey so far. Ive even got better at art! As i'm writing this an epic 2 vs 2 inter team game of Ouendan is coming to an end.

T- 3.5 days until the internal show, and the start of our testing / polishing / wrapping up phase so we'll upload the internal show build and let you guys have at it!

Cheers,

The Lucid Dream Team

Art !

Today I have mostly been texturing! After a brief wrestle with Maya I managed to get into the swing of things and managed to get quite a few environmental entities up to finished quality. All in all a pretty productive day all round.

Ross finished some more mapping and started texturing the church, which will be the focal point of our island. Dave has also added hair and wings to our main player character ready for animation. Check him out:



We've managed to compile our choicest art for our first deliverable, ready for printing off into awesome banners for Protoplay. It'll be really good seeing them up on the wall - its also been a great exercise in realizing how things have changed visually along the way. We also managed to animate mission 2 and 3 and is currently implementing a header system that will call each scene independantly as it was having a little trouble previously. Other than art its been a case of sourcing more sounds for walking on various surfaces and Rich has been investing compiling our game into an .exe (currently it runs as a VMO for web browsers).

Piers was back to day for his weekly dose of Ross, who had some very poignant thoughts on creativity and inspiration, and we got to see the latest Irish video which is frankly epic.
Note: Team Lucid Dreams would like to retract any previous comments about click warps in videos as none were present

(aaaaaaaarrgh, blogger is refusing to let me out of Italics)

Its getting quite hard to remember what happened today - Ross has been introduced to the class A equivalent of a cat gif site, in what we can only suspect to be a cunning ruse on behalf of the Irish teams, possibly there was Guiness involved as some kind of payment ^_^ and we uploaded an AI test video here.

Okies I think its time we get outta here !

The Lucid Dreams Team

55 frames ... 48 people

Woooooooooooooooooooow, NPC madness continues! Today Rowen has been incrementing on the NPC script slowly but surely and after many iterations, a revision to the path generation and our new shiny animation level of detail we have a now fully populated world! Thats 7 more NPC's than we wanted max not including mission NPC's and still have frames to play with... Sweet


Eleeso - surveying his targets

I have just been reliably informed this now includes animation Levels of Detail ... Sweet ^_^

Ive been trying to put together a very special video to highlight the epicness but have been having issues with sound so maybe tomorrow. Tomorrow were also going to be compiling our art assets to send off for Protoplay so kind of scary as its our first(ish) milestone.

Phew yeah so continued making 2D assets today, found out the technical term for those little flags you get is called bunting. .. cos knowing is half the battle (Especially when using google) and some awesome signs for our new denizens. Ross made an epic return today and had made some really good renovations to the island after his weekend experience with Crackdown and learnt a few lessons about making space more populated with what we've got. Its looking really good now and makes life a bit easier so bonus all round.

Texture wise Dave is real close to finishing the player character, ready to get some buildings done tomorrow so we can get our latest screen shots off for Protoplay. We also took delivery of our fancy new scrolling menu system and flight cam from Rich.

So things are really coming together now - while I still had to explain to Dare Dave why we didn't have so many finished art assets in, I think that by the time of the internal show well be just needing to tweak here and there and apply testing and polish. The only real hurdles at the minute are animating the player character and texturing the more specialized buildings but now with weekend access im sure thatll happen.

Also found out today that Alex Ward (Burnout Series, Black) wants to come down and meet us. It'll be a good experience as well need to justify what were doing and why, so its extra preparation for Protoplay. Also he says good things about Army of Two - so hopefully I can gleam some info and it will be like playing it by proxy :). Other than that the new video is out - Check it out Ross has his own section ! Apparently Northern Ireland are preparing some kind of Epic video rebuttal, thats so click warp intensive Mark refused to have anything to do with it ^_^ sounds great

On the subject of E-fame I don't know if i mentioned but i was having crazy VMO / 360 troubles Big thanks to mini rich who informed me of a sneaky driver update - sorted now, but while searching for 360 controller, VMO and virtools our blog came up numero uno on google - which while not helping me solve my issue was cool :) . Jeebus! Apologies for the rambly nature of this blog - just keep ... remembering ... things ...

Good day Good day!

Team Lucid Dream

(p.s A prize to anyone who can accurately tell me the frequency of the word Epic and Awesome in this post cos im sure its high)

(pps Hi Mike)

Madness!

In the words of Rowen "cripes!". Things have been moving full steam ahead today and its only monday ! Sorted out alot of admin for our internal showing next week and various bits and pieces for Protoplay, still only feels like weve been here a few weeks. We got an email through today saying EA will be open on weekends starting as of this weekend which I can see us taking advantage of.

Excitingly over the weekend Rowen managed to sort out our NPC generation script, so we can now import completely unique NPC's at the touch of a button (as long as their in multiples of 6 :) ) still its really awesome to see about 300 charaacters wandering along in a huge snake like line. He managed to get it into the island and working so now its a case of redoing the path map. Rich has also been pressing on with our new and improved camera and fire mechanic, the finer details of which we now have sorted. Simplicity is the key so we figured make it as easy as possible for the focus testing and then go from there. He also managed to sort out dynamic lighting which definitely makes things a bit easier for the guys art wise.

On that side of things today Dave has textured the majority of the main player character, if you've noticed a strange calm in the world today its because Ross has been taken out of action by some crazy virus. Hes all drugged up and will be back on the front line tomorrow ready to go toe to toe with some animations. Luckily our handy new target system has cut the volume of animations we need (ish). We also managed to sort various other bits n pieces such as creating a list of the all the names that our NPC's can use when randomly assigning names, and gathering as many 2D images for easy alpha making as poss.

Heres a nice pic!




The Lucid Dream Team