The Ultimate 3D 2.0 Tech Demo is going to be a complex interactive technology demonstration for Ultimate 3D 2.0. By default it's going to use a first person camera, a third person camera will be optionally available. The demo is going to be made up of many rooms, each will have it's individual sights. The player will have to walk through these rooms manually. Many rooms will contain interactive elements. For example the first room will have some control panel screens allowing the player to set up graphics options, another one will contain a car that can be either driven or demolished through a baseball bat. Most rooms are going to be completely subterraneously. The only real exception from this sentence will be placed at the end of the demo. The player will walk through a worm hole which leads him into a medieval tavern that's set in an extended version of the Fire and Water Demo. Until this incident with the worm hole all rooms will have a modern/futuristic style.
This is a quite big project and it will require definitely more than one person to be realized. The programming part is going to be done entirely by me, but for the graphics (models and textures) a lot of help will be needed. For that reason any qualified volunteer is welcome. A password protected, hidden sub-forum is going to be created in the Ultimate 3D Community. Everybody who volunteers to help with the demo will be invited to this sub-forum. Through this forum it should be possible to manage the tasks in a comfortable way. Despite it can be used to discuss concept related ideas. Any good idea will be taken unless it would be too much work to realize it or would lead too far away from the original concept.
This project has multiple purposes. One of them is that everybody who participates in it can learn some things by doing that. It is a a big, international teamwork, probably bigger than all you've been part of before. For that reason it will be a new experience for all of us. The result of this teamwork will be open source and available for free, so all of you can gain from looking at how it's made. It will come with many useful shader effects ;) . Also this is a chance to help making Ultimate 3D more popular. With a that huge tech demo it will be easy to convince people in the Game Maker Community of the unexcelled power of Ultimate 3D, which will lead to a growing of the Ultimate 3D Community. Another nice motivation to participate is probably, that it's a chance to do something in reward for the hard work I've spent on the development of Ultimate 3D and the support.
My personal main motivation to initialize and organize this project is that I want to have something for my portfolio. I have spent so much work on Ultimate 3D that it would be a shame not to gain from the result somehow. If I can possess a 3D tech demo, which is as complex as this, it will surely simplify interviews and improve my chances to get an employee or a traineeship at a company that's related to game development or programming of 3D graphics.
Unless anybody can come up with a good solution to the problem described below the first version of the Ultimate 3D 2.0 tech demo is not going to have any sound in it. The problem is that I want the technology demo to be downwards compatible to Game Maker 5.0, but this version doesn't have sufficient functions to implement proper 3D sound. A possible solution would be the use of a separate dll for the sound effects, but I think you agree to me if I say that it would be strange to use a third-party dll in a technology demo of a dll. Another reason why there probably won't be sound is that Ultimate 3D is currently exceptionally a library for the displaying of 3D graphics, so a tech demo for Ultimate 3D doesn't need to have some decent sound in it. Of course I'm aware of the fact that good sound effects can greatly contribute to the atmosphere of the 3D scenes and that this is a good reason to have sound effects in a demo for a 3D engine, but the technological possibilities currently don't allow it. A later version of the demo may have sound effects in it.
The character model will be female and will have a quite futuristic style. More concrete concepts aren't worked out yet. As soon as possible those will follow (most likely in form of concept art). sherif has volunteered for modeling the character model.
A big teamwork like this requires reliable teammates. For that reason I'd like every teammate to agree with a couple of rules. If these rules are neglected by a particular teammate this teammate may be excluded from the teamwork. I want to clarify this in advance, to make sure that nobody is insulted in case he gets excluded from the teamwork after he has turned out to be unreliable or not qualified enough. So here are the rules:
The first rule is meant to make sure that the teammates are qualified. There are many experienced modelers on the Ultimate 3D Community and those will be welcome in the project for sure. If a member hasn't published any works in the community yet and volunteers for a complex task he or she may be asked for some pictures of his previous works first.
The second rule is meant to make sure that the project will be finished in a moderate time. For the whole tech demo I was thinking of a development time between two and three month. More detailed estimations will follow as soon as there's a detailed to do list. The third rule is meant to ensure a high quality. I hope that these rules will contribute to the success of this project.
Through the room based architecture the Ultimate 3D 2.0 Tech Demo will be able to take advantage of the advanced culling functions, meaning that it will not have to render more than one room most of the time. For that reason the single rooms can use detailed geometry and lots of effects. Despite this architecture can simplify teamwork since it makes it possible to distribute tasks according to the rooms. The main part of this concept paper deals with specifying the contents of the single rooms and the transitions between the rooms. As a result of the carefully planed rooms a list of all needed textures and models will develop. For the most rooms simplistic sketches will follow to clarify the positions and proportions of the objects within the room. For descriptions of needed graphics that aren't precise enough concept sketches are going to follow as well (mostly on request).
Basic idea:
Needed graphics:
Special effects: The Ultimate 3D Logo probably uses a particle effects system to look better, parallax mapping to make the cube look more 3D and possibly some glow effects. The walls and the ground probably use bump mapping and parallax mapping just like most things in the demo. The security screen and the control panel use render to texture functions and possibly some cool shader effect.
Comments: A nice way of starting the demo would be the following: At the beginning the screen is totally black. Then the Ultimate 3D Logo appears in the middle of the screen, by becoming brighter. Then the lights turn on and the player sees the whole room. After that the player takes control and realizes that the Ultimate 3D Logo he saw was 3D instead of 2D.
Transition: The transition to the next room uses a futuristic door model sherif made for me a while ago. This door model gets a chrome style through cubic environment mapping.
Basic idea:
Needed graphics:
Special effects: Again the room uses parallax and bump mapping. Most things will receive shadows. The light bulb functions as shadow casting light source and the stairs model casts shadows.
Transition: Same door as for previous transition.
Basic idea:
Needed graphics:
Interactive parts: The motto behind this room is “Drive 'n' Destroy”. The player can take the baseball bat to demolish the car or he can get into the car (loosing the bat) and drive it down the asphalted way. The car physics are kept simplistic. The asphalted way ends at a massive wall, which takes the car quite a bit of it's nice design as the player crashes into it. After that the car won't be drivable anymore. On the wall there's a red graffiti telling the player "Press <KEY> to leave the car.".
Special effects: The car uses cubic environment mapping. As the baseball bat is being used to demolish the car the geometry of the model will be manipulated and the reflections will become distorted. The plasma silos use a plasma pixel shader effect and LoD techniques to be rendered efficiently. The whole scene uses a motion blur post screen shader. The room model may use light mapping.
Transition: A garage door in comic style with some colored letters over it saying something like “Tools 'n' Toons”. As the player passes through this door the player model suddenly gets a comic style, matching to the comic style of everything else in this room.
Basic idea:
Needed graphics:
Special effects: Absolutely everything within this room uses shader effects and cel-shading to achieve a cartoon style similar to the one of the PC game XIII. Of course this will also require comic style textures. At the dripping faucet every drop makes a small billboard appear with a text like "drop" on it.
Transition: A usual door, also in comic style. As the player passes through it he looses his comic style.
Basic idea:
Needed graphics:
Special effects: Possibly the whole scene uses a special bloom post screen shader. The room and the particle acceleration machine eventually use parallax and bump mapping. And obviously there are lots of particle effects.
Comments: This room will be mostly programming work. The required graphics are simplistic.
Transition: Same door as for transition from room 1 to room 2.
Basic idea:
Needed graphics:
Special effects: The office table eventually uses some per pixel lighting. The magnifier actually magnifies things you can see below it, using a vertex shader and a cubic environment map. The lava lamp uses a pixel shader to get that lava lamp effect. The two statues are meant to demonstrate bump mapped specular lighting and bump mapped environment mapping (both through shaders). The lamp in the middle of the room has some flares around it to make it seem brighter. The whole scene uses a special bloom effect.
Comments: Almost everything in this room uses a shader effect, that's why it's called shader collection. The shaders are going to be programed in a way that they will be quite easy to adapt into other projects.
Transition: An automated sliding door, made up of a lot of heavy metal, with big warning signs on it warning the player about the experimental technique in the next room.
Basic idea:
Needed graphics:
Special effects: This room is really pretty, because it uses a simple post screen shader in combination with render to texture functions to implement an easy to use post screen warp effect. Everything around the black hole and the worm hole gets warped in strange ways and the hot air, which is blown out by the machines makes the air flicker. The worm hole uses render to texture functions and a pixel shader to show the distant room. The black hole is nothing but a sphere model with all material colors set to black.
Transition: As the player traps into the worm hole it brings him directly into the medieval room (without any visible lag). Eventually the worm hole will collapse behind the player once he has stepped through it so he can't get back and is trapped in medieval.
Basic idea:
Special effects: The fire in the chimney uses a nice pixel shader effect to implement the fire. The whole room uses light mapping.
Comments: The style of this room was mostly Despellanion's idea and he has volunteered for designing it completely. That's why this document doesn't give any further information on this room.
Transition: A door made up of massive wood.
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Special effects: The fire place uses a shader effect for the fire and parallax and bump mapping for the banks. The lake uses two pixel shader effects and render to texture functions for the water, with reflections and refractions. It will be possible, to get below the surface of the water, that's why a second shader is needed now. The forest uses a complex LoD technique to be rendered in real-time. The terrain uses a precomputed light map. Below the dark sky with it's many stars there are clouds which are being animated through another pixel shader effect.
Comments: This room is mostly an extended version of the Fire and Water Demo. It will be basically the same scene, with the same special effects at the same places. The differences are that the terrain will be bigger, to have enough place for some forest rendering, that the post screen shaders won't be part of it anymore and that it will be possible to get below the surface of the water. Despite the scene won't be bounded through mountains anymore, but through invisible walls in the forest (unless anybody suggests a better solution).
Transition: This is the last room, so there won't be a transition to another room anymore. The player can spend some time exploring the forests and he can go back to the tavern if he wants to. Since there's no way to get to another room, it would be nice to have something to make this clear. Maybe one could make a name sign for the tavern, saying something like “To the end”. German hostelries usually have names, like this (starting with “To the”), but I don't know how this is handled in countries with English as native language. I would appreciate if some native speaker could tell me.