Since a young age I have been extremely interested in computer software, starting with interests in video games and more recently how they are made. This interest sparked a passion for 3D modelling and character design which I was drawn to by characters from the Half Life video game series. So I wish to study a course that leans more towards these design aspects. I am currently studying a BTEC ND in game design, in which the programs I use are 3Ds Max, Photoshop, Game Maker and various game editing tools. At home I like to increase my understanding of 3Ds Max and Maya using online tutorials.

Outside of college I hold many responsibilities doing volunteer work for a Family support group, the tasks I do involve organising events, scheduling and general grunt work. I used to do Trampolining and have won a couple of trophys. I also enjoy archery and have taken part in a few competitions.

I enjoy drawing and reading in my spare time and often write short stories

Warhammer Online Review

The idea of an MMOG is nothing new by any standards, and many that rise up to the challenge tend to pale at the sight of World of Warcraft. The latest game to take up that challenge is Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, or WAR, which seems to roles of the tongue with a little less effort. WAR is a MMORPG developed by EA Mythic, with the usual array of Dwarves, Orcs, Elves, Humans and the rest. WAR also boasts “next generation Realm vs. Realm (RvR)” which combines Player vs. Player and Player vs. Environment combat into one seamless experience, scenarios, sacking cities and a whole lot more to be unveiled. The player can select from 6 races and 20 different classes.

The quests available number in the thousands and with them being the meat and bones of the game and 80% of the story, they are a big deal and they do not disappoint. The storyline in WAR is incredible, but that should be expected after 25 years of story development, so this is a great asset to the game as long as you don’t mind a bit of reading. The quests themselves are split into two groups, Public and Personal. In a public quest the player, and a limitless number of other players, work together to secure various objectives, kill hordes of monsters and collect some nice loot. In a Personal Quest however, a player must complete much more specific and excellent story driven tasks alone.

For an MMOG the graphics are stunning, full of gritty realism. This isn’t a frolic in the meadows; this is a war torn world full of destruction, corpses hanging from trees and the shattered remains of siege engines and weaponry. This is how a war is meant to look.

Overall this game has some major pros, especially if you like some good PvP and as long as you’ve got some decent competition you’ll be set for quite a while, not to mention the game’s pretty easy on the eyes. On the down side some of the armour and weapons can be kind of dull and uninspired, often copies of other weapons but with different statistics. This is understandable since it would be hard to create thousands of unique weapons, and once you get to higher levels the good stuff starts rolling in.

There are some very minor gripes about lag, server population caps, summoning and other matters, but the game is in its couple of weeks and will no doubt be fixed in future patches along with some extra content.

The Darkness Review

The Darkness is a game developed by 2K Games for Xbox 360 and PS3 based on a comic book series of the same name, the player takes on the role of Jakie Estacado, a hitman for the New York Mafia, who ironically was targeted for assassination on the eve of his 21^st birthday by “uncle” Paulie, the don of the Mafia. From there it only gets from bad to worse, he finds that his body is host to a demon known as The Darkness, a spirit driven insane by being alive for thousands of years, which has been passed down through his family for generations. The demon gives Jackie an array of supernatural powers which are then used all in the name of finding and killing Paulie.

The story is well driven with a terrific plot, always pushing you to find out what will happen next and never disappoints. At times The Darkness will rely a little on comic book storyline to fill in the blanks, but nothing that impairs the playability of the game.

Gameplay wise this game is pretty linear, if not entirely, and pretty short to boot. But considering this, 2K have managed to fit a lot into the 6-8 hours of gameplay available. This includes a lot of killing with Jackie’s demon buddies, some of which spend most of their time surrounding your character and giving menacing looks.

The graphics in this game are brilliant and that’s the only word for it, the demons are dark, gloomy and expertly textured and everything in New York, from the subway to the docks are perfect, gritty and dangerous. There are some minor frame rate issues when a lot is going on, but once again it’s hardly worth mentioning. Once the player gets to the Otherworld, a place with a world war two setting and home The Darkness itself, the atmosphere changes completely. New York is replaced with a barren landscape as far as the eye can see, once Jackie gets out of the trenches, there’s no telling which direction to go. There are horrifying statues made from corpses and enemies all around. In all, Players can really get the feeling that they are in hell.

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To sum it all up, this game has some flaws, but if you can learn to look past it, you can really see some gold shining through.

 

Diablo II Review

Diablo II is a Point-and-click RPG by Blizzard North. It is a sequel to the ’97 game, Diablo. You choose your class, gain levels, choose abilities and get to the demon killing.

Upon entering the world of Diablo II, eight years after its original release, it’s hard to see what all the fuss was about. Compared to what I’m used to, the graphics are nothing to rave about. But if I compare it to other games from back then, they’re not too bad, nothing revolutionary but brilliant for this type of game. The character models are brilliantly detailed and the weapons and armour are superb. As is the case with all the NPCs. As for level design, the locations look brilliant but since nearly all the landscape is procedurally generated I can only say dirt looks like dirt, wood looks like wood and stone looks like stone. The graphics in the cinematics are nothing short of perfect, but this is to be expected with Blizzard games.

As for sound, this is one of Diablo II’s best aspects aside from game play. Each enemy type has their own wide array of sound effects and none of it seems to get repetitive or boring. The voice acting for the cinematics is top notch and music sets the mood for the game perfectly, a kind of eerie excitement. I’m not sure how many tracks are in the game but I’ve yet to get bored of the orchestral music.

Now onto the gameplay, this is what the game is all about. Diablo II contains most of the traditional RPG elements, hitpoints, mana and the constant trading for new equipment. The simple point and click movement and combat work brilliantly, one improvement on Diablo I is running, and it has become one of my most used tools in escaping from a sticky situation. The difficulty of this game can often depend on whether you fully understand the keyboard controls, but even the best of the best will find it hard to stay alive while being swarmed by thirty or more enemies at once, sometimes the only choice is to runaway and pick off a few more when your health had returned. This adds a lot of pace and excitement to the game.

The multiplayer adds a whole new and brilliant side to the game, where teamwork and cooperation go a long way towards success, so partying with others is much more fun than soloing the entire game. Also, if it’s your style, or just get bored of the usual hack and slash gameplay, you can trade with, or even start fighting with them.

The first couple of quests are easy, but about half way through the first of four acts, this game gets a lot harder. The first act takes up to five hours if you take your time, so with four acts, 21 quests and the final challenge this game can consume quite a lot of your time. There are also thousands of unique items to find and create and five different classes to choose from, seven with the expansion.

On top of all this, Diablo II has a killer strong and supported storyline which is constantly making you wonder where you will be heading next. Many of the NPCs in the game exist to throw sly hints at you. On top of THAT it has replayability in spades, after completing the game you’ll want to playing for hours more. Completing the game unlocks the ability to create new items, find many new areas and enemies.

So after all that, you have one of the best RPGs ever made, excellent graphics, superb gameplay and some of the best sounds ever to grace a videogame. It has a brilliant single player, but if you really want to experience its full potential, play it online.

Todays NPC’s are blind men with sticks!

When scripting intelligent life like behaviour, programmers are faced with many tasks. Some core tasks include synchronization of synthetic speech and gestures, the expression of emotion and personality by means of body movement and facial display, the coordination of the embodied conversational behaviour of multiple characters including the user and the design of artificial minds for synthetic characters.

A 3D topology analyzer is software that is used to analyze the shape and form of a map in a game. The information gained is used to make NPC’s, or the user, react appropriately. It must identify all locations from which an enemy can hide and shoot. It should also be able to dynamically analyze all potential locations from which an enemy can shoot at a VIP. You will then be able to position body guards in order to cover these threats. It will also identify the routes that the enemy could take and then organise and opposing flank assault. Finally it must pick the right position to place the camera so it can see the necessary topology.

Game developers are working hard to cure the blindness of NPC’s. A lot of software and time has been put into making NPC’s seem smarter and more human. Trajectory computation has been introduced into the dynamic world, this lets the NPC’s know if any changes have been made in the landscape. For example, if a bridge is destroyed, and that bridge had a path going across it, the NPC will would need to find another way to the other side. The way NPC’s react to enemy movement has also been improved.

Artificial Intelligence

An NPC, meaning non-player character, is a term used when talking about characters or creatures in a video game controlled by a computer. They can be enemies, allies or just people walking in the streets. 

This is an example of some enemy and civilian NPC’s from Assassin’s Creed.

NPC’s require specific data to move intelligently, find hiding positions and navigate the terrain. They need to be able to identify all potential cover locations where an enemy can hide, they must be able to analyse the 3D topology so that they know where to flank and not to walk through buildings.

Accurate World navigation is also known as path finding.

World navigation is divided into 2 main categories, world navigation, which takes care of the geometry in the whole of the environment using very specific paths to control the AI, and local navigation, in which the AI must be able to interpret changes in the layout of the level, and then react accordingly. NPCs may have moved or objects have obstructed the paths usually used by the AI, so now Local Navigation has to navigate the NPCs through the objects obstructing the path. The problem with local navigation is that if there are multiple NPCs heading to a single location, they usually end up on the same path with unusual effects.

To deal with this, a flocking algorithm is used. This stops NPCs from colliding with each other by varying the paths used by the AI.

Peter Molynuex suggests that AI will change the way games are designed. It is his opinion that if a game is not fun anymore then gamers will not want to play it. He believes that if you put emotion into AI, then the NPC’s will be able to care and feel, and maybe you can even care back.

Jess Crable suggests that there can can be to much realistic AI in a game, believing that if the AI is to good it can take away from the fun of the game. There has to be a good balance between randomness and believability and some level of unpredictability within straying to far from believable.

Emergent Gameplay is creative use of a game not intended by developers, this could include glitches found by players, or unexpected quirks in the AI, or even a realistic economy that can be found in some online games.

Chess can be considered emergent gameplay because it can be unpredictable, with a near endless combination of moves to be made, the players will have a different experience every time.

These are a few examples of emergent gameplay

Crysis

EVE Online

Animation Systems

The disadvantages of a mesh based character system is that you have to move and define the position of every point on a model. This many vertices and polygons can become a lot for a computer to handle.

The advantages of skeletal animation are that instead of moving each point of the mesh individually, you move them all at once using a skeleton. Since a skeleton usually has about 50 bones, this is much easier than using 3000 polygons.

The picture on the left shows a skeleton without a mesh, you can see all the bones and joints.

“To weight each vertex individually”, which is the process of snapping a mesh to a skeleton, means that if the weight is decreased, the mesh will not snap to the skeleton properly and will look deformed.

Lighting

API

API originally meaning Advanced Programming Interface, is now more commonly known as Application Programming Interface. An API is a source code interface that an operating system or library provides to support requests for services to be ade of it by computer programs, in other words, it serves as a way for two programs to interact with each other.

OpenGL Lighting

The three forms of lighting offered by OpenGL are per polygon, per vertex and per pixel lighting. Vertex lighting determines how many polygons are touching a vertex and takes

Vertex, normal and polygon

Vertex Lighting

The advantage of vertex lighting is that hardware can help do this faster using hardware transform and lighting.The disadvantages, on the other hand, are that it does not produce shadowing.

Shaders

A shader is a set of software instructions used to perform rendering effects. If i wanted to illustrate the shininess of an object i would use a Phong shader in my scene.

What is a games engine

A games engine is the core of any game. It can make it run on multiple platforms like Xbox, playstation and Wii. It provides a working enviroment to quickly and efficiently design and create games. The games with the best engines have better graphics, better sound and would probably include Havoc physics. Havoc is an middleware extension to the game engine, as is Speedtree that can be used to render a large amount of objects ingame.

Physics engines

The main purpose of a physics engine is to make life like physics involving gravity, collision detection, particles such as explosions and, in more sophisticated engines, ragdolls.  

Ragdoll physics treats a characters “dead” body as a series of rigid bones connected by hinges at the joints, making it react as it would in a real life situation.

Unreal

The Unreal game engine is a significant game engine as it was the first to integrate rendering, collision detection, AI, visibility, networkng and filesystem into one complete engine. (Taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_engine). This picture is a comparison between all three Unreal game engines.

Picture source: http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/thumb/5/53/250px-Unreal_Engine_Comparison.jpg

The core of Unreal engine is written in C++ and is very portable.

Havok Physics

Havok is a middleware engine used to simulate lifelike physics in games.

Game Engines:

DOOM, id software

Unreal engine, Epic

Bit Depth

Bit depth, also known as colour depth and BPP (bits per pixel). Is a computer graphics term which describes the number bits used to make up a single pixel in a bit-map