Effects

[TheReturnofDMD]

Hi

I just was wondering...I know that the screens will be static, but will there be any effects like for example...shadows of the sun or like clouds moving perhaps or effects such as a light breeze sweeping through the area? Will there be like background action such as say people looking out windows, drying clothes, or random people walking streets etc?

[Allert van der Leij]

yes, absolutely. Although most of our screens are viewed through a static camera, the world is in 3D. So expect dynamic character shadows, moving clouds, treebranches affected by wind, etc.. And yes, there'll be random villagers walking around doing their thing; not sure about the 'drying clothes' thingy though

[Cez]

and a lot of different cameras

[Yonkey]

Heh, yeah, just to expand on what Cesar means...

There's one scene in particular which has a static camera by default, but it also has a sequence that uses a dynamic camera swoop that really shows off the benefit of this game being 3D as opposed to 2D.

[TheReturnofDMD]

Awesome!
Thanks...see in the older KQ's, these little details like clouds moving etc were things I missed...for me it adds a bit more realism to the game world.

[Yonkey]

Yeah, don't worry about that, things like that will be in the game. 

*remembers when Rich wanted to use a static 2D cloud background instead of the Torque clouds*  

[maestro]

If the game has shadows, then will it have day-and-night cycles?  Shadows would seem to imply day-and-night cycles, since the position of the shadows would depend on the time of day.  So if you entered the same scene later in the day, then the position of the sun, and therefore the shadows, would change.

Are the static camera positions all facing north, or do any face east or west?  If the camera faces east or west at sunrise or sunset, respectively, then the sun should be directly visible.

Does the night sky have true constellations?  I've never seen true constellations in a game, but there's a first for everything.  However, I'm not sure whether Daventry is on earth or another world, so the constellations may be different from those visible on earth.

[Yonkey]

I believe some chapters have day and night cycles, but they are based on events rather than actual game time.  At night, there won't be any sunlight, therefore no shadows.

Rich made sure that shadow directions are consistant with light sources, regardless of camera position.  The camera positions are more based on scene layout and land geography, so they face whatever is needed rather than constantly facing the same direction.  And as I mentioned above, the shadow directions were taken into consideration with each scene.

I'm not sure about the sky constellations.  I think for the most part we'll be using 2D backgrounds for them rather than actual 3D star particles, since they'd be so far away you wouldn't be able to tell anyway.

[maestro]

But do the position of the light source (the sun) and, therefore, the shadows, change throughout the game?  If you enter the same scene later in the day (based on events, not game time), then the shadows should be positioned differently.

What I meant about the constellations is whether we'll be able to identify Orion, Ursa Major, etc., or whether the stars will be randomly distributed.

[Yonkey]

But do the position of the light source (the sun) and, therefore, the shadows, change throughout the game?  If you enter the same scene later in the day (based on events, not game time), then the shadows should be positioned differently.

Well, as far as I know, day is considered one timeblock, and evening/night is considered another timeblock.  There might be morning as well, but usually it's not sunny enough to cast many shadows at that time.

[Rick_Florez]

Most of the shadows in the screens are painted directly into the textures.  However we want to use dynamic shadows for those elements that move (plants moving in the wind, characters, animated objects) since their shadows would be continually changing.

Lighting in the game is done more artistically than realistically.  The sun is readjusted in every screen to deliver the best possible look.

The sun doesn't physically move during the day, day and nights are scripted events and are considered 2 different things.

[maestro]

Most of the shadows in the screen are painted directly into the textures.

So that, if a player character were to walk into the shadow, then he himself would not be in shadow?  Does that look right?

[Yonkey]

It's ok.  It actually doesn't look as bad as it sounds, since in most cases you won't be able to get that close to an object anyway to be walking in its shadow.

Basically if every object in the game cast dynamic shadows, it would make the whole game overall a lot slower.  The engine would waste time rendering shadows that will stay static pretty much all the time.  It's more efficient video card usage to render dynamic shadows for moving objects than stationary.

[maestro]

So is it possible to have both static and dynamic shadows in the same scene?  I had thought that shadows had to be either turned on or turned off.  But you seem to suggest that it is possible to have shadows turned on, but only for some objects.  Does your game engine let you do that?  Are there Direct-3D and/or OpenGL functions or flags that you can set to turn shadows on and off locally, as opposed to globally?

[Yonkey]

Yeah, a scene can have both.  The way I described it was a bit simplified.  Basically there are certain types of objects that are able to cast dynamic shadows, and certain types that can cast static ones.  The player (and all characters I believe) will cast dynamic ones, while static objects don't seem to cast very well onto scenes because the scene itself is an object too.  They're meant to be cast onto Torque terrain or tiled flooring, which we don't really use in our game.  So, the way we get around not having to rener static shadows is to have them embedded into the ground textures.

You really can't tell the difference, so it works quite well.  As Rich mentioned, it's only with moving objects that you can't get away with "baking" shadows into textures.

To answer your question though, there is a flag to turn on or off all rendered shadows globally, but you can't do it during runtime.

[Allert van der Leij]

Ok, lets clear this up for the record. Only objects that are moving on screen (ie. player-characters as well as NPC's) will cast realtime dynamic shadows. All static objects will have their shadows baked into the background textures, right now the colors between static and dynamic differ per scene a bit, so we have to fix that - but its not high on our priority list. As for walking into 'shadowy' areas, yes, since the bulk of the shadows is baked in, it won't directly affect lighting on the characters walking through that shadow-patch. But we use a couple of technique's to fake this, by implementing some spotlights here and there, so that when a character walks in and out of its fallof, you notice the shifts in shading/lighting that character, and thus we can make it look like he/she's walking through that shadow patch.

[maestro]

So when you say "baked in," I take it to mean that the Torque engine calculates the shadows based on the lighting and adds them to the texture, as opposed to an artist taking a brush and painting the shadows in himself.  Is that correct?

[Yonkey]

Nope, baking the process of an artist adding lighting and shadows into a texture, using layers in an imaging program like Photoshop or similar.