InGen Town

Sorry for taking so long to post again.  I have been busy at work and spent a lot of time just resting and not doing much.  I'm now the shift Associate Sponsor and have just been made full time and I've spent the last month training new hires.

However I did take a break from working on my Isla Nublar project to refocus on the InGen Town project.  Here's some progress screens from what I've done recently:

 

And here's some images from earlier in the year, from an earlier build of the level:

And here's some screens from an extremely early version made a couple of years ago.  This version wasn't finished but was released in my release thread on TresCom:

My Models - Jurassic Park Gates

What do they got in there?  King Kong?

Probably about as iconic as the cars themselves, the gates of Jurassic Park are probably the most replicated structure in the entire movie.  All the parks recreate them and they are often one of the first things modeled in various modding projects.

This is the second model of the gates I have done.. The first one was done in 2006 when I rebooted Jurassic Park the Mod as Jurassic Park Oblivion.  This second one was done in 2009.  It's still incomplete as it doesn't have the override switch or the animated flames, but it won't be too difficult to finish.  It'll be released in its finished state when I release hppav test version 2.

InGen Construction Helicopter WIP #1

I decided to take a break from the Visitor Center to work on this.  This is one day's progress on the model.  I remember when it used to take me a week to get this much done on a model like this... And I know that number's right because this is the second time I've attempted the helicopter, ha ha.

And here's the interior, which matches the movie in which the passenger compartment extends upwards into the engine compartment.

I'm planning on making 3 variations. 1 with the rotors spinning (animated texture) and gears up, 1 with rotors spinning (animated texture) and gears down, and 1 with rotors stopped (model) and gears down.

Why hello there Google visitors!

I took at look at my page views and noticed a massive spike in people visiting here through Google.  I noticed my images were coming up in Google Image Search when I was looking for some images of the Visitor Center (In my never ending search for someone to upload some behind the scenes photographs from the sets and their construction, so far this hasn't happened).

Seeing as how Trespasser is from 1998 - about 14 years ago - and how it only sold about 50,000 copies, I feel I must inform you about what Trespasser is.

Trespasser is a video game sequel set one year after the events of The Lost World: Jurassic Park.  It features the voice of Richard Attenborough, the first physics engine in a game, a fully interactive environment, real time folley, and glitches.. Lots of glitches.  In fact, these glitches are so bad that they are probably the reason you haven't heard of this game - if you haven't heard of it anyway.

But that's where TresCom comes in.  For the last 10 years TresCom has been working on trying to fix these bugs and create the game Trespasser was meant to be.  Some are doing it with the released engine, others are doing it by using modern engines.  But all are doing it for the same goal.

I put up a links page so you can learn more about Trespasser, its history, and the community of people that work with this engine.  Be sure to check them out!

Oh and thanks for visiting my blog!

Visitor Center WIP Part 4 - Tighten up the graphics

I've still been fighting with Trespasser over this Visitor Center.  Lots of polygons are lying bleeding in the streets.  The UN has already denounced my actions but that's about all they're going to do and all they ever do.  But the actions of these terrorist polygons shall not go unpunished!

I've recently just started my third level using this mesh.  This time I had machf take a look at it an identify a number of things that I could do to solve the framerate problems that I am getting.

If you have been following my progress on TresCom you'd know that a LOT of work has been done on it since the last update.

The Exterior Front of the Visitor Center.  I have since added some white splotches to the wall texture.

  

Here's the main hall of the Visitor Center with the completed roof.

Here's a mesh I had started working on back when I began making the Visitor Center a couple years ago.  This is the Visitor Center tour, Genetics Lab, and Control Room area.

And this is a rather standard square crate.  I just retextured it to look like one that appears in the Emergency Bunker set.  This will be the standard box crate in my Nublar project.

I've run into a few areas that require some difficult decisions... At this point it looks like the rotunda may have to go without the skeletons.  And it also looks like the Visitor Center will have to be split between two levels for performance sake.

The biggest drain on performance seems to be the physics objects and how I went about making the building physical.  Seems that the CPU usage for calculating all those physics objects is what's dragging the FPS down to the single digits in places.  Right now the third level is entirely focused on finishing and optimizing the previously finished meshes and occlusions to attempt to boost frame rate.  Once the finished meshes are optimized and in the level I will begin creating newer and fewer physics objects for the building as a whole.  I will also work on creating new LOD meshes for many of the detailed models.

Right now I am using two levels.  VC - Alpha version with horrid framerate.  VC~beta - Beta version which hopes to correct framerate issues.

Since the majority of the plot for the Nublar project I'm planning is intended to be a prequel with some overlap with the movie, not have the skeletons isn't too much of a problem, considering.  As machf suggested to me in our communications - I can explain it away by saying they haven't set them up yet...  Though this will cause issues for those people who want to set up the Visitor Center as it was in the movie.

Perhaps in the future, patches to the game engine will increase it's efficiency and enable me to do this all in one level sometime, with full bumpmaps and dynamic lighting.  But that could be a long time off.

As soon as I get all the details ironed out, I'll give you more information on what my project is.  I was hoping to have some input from more of the admins but none of them seem to be interested in helping me out any except for machf - who has a massive workload of his own so he can only look at the progress and offer suggestions.

TresCom Down

All of Paul's servers are offline and they're working on it.  Paul says they don't know what the problem is, but I'll let you guys know when it's back online.

As for updates, I'll have to get back to that here soon... Just throwing myself at too many fires, haha.

UPDATE: Paul restarted the servers and everything seems to be back online.

Visitor Center WIP Part 3 - The Engine Killer

Well, since I have several days worth of work to summarize (thank Walmart for asking me to come in on one of my days off to help clean up the backroom), this won't be a verbatim repost of what was in the TresCom Forums.

I have expanded my work beyond the Cafe.  Here's some shots of the floor immediately above the Cafe:

The room behind this sitting area is the Conference Room, this is where the main characters have their lunch in the movie before meeting Lex and Tim and heading out on the tour.

In order to get up to my goal of about 15 FPS in the Cafe, I reduced the chairs to the most simple form possible:

Yup, opacity maps galore.  Then when I started importing parts of the Main Hall/Lobby, I had an engine fowl up:

And, after some manipulation of the occlusion object and reducing some more polygons I was able to get everything working again:

Being a modeller is more interesting than being a simple level designer in this engine, haha!

Visitor Center WIP Part 2 - The Cafe Continues

Doing some more work on the cafe. This is the place where we learned that the entire reason why Jurassic Park failed was because Ellie Sattler failed to respect the Electricity God. It's true, she admitted it:

But I made a mistake too, I didn't have enough respect for that power and it's out now.

Seriously, who wrote that bit of dialogue? haha

mmm, 10 FPS... Tastes like justice.

Seems I'm going to have to do some optimization on the mesh of the room in general. That doesn't surprise me any though, this mesh was from when I finally mastered accuracy but before I mastered proper polygon management. I'll probably take the dome light meshes down to six sides instead of the current 8 and the frames above where the fans will go I'll probably do as a texture instead of as a mesh. Plus, looking at the wireframe, the frames of the windows and above the Gift Shop stairs have some serious polygon issues.

Visitor Center WIP Part 1 - Take A Look At The Nook

So I'm working on getting that Visitor Center from JPO finished.  Mainly because I know it's the part of the park that everyone really wants to see.  Telltale didn't know this, or else we might have spent more time in the Visitor Center in the game.

Today I started by taking the Cafe, which I made for JPO a couple years ago, and finally give it physics and start modelling some furniture, starting with a neat little nook that most people probably never noticed:

And here's what work I've got on that area (And yes, the room itself has physics too, which took a majority of my time today):

I think I've paid too much attention to the movie, haha.  Anyway, I have no idea what the painting is so I just took a photo of Cocos and put it on there. The same painting also goes on the opposite side of the cafe in the same general area.

The lamp disappears between the shot when Grant drops off the kids and when Grant and Ellie find the kids after the kitchen sequence. I theorize one of the raptor's nicked it and that's what took the second raptor so long to enter the kitchen

My Models - Jurassic Park Breaker Box

And here's the model that hppavTest was created specifically for... The breaker box from Jurassic Park.

Originally I was going to make this for Jurassic Park Oblivion.  When you reach the Visitor Center Compound all the facilities would be shut down, you'd have to restart the generator, turn on the breakers, then return to the Control Room.

Then I started work on my recreation of Jurassic Park SNES (which is still in development).  The first thing you do in that game is turn on these breakers, so I thought - why not actually try to implement the original Jurassic Park Oblivion puzzle?

The model I had made for JPO was lost when my old computer's hard drive crashed so I had to recreate it.  Not too hard.  I also had to find where I wrote down the breaker list, which is as follows:

Herbivore Feeding Compound
Visitors Cntr. Compound
Visitors Cntr. Control Rm.
Visitors Cntr. Tour
Genetics / Fertilization / Hatchery
Grounds Tour
Grounds Surveilance System
Maintenance Shed / Bunker
Carnivore Feeding Compound
Raptor Pen Fence
T-Rex Paddock Fence
Perimeter Fence

After double checking to make sure that my list was correct, I set to work on recreating the box itself.  Modelling the box proved to be the easiest part of the whole process.

As I went to implement the box, I started putting each thing in one at a time.  Saving, testing, and backing up after each tiny change.  This is key in making such complex puzzles.

The first puzzle was the primer handle.  Knowing Anne's arm controls are pretty well... clunky, I decided to only have you pull up on the handle once.  As you pull up on the handle, it'll hit a trigger box.  This box changes the texture of the button panel to say "Charged" over the yellow button and it will activate the trigger over the green "Push to Close" button.

The green button was a pain to get working because of the fact that it had to change SO MANY textures.  I had to actually create TWO triggers, one to turn the breakers' center lights on and one to turn on all the green lights.  This is because of the limits on how many actions a trigger can take.  I looked at the triggers for the Cray Puzzle in the Lab level for inspiration (though I still haven't figured out how that puzzle actually works).

But once I got that figured out, I decided that as you turn on the red buttons, you should only be able to turn them on in order top to bottom... This makes it easier to script the "Generator Power On" text and the completion of the puzzle.

Turning on the red buttons took a long time to figure out because Anne's hand kept missing the button due to the physics of the box itself, so I ended up moving the physics and increasing the size of the triggers to be rather large.  It can still be a little quirky to try to activate.

And then came getting that big door to work.  I had never done doors before and I found out the hard way that you needed a Density value to go with the Mass value for the door to be able to move.  I spent way too much time figuring that out.  If I remember right, I found it was the reason why doors didn't work like they were supposed to in Pine Valley.

My Models - Jurassic Park Explorer

Probably one of my most famous models to date is the Jurassic Park Explorer.  Originally intended for Jurassic Park: Oblivion, the explorers were eventually released as a part of a small test level called "hppavTest" which featured a real working breaker box.  I will detail the process of making that breaker box in a later post.

This is actually the second or third time I have modeled the explorers.  Previous attempts were way too high poly for the engine to handle.  Ironically it was a 1130 polygon Explorer mesh I found on Turbo Squid that I used to defeat the 300 polygon limit myth that was prevalent in the early Diehard Forums days.

The explorer model includes 5 working doors, two screens on a separate mesh so you can put whatever you want on them, and are as movie accurate as anything else I have made.  However, only Explorer 05 currently has magnets.  I was going to make magnets for the others but I had computer troubles and only released this after quickly grabbing it before the computer crashed.  Of course those troubles have been solved and I could go back and fix not only the magnets, but the way too high poly bumpers in the near future.

When I was a kid I always wanted to own my own Jurassic Park Explorer.  I thought they were the coolest looking cars I have ever seen.  And yes, I do own the Jungle Explorer toy, haha.  In my opinion, they need a large scaled (like 1:18 or 1:24) diecast series of the cars from Jurassic Park.

Trespasser Characters - The Alpha Raptor

The Alpha Raptor is the game's final boss, located on the summit of Mt. Watson, and is a member of the Tribe C group of Raptors.

As the player plays through the game, they hear a few of the voice overs meant to tell the story of this raptor.

The Alpha Raptor is the first raptor bred by InGen and the first animal cloned on Isla Sorna.  The artificial ovum was fertilized in November 1983. (VH30, VH31)

The raptor was released from the Lab facilities into the open on April 22, 1985. (VH32)  It originally kept to the south, hunting herds there... And it grew very large.  In 1988 it started moving northward towards the mountain (VH40).  Along the way it managed to get into the town but no information on what occurred there is given in the game, just that they discovered that it had used the sewer pipes to enter (VH39).

What is known is that it did eventually make it to the summit of Mt. Watson and lived amongst the heartier Tribe C Raptors.

It appears at the very top of the mountain after Anne radios for help, forcing her to kill it before she can climb over a pile of crates to get to the helipad and wait for rescue.

Unimplemented Idea #1 - Sinking Boat

It was in the early days of Trespasser Modding. 2002.  No one knew about ASA animation in those days.

MikeTheRaptor, I believe, was helping me plan out Jurassic Park the Mod (which is what JPO was called in those days).  The original plot was going to start out with a ship called the Explorer sinking due to hitting some unseen thing underwater. lol, irony.

One question was how to show the sinking of the ship?  There could be an animation but since I only had gMax, which had no renderer, then in game would be the only working option for me.

So I thought about the possibility of using the same mechanism behind the bridge collapse in the demo, ActionType 10:

group TrigWWFall-00 = {
    string Class = "CLocationTrigger"
    bool PlayerEnterTrigger = true
    int FireCount = 1
    int ActionType = 10
    string Target = "S_AlumWw10x2-02"
    int Z = -1
}

The idea was to enclose the ship in a single large box, rest the stern on another large box, and drop a third box onto the ship.

However, since I never even got that far in the initial work on the project, the planned sequence was dropped..  Now, with the discovery of ASA animation, this could be handled much more simply and elegantly.  But this is the kind of thinking outside of the box that was required when we knew nothing about what we were doing.

Trespony

Anne from Trespasser ponified.. Why? Why not?

Link to it on my DeviantArt: MulletManSam

Development of East Dock

East Dock was a level created by myself and Draconisaurus. It was originally going to be released during the Week of Tres, but due to several delays the project didn't get released until much later  This post is a detailed explanation of the development process, which some will hopefully find helpful in their own project.

I originally was going to do a demo of my failed "Jurassic Park Oblivion" mod that centered on finding Nedry's Jeep and exploring the wrecked docks.  Draco liked the location but not the premise.  He was the one who came up with the idea of doing a campaign around Nedry trying to make it to the docks from the Jeep wreck.  A sort of "What if?" alternate universe level.

I used MS Paint while looking at Jurassic Park Legacy's Nublar Map to do a rough map of how the area was laid out, which Draco used as basis for laying the roads and building the level.  Vegetation was planned to be a mixture of the TresCom Isle plants and the retail Trespasser plants. The docks themselves were designed using an image I found on Google Image Search.  However, due to the changes in Google since then I can't relocate the image and the reference folder for the East Dock project was lost in my last hard drive crash.

Draco pretty much recreated the docks based on that image.  He modeled the docks themselves and the phone box and used models from TC~Isle and the retail Lab level to create the docks.  The high security storage cage area was my idea and the light posts, water tower, sign, and van were models I made specifically for the docks area.  Virtually all the textures used in this level was done by Draco except for the van and the dock sign.

The Jeep was the only model that had been made prior to the development of East Dock.  Draco spent a good two months working on the mesh and making new textures.  You can ask any of the admins who chipped in occasionally (Slugger and machf specifically) about how much Draco fussed with that mesh.  The Easter Egg in the Jeep, the Seinfeld tape, was something Slugger suggested and was put in by Draco.

Nedry's torso was my model.  Draco took that and made the head and limbs himself.  He then had machf rig the mesh since he had been doing a lot of experiments with rigging different meshes to Anne's rig.   The motion sensors were my model and designed based of Jurassic Park for the Super Nintendo.  The yellow road signs were my idea based on this image:

 

If you look closely you can see something that appears similar to the outlines on the signs used in the level.  I remember Draco thinking that was quite neat.  I'm personally surprised there wasn't a more direct shot of the sign, since they clearly put some effort into making it look like it fit in.

The tunnel was a lofted spline based on the outline of the cafe from when Nedry said "There's the road."  Fun fact: The tunnel's mirrored from what it should have been and it wasn't caught until after it was too late to do anything without yet another delay.

The island signs and reflector posts were my models.  The fence and gate later on is my model as well.  Draco, as stated earlier did the textures.

The idea to use the SS Venture was mainly to cut time.  All Draco had to do was change the name to the SS Anne B, the name of the boat in the book.

The last thing put in the level?  That van.  Probably the lowest quality item in the entire level.  I'm surprised that we didn't just scrap it since it's just there to add visual interest.

And Draco's custom settings for the ATX rain became the standard settings because Big Red thought it looked awesome.

Speaking of rain, did you know that the TC Test Rain (used in the tunnel transitions) was based on an idea I had back in 2002?  Lacking the skills to do it myself, I suggested the idea on the forums.  Remdul managed to actually attempt it, though it proved to be a resource hog.

Now, here's the funny things about this level now that Jurassic Park the Game has come out.

The guy at the dock was played by Draco.  We had no reference for what he looked like except for a highly pixelated security cam image in the movie, which gave us some leeway.  Ironically the guy in the game kinda looks and sounds like Draco's representation of the character.

Then there's how both us AND Telltale's team did the same error in the Jeep crash scene.  You see, in the movie the Jeep slides down a small slope before it levels out on top of the fallen tree, but in our level and in the game the Jeep wreck is on the same height as the road it drove off.
  
And that, pretty much, is all there is to it.

Rogue Distraction

Welcome to the blog of Samuel England, aka hppav - an administrator at TresCom.  I'll start posting real content in a bit, but for now I'm just setting it up.