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!