SUBSURFACE THE GAME

Take 30 minutes on Wednesday, July 22 at 11:00 a.m. to learn new skills with 3DVIA Virtools 5.

Rapid Game Prototyping and Development with 3DVIA Virtools 5
Wednesday July 22, from 11:00 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. EDT
“Build a multiplatform game in weeks / months instead of years!”

Understand how gaming companies benefit from the use of 3DVIAVirtools for rapid development, whether for internal use or consumer products on the PC or console platforms. Learn from concrete examples of projects (including development of the Subsurface game, which was completed in 60 days) and a development pipeline description.  You will be exposed to tips and tricks on how to best take advantage of the latest release of 3DVIA Virtools.

>Here’s a link to a hi-res video

Here’s some video snippets of the underwater enviroment and game controls.

because we’re aiming at current gaming pc’s but in an online enviroment as well , we want to keep filesize low, so the enviroment features a selected amount of normal map shaders on the base enviroment. In an extension of this optimisation, all foliage, fish (now only a shark), lightbeams etc etc are spawned as a relatively simple placement and spawning script, iterating over a selection of spawnable items.

There’s no particle effects in the video , but these and other sfx will be added later. Als the Submarine itself is not using any dynamic lighting, to optimise the scene, we chose to keep the submarine static, because its also physically always within the same lightcone, (it being the source of most lights in the world) We’re also hard at work to create a large selection of spawn-able foliage, such as brain corals, spunges, and other deep-sea flora.

Deep sea Corals? When we think of lush coral based ecosystems we always tend to think of warm shallow tropical settings, but did you know there’s large coral systems in the deep atlantic, apparantly the colder streams of the north atlantic are very rich in foodsources, allowing corals to grow much much deeper, where as tropical waters tend to be poor in nutrients, requiring coral to seek nurishment close to the surface.

here’s a link to the story

As the subsurface game is a submarine adventure, it wouldn’t be complete without a loading bay. Part of the surface ship supporting the expedition the loading bay is where the player gets introduced to the story and the characters, as well as the main interface for starting the gameplay.

It will serve as a brief exploratory space and enviroment to showcase the virtools 5.0 character animation features.

Just to showcase how easily the scene has been accomplished inside the engine, here are a few steps of implementation

step 1 : importing the model. This image is of the bare model including only vertex colors for a base shading, and as a base for future shaders (ambient occlusion etc etc)

step 2 : Adding lightmaps. Basically this is a static scene, there will be caustics (more on that further on), but the general area can be lit with a static lightmap generated in this case from 3Dstudio Max.

step 3: Detail. Due to the speed of production and the online requirements we forego explicit lighting on the detail and interactive objects, this also serves to shows you can combine many techniques to get an overall result. In this case the details receive vertex coloring to light them from the same solution as the lightmap. The waterplane in the bassin receives a virtools standard water shader with some reflection effects.