Briosafreak
Lived Through the Heat Death
By this time you all have seen the Fallout3 pics we`ve posted earlier, one of the developers involved in making it left a few notes about it here on NMA:
<blockquote>To explain what everyone's looking at:
The "Main Menu" screen
This is a realtime 3D image. The two characters you see on the screen are all the in-game models. In game the largest you'd ever really see them while just moving around is about the size of the characters forearm. In the inventory and character creation, you would see the characters about this big though. The shadows as mentioned before. They looked good in game, but here but so close up, the self shadowing looked really harsh on the characters. One of the ideas here was to take the characters in your part from your last saved game and stick them there everytime you entered that screen. The skybox animated, the train animated into the scene, and the characters moved around in their idle animations. Eventually we were going to do lots of cool stuff with this screen, but it was a really nice start.
The Vault
The screen shot looks like a pre-prototype one as it's missing the lighting that gets burned in after being laid out. As for the vault suits missing numbers, i think this is just an oversight. It was real easy to change vault numbers as it was just a socket on the back of the caracter that we could change really easy. We had a bunch of vault numbers made as well as numbers made for the prison suit. There was lots of cool little stuff going on in this level; characters walked around and interacted w/ stuff, there were all kinds of cool computer noises, the doors opened w/ the old Fallout sound (we used lots of old sounds for our prototype to help keep the feel), there were some cool effects from a broken generator and a floating eye bot. It just looked like a vault.
The Exterior
This level was the most impressive to look at. All the buildings, streets, etc were built with our tile and prop sets. When you walked into the buildings or peeked through the windows, the roofs faded off super clean to reveal the interior (the interiors of buildings didn't render while you were walking around outside, thus dropping lots of polygons to draw). Outside you also got into some shoot outs which looked fantastic. We had a flamethrower, minigun, cattleprod, knive, and pistol. We had a ton more made, but we only needed a few for the demo so we really wanted to show off the more flashy ones and have a good variety as well. The glass on the windows would blow out when hit with stray bullets and the flaming barrels would blow up as well (you have to have exploding barrels in game, it's an unwritten rule). There was a car similar to the one you see in the pic on fire which looked fantastic. The most impressive thing to the Fallout fans was when you got to the end of this level, you stood at a huge vault enterance. To the right of the door was a terminal w/ a flickering lamp which you clicked and you guessed it. The vault door opened in real time. It looked so beautiful! After we did our prototype, we showed the demo to a few people around the company who were Fallout fans and I heard no less than 3 people gasp for air as it opened. It was a great moment.
Too bad they're not the best screenshots, but at least you guys got to see something from our work. We had some really cool stuff scheduled to get done over the next few months too; broken tiles for the building sets (they integrated perfectly w/ the building tiles so you could make a destroyed building in just about any shape), the PC vehicles (yes plural), more creature models and concepts, animations, game functionality (including starting work on putting in the turn-based support), etc. Anyhow, just wanted to clarify some of the speculations on what this stuff is.
</blockquote>
Thanks for the explanations, and you guys and girls can see a few more pics of the Fallout Milestone Tracker here and here.
<blockquote>To explain what everyone's looking at:
The "Main Menu" screen
This is a realtime 3D image. The two characters you see on the screen are all the in-game models. In game the largest you'd ever really see them while just moving around is about the size of the characters forearm. In the inventory and character creation, you would see the characters about this big though. The shadows as mentioned before. They looked good in game, but here but so close up, the self shadowing looked really harsh on the characters. One of the ideas here was to take the characters in your part from your last saved game and stick them there everytime you entered that screen. The skybox animated, the train animated into the scene, and the characters moved around in their idle animations. Eventually we were going to do lots of cool stuff with this screen, but it was a really nice start.
The Vault
The screen shot looks like a pre-prototype one as it's missing the lighting that gets burned in after being laid out. As for the vault suits missing numbers, i think this is just an oversight. It was real easy to change vault numbers as it was just a socket on the back of the caracter that we could change really easy. We had a bunch of vault numbers made as well as numbers made for the prison suit. There was lots of cool little stuff going on in this level; characters walked around and interacted w/ stuff, there were all kinds of cool computer noises, the doors opened w/ the old Fallout sound (we used lots of old sounds for our prototype to help keep the feel), there were some cool effects from a broken generator and a floating eye bot. It just looked like a vault.
The Exterior
This level was the most impressive to look at. All the buildings, streets, etc were built with our tile and prop sets. When you walked into the buildings or peeked through the windows, the roofs faded off super clean to reveal the interior (the interiors of buildings didn't render while you were walking around outside, thus dropping lots of polygons to draw). Outside you also got into some shoot outs which looked fantastic. We had a flamethrower, minigun, cattleprod, knive, and pistol. We had a ton more made, but we only needed a few for the demo so we really wanted to show off the more flashy ones and have a good variety as well. The glass on the windows would blow out when hit with stray bullets and the flaming barrels would blow up as well (you have to have exploding barrels in game, it's an unwritten rule). There was a car similar to the one you see in the pic on fire which looked fantastic. The most impressive thing to the Fallout fans was when you got to the end of this level, you stood at a huge vault enterance. To the right of the door was a terminal w/ a flickering lamp which you clicked and you guessed it. The vault door opened in real time. It looked so beautiful! After we did our prototype, we showed the demo to a few people around the company who were Fallout fans and I heard no less than 3 people gasp for air as it opened. It was a great moment.
Too bad they're not the best screenshots, but at least you guys got to see something from our work. We had some really cool stuff scheduled to get done over the next few months too; broken tiles for the building sets (they integrated perfectly w/ the building tiles so you could make a destroyed building in just about any shape), the PC vehicles (yes plural), more creature models and concepts, animations, game functionality (including starting work on putting in the turn-based support), etc. Anyhow, just wanted to clarify some of the speculations on what this stuff is.
</blockquote>Thanks for the explanations, and you guys and girls can see a few more pics of the Fallout Milestone Tracker here and here.
