This is the end...

AwesomeTown Post Mortem

The Good
AwesomeTown was, for lack of a better word, awesome. At the beginning of the project Joe and I sat down to decide what we wanted to do. We knew that we wanted to make a city but we didn’t know what type. We spent a couple hours going through the various types of cities we could make. We decided to make a larger scale city with an industrial section. We made a list of assets that we wanted in the city and held a draft to see who would model what. After that we set up a schedule and milestones that we needed to meet. We had 23 days to each model 23 items. A lot of people called us crazy for trying something so big, but we felt we could handle it.
Communication throughout the project was also very good. The whole time Joe and I were on the same page. In some projects I’ve been in the other people were doing things that had nothing to do with what the outcome was going to be. This didn’t happen in this project. Every time one of us thought something the other one was on the same track.

The Bad
People thought we were taking on more than we could handle. They were wrong. However, we found out we were taking on too much for Torque to handle. We were pretty much on schedule when we decided start putting things into the engine. We put roughly 6 DTS shapes in there (totaling approximately 2,000 polys) and Torque went crazy. The frame rate was horrible. This wouldn’t have normally bothered me, however, the final city had thousands of objects in it. This is what hurt us the most. We really wanted to run around the city and shoot Justin’s chainsaw’s at each other.

What I Learned
I learned a few things during this project. The first thing I learned is that Joe and I are stupid. We should not try and make an epic city in 23 days. I also learned that Torque likes texture files at 512 instead of 1024. Even though Torque can handle 1024 it doesn’t want to do it. I think we could’ve got more into Torque had we used 512 textures. Another thing I learned was that the advanced engine doesn’t like objects to be in a group when they are exported. The regular engine is a horrible place to put assets in. Finally max starts to slow down when you have thousands of objects that total over 119,000 polys.

What the Future Beholds
I’m hoping that we can put this city into an engine. If we can’t get it into Torque, I’m playing with the Unreal Editor right now. Hopefully we can get this thing into one of those. I also want to develop the city a bit more. Traffic lights, telephone wires, debris, and other tiny overlooked items will really bring out the city more. Hopefully I can get some really nice renders out of this city to bring to GDC with me.AwesomeTown Post Mortem

Not enough good things happening.

So this weekend was a big letdown. Joe and I decided to get together and put all of our objects into Torque. It was a good idea at the time. So after we got three buildings and six streets in there Torque runs at about 2 Frames Per Second. Sad times. We discovered, with the help of Jake, that the school computers have a graphics card thing that TGEA doesn't like. We need to switch it to OpenGL for it to run smooth. Well after some research it turns out TGEA 1.8 will let you decide if you want to run in OpenGL or Direct3D. Good news. The bad news is the school only has TGEA 1.7. Again, sad times. "It's ok" we said, "we'll use the normal engine." As it turns out the normal engine is not as easy to place assest in as the advanced is. It will take us a very long time to lay out the city perfectly. On top of that, Torque is lighting our building in a very messed up way. So the problems are building up into a great big problem sandwich that Joe and I don't really want to eat. So, after about a hour of switching back and forth between engines trying to decide which one sucks less, we decided that we will export all of our assets for the Torque engine. However we will not build the city in the engine. We will have the city laid out in 3D Studio Max so that everyone will have an idea of what AwesomeTown will look like. With any luck Torque 3D will come out tomorrow and we can just export as a collada file and be done with it. Not putting the city together in the engine makes us both sad pandas.

This is the biggest setback we've had through this whole project. Everything else has been going great. Joe and I have stuck closely to the schedule that we prepared. Sometimes we were ahead, sometimes behind. For the most part we were close. It's very dissapointing to come so far and not be able to make it the rest of the way. Hopefully we will be able to put all of the assets in the engine someday soon. Until then I must end this very long rant. Thank you for listening.



Mmmmmm corned beef.

Some type of park structure.