Project Offset - Gameplay bluestargalaxy4 2007-07-30 | Epic beasts, exciting combat, and stunning visuals await you!
Project Offset - GDC 2006 Dragon bluestargalaxy4 2007-03-14 | The Offset Engine showing off some realistic movements of a dragon sitting on top of a rock formation surrounded by water inside a cave. ---- Shadowing The Offset Engine uses a texture based shadowing approach, utilizing hardware shadow mapping technology when available. All objects in the world are affected uniformly by shadowing, with correct self-shadowing on characters and other complex objects. Shadow softness and resolution can be controlled on a per light basis. ---- Shadowing notable features Shadow have the ability to conform their shape to any normal maps that are applied to a surface, a new technique we dub "displacement shadow mapping". Shadows work correctly with shader-based opacity, with light passing through the transparent regions.
Project Offset - Sneak Peak 2 bluestargalaxy4 2007-03-14 | A peek at what we are making and the technology behind it. released in August, it was a giant success, gathering interest worldwide. Aside from publisher and fan interest, the video also proved to be a valuable recruiting tool. ---- The Technology The Offset Engine is a complete platform for creating next generation games. Though it aims to be a top tier engine, OE is not just built with large developers in mind. Every aspect of the engine is designed around the goal of reducing development time and cost, while empowering designers and artists with the tools they need to create spectacular visual effects and immersive environments. ---- Post Processing Effects such as motion blur, depth of field, and specular bloom are all possible with the engine's post processing architecture. The Offset Engine is the first engine to utilize true cinematic quality motion blur on all objects. Rather than being something that is applied as a simple special effect, the motion blur works uniformly on everything that gets rendered, including moving and deforming objects and particles. This, combined with unified lighting, shading, and shadowing, bridges the gap in quality between real time and prerendered graphics. ---- Post processing notable features Post processing can be set up in the C++ code by "chaining" together passes. Any pass can be used as the input to another pass, allowing for elaborate effects. Post processing shaders can be created in the node based shader editor, just like any other shade. ---- Particles Similar to Offset's shader builder system, particle effects also use a node based approach. This allows for very complex effects to be created by artists without the need for a programmer. "Super emitter" type effects and particles that change their properties based on various conditions are trivial to set up. Artists familiar with 3dsmax's "Particle Flow" system will be right at home with the Offset Engine. ---- Particle system notable features Particles work seamlessly with the engine's motion blur system. Even the simplest of effects, such as the simple black square texture above, is brought to life with motion blur. Every particle can casts its own shadow into the scene.
Valve Software - HL2 Ep.2 GDC 07 In-Depth Interview bluestargalaxy4 2007-03-14 | Director of marketing, Doug Lombardi, talks about Half-Life 2 Orange, Portal, Valve on the Wii, and Gabe Newell's comments about the PS3.
Valve Software - Half-Life 2: Episode 2 GC 2006 Interview bluestargalaxy4 2007-03-14 | An up-close look at the next chapter in the Half-Life saga and its accompanying projects.
Project Offset - Crowd Test bluestargalaxy4 2007-03-14 | Hundreds of Goblins running realtime on the Offset Engine. ---- Gameplay Systems Offset's "simulation" code and entity system makes new gameplay systems extremely easy to implement. New entity code automatically gets exposed to the editor's interface, so that no editor specific code has to be written to support new gameplay code. The engine is capable of displaying large numbers of entities on the screen while maintaining a smooth frame rate. Below is a simple test of goblins spawning from a teapot, yet demonstrates the engines ability to draw hundreds of characters on screen.
Project Offset - Sneak Peak 1 bluestargalaxy4 2007-03-12 | This was the video that started it all. Released in June, this video shows some character designs, detailed models, HDR lighting, and ends with a taste of the game itself. ---- The Game "Project Offset" (working title) is a first-person shooter set in an epic fantasy world. The legendary tale opens with the selection of heroes' classes and appearances and leads the players across a perilous journey through the world. The quests heroes partake in rely on detailed scripting to enhance the drama of key moments within this war saga. The world consists of sprawling environments that convey the massive scope of this fantasy setting and lead heroes along roads, rivers and natural trails as they uncover dark mysteries within dank caverns, fortified castles and labyrinthine dungeons. Colossal cities, ancient structures and other war-ravaged settings are the stage of large-scale battles available in both the single-player and multiplayer campaigns. Treasures will aid collectors in the form of myriad weapons, armour and magical artifacts. Heroes must take care when tampering with the forces of the arcane as magic is still an art full of mystery and unpredictability. Despite the opportunity to improve heroes' arsenals, the core of combat still relies on the skills of the player and not their gear. The battles of this conflict are not won with weapons but with the skills of those that wield them. Heroes may band together in cooperative play through the single-player campaign hosted on developer-run servers where persistent experience points and rare artifacts provide a compelling reason to relive the adventure again and again. ---- Editor Framework The Offset Editor allows all aspects of the game and game content to be created and modified inside a single application. It is built from the ground up with the goal of decreasing development time in every aspect of game creation. ---- Editor Framework notable features: For designers that prefer to work close to the metal, all content is editable external to the editor via easily readable XML files. "Hot loading" is supported for all content files. If a file, like an image, is modified externally, the editor will automatically detect the change and reload it instantly. Game code can be run while the designer edits a map. ---- Unified Lighting and Shading The Offset Engine uses a fully 64-bit floating point HDR rendering pipeline. This allows pixels to encode color values which are brighter than the displayable range of the monitor, enabling cinematic color precision. The engine fully supports normal mapping technology, which allows source art comprised of millions of polygons to be reduced to just a few thousand polygons with no apparent loss of detail. The Offset Engine's advanced shader system allows artists to create elaborate effects without needing a programmer. Complex effects which might normally take a programmer several hours to create and debug can now be created by an artist in seconds. Several different types of light sources are supported, including omni light, omni projector, spotlight, spotlight projector, directional, and sky light. The projector lights have the ability to cast any shader into the scene, allowing for interesting projected effects such as caustics or "strobing" effects. ---- Lighting and Shading notable features The node based shader system used by the shader builder is integrated tightly with the rest of the engine. All shader code is internally generated on the fly as the engine runs, without the need to save code out to external files. Programmers that wish to extend the capabilities of the shader editor may do so by adding "shader modules". These are small, simple to create XML files which define the behavior of the shader nodes. With other engines, often multiple versions of the same shader must be created for the shader to work under different lighting conditions. The Offset Engine, on the other hand, automatically generates all the necessary permutations for the shader to work in any lighting environment.
Stuntman: Ignition Montage Trailer bluestargalaxy4 2007-03-10 | The sequal to Stuntman, developed by Paradigm Entertainment and Published by THQ.
Portal - Now youre thinking with portals. bluestargalaxy4 2007-03-10 | A first-person single-player puzzle game developed by Valve Corporation. Portal is an experiment with gameplay mechanics and portal based technology. Also, Portal will be shipping with Half-Life 2: Episode Two.
CellFactor: Revolution Announcement - Trailer 3 bluestargalaxy4 2007-03-10 | After CellFactor's demonstration at E3 in 2006, Artificial Studios decided to develop CellFactor into a full game.
CellFactor: Combat Training - Trailer 2 bluestargalaxy4 2007-03-10 | Combat simulator demonstration showing the Ageia PhysX card in action.
CellFactor: Combat Training - Trailer 1 bluestargalaxy4 2007-03-10 | Combat simulator demonstration showing the Ageia PhysX card in action.
Artificial Studios Backyard PRT Tech Demo bluestargalaxy4 2007-02-28 | Running on a Radeon 9700 at 35 fps, this scene employs complex global illumination effects, such as soft-shadowing, interreflections, and subsurface scattering. Previously only possible using static lightmapping methods, these effects are modelled here in real-time using a technique known as precomputed radiance transfer. Reality's lighting model scales to previous and next-generation hardware, and is also scalable to moving and deformable objects, providing the ultimate solution for next generation games.
Artificial Studios Haunted Mansion Tech Demo bluestargalaxy4 2007-02-28 | Our first release was a demonstration of a complete interior scene running on a standard Radeon 9700 graphics card, which runs at a sustained 40fps (slightly lower here due to video capture overhead). The demo illustrates the performance and features our engine can deliver on even modest platforms. As with all our media, there were no edits, external processing, "scripting", or special tweaks. This in-game footage includes demonstrations of per-pixel lighting, virtual displacement mapping, world shadowing, High-Dynamic Range Rendering, Blue-Shift, Post-Process spectral flares and glares, advanced rigid body physics, reflection mapping, dynamic projection mapping, rain & lightning effects, and various custom shaders.
