FIRST Video Game: What should be prerendered?

[Mike Ciance]

it has been mentioned by several people, including JVN, that we need to keep this game simple if it is going to happen. i think we should definitely have some things be prerendered, instead of realtime, to simplify things. here are some ideas i have for pre-rendered things:

a prerendered crowd:
i mentioned this in another thread, but i will go into much more detail here. we should have a bitmap image with small blobs that look somewhat like people. we can tile this on a large plane, which we slant to look like filled bleachers. to add some attitude to the game, we could make a second image that looks like people standign up with their hands up in the air. we could switch the whole crowd to this when a close or important round ends. at random points during the match (say, when an important move is made) we could have the images alternate in a pattern to give the illusion that the crowd is doing the wave.

prerendered balls:
if we use a game with balls, they should be prerendered. this would even be more beginner-friendly, because we would have the "5" or "2x" labels always face the player.

prerendered drivers, refs, human players:
i think this is a must if we are going to included people in it. we could have a few sprites for each character (ex. a ref standing, throwing flag, motioning for pin).

the robots should be realtime without a doubt, but what are some other opinions on what should and should not be prerendered?

[Astronouth7303]

any and all decals can be prerendered and placed as a texture. any background can be prerendered, and a 'player view' border would be prerendered. after that, it starts looking cheesy.

[Mike Ciance]

Originally Posted by Astronouth7303

any and all decals can be prerendered and placed as a texture. any background can be prerendered, and a 'player view' border would be prerendered. after that, it starts looking cheesy.

cheesy, possibly, but for the preliminary version, i think gameplay and actually getting the thing working right should be the objectives. we can send that as a preview version to some people in FIRST, then continue to polish it.

[impulse3D]

I would be willing to do the crowd AVIs with "the wave" and other additional crowd features (being pretty much just cheering and waving hands in the air, etc, but send ideas my way!). I think that it'd look better having an AVI textured onto a plane rather than still bitmaps, and a bit more exciting as well, and I don't think that it'll effect anything too much because it's only an AVI that has to be played and not actually rendered in real time. If it ends up looking a little corny with just one plane, we could always add several and render AVIs for those to get somewhat of an effect of depth. But then again, you really won't see a clear difference if you have a stationary viewport for the camera in the driver's section. Give me the go-ahead that you've approved of using an AVI texture, and I'll get down to work.

[Astronouth7303]

Anybody can work on any resource thing they want! (Resources are things that aren't coded. This is pretty much everything but the engine. Resources include (but aren't limited to): Textures, CADs, sounds, text, images, etc.)

Keep a vector version handy (if possible), as we don't know what resolution we want, yet.

(and good call with the AVIs)

[Mike Ciance]

i made up a preliminary logo for the game. it obviously won't be the final logo, because i did it in paint and the name isn't even decided yet, but here is what i made up. see if you like the basic styling of it. the colors and layout especially (i skewed the text on purpose)

[impulse3D]

I think that the game's logo should look just how you drafted it--the FIRST logo, with the name of the game to the right. The color scheme looks as it should, making evident the identity of FIRST and the game's connection to the organization; and of course we'll come up with a nifty 3D logo for it once a name has been decided.

[Ryan M.]

Originally Posted by afflictionblade

prerendered balls:
if we use a game with balls, they should be prerendered. this would even be more beginner-friendly, because we would have the "5" or "2x" labels always face the player.

For initial versions, sure, but I say we have to render them later so they can appear to actually roll... The cheesy thing coming to mind.

[Mike Ciance]

Originally Posted by Texan

For initial versions, sure, but I say we have to render them later so they can appear to actually roll... The cheesy thing coming to mind.

maybe something we could do to minimize the cheesiness is create 3 ball sprites for each type -- 1 still and 2 with swirls which we can alternate at different speeds to give the effect of fast or slow rolling. then when it stops it would display the 5 or 2x facing the player. maybe this is a good median between unanimated and realtime

Rendering and animating a textured sphere is pretty easy, and is probably the least of our worries.