Progress on the ninja game continues, though I have been inhibited by taking 21 units of classes this quarter, so I don’t have as much spare time for my own projects as I might like. Erc and I are currently struggling to get a working 3DS Max => .scene file => .scene loader pipeline working so that we can import some level geometry and start making something that looks like a game. Today I was stress testing Ogre and my video hardware to see what level of scene complexity I should be shooting for in my game. I could talk more, but the screen shots are really more interesting than I am.
These ninjas use a skeletal animation technique
My hardware (1.9 GHz Pentium 4M, 512 MB 266 DDR RAM, Geforce440Go) is brought to it’s knees by a scene containing an army of 400 ninjas.
My game doesn’t really involve armies of ninjas (yet), but it’s nice to know that there’s quite a bit of headroom even using a poor graphics chip. With LOD techniques it would probably be possible to have a game with 400 skeletally animated characters in a level, so long as they were never all bunched up and viewable in a single frame, like in the 2nd shot above.
I took screen shots of my huge ninja army at a higher resolution. If you like ninjas at all, even a little bit, you owe it to yourself to look at these:
Ninja Army 1
Ninja Army 2
The astute reader will bring up the point that ninjas don’t march in armies. To that reader I say: my ninjas are badass. They do what they want.
