Tools at Lionhead

re: Tools at Lionhead

Sam — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 12:36:43 GMT

and informative blog entry Sam!

And I like that image...

re: Tools at Lionhead

BayStone — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 12:43:32 GMT

Finally! Been waiting for this. So, thank you.

As for the FableEd... it looks pretty much as I expected. Didn't expect that much buttons, but otherwise seems to be about right.

re: Tools at Lionhead

kevingleich91 — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 13:37:16 GMT

CHicken coops!!! and dog farm... hmm. i wonder if the owner farms dogs. OR maybe your dog originates there? cant wait till i get home from school so i can overanaylse it. this is like feeding a grain of rice to a bunch of starved crazy homeless people haha

re: Tools at Lionhead

maggot — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 14:06:33 GMT

FablED looks pretty cool and dog farm ?

Thanks for the blog and hey republic !

re: Tools at Lionhead

midnyht — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 14:36:43 GMT

Thanks for this, I love reading about the tools that are at work behind the scenes. I never really considered that there was a team writing program tools from scratch in video games until the 3rd vid diary.

I am guessing nothing is concrete forever, since codes may become obselete when people think of more efficient or comprehensive ways of writing them. Does this ever come in the way of writing new tools, relying on re-using older assets?(I dont know much about game development, so forgive me if I sound like an ***)

re: Tools at Lionhead

sCM redruM — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 14:53:40 GMT

How do the textures work with the adjusted height fields?? Are the textures oversized so when the height fields reduce or enlarge they adapt cleanly, or do the artists have to constantly resize on their own to limit the space as much as possible??

Also, since we've seen that fences can break, are they in the editor as an object, because I don't see something like, "NewObjectFurnitureStaticBWFenceBroken"...

Nice blog by the way...

re: Tools at Lionhead

Mortalitis_Infinitas — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 14:55:29 GMT

Very cool stuff. Quite interesting.

re: Tools at Lionhead

tigereyes — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 15:20:43 GMT

Will the read "Sam" please stand up...
...we're going to have a problem here.

No serious, that was a great post. That picture is very interesting.

re: Tools at Lionhead

AlbionKnight — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 18:53:46 GMT

Is this built in C# or some other language?
Can I get a copy

...

Didn't think so

re: Tools at Lionhead

marcopolom — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 20:35:22 GMT

lol, i see you guys have decided to remove the excessive amount of underscores from the names of your objects, they started to get to be a bit of a pain

well partially atleast...

re: Tools at Lionhead

Jontis_Pyro — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 21:10:46 GMT

Ywy theres going to be a lamp on a stick! now fable 2 is exactly how i dreamed it to be *flutters eyelashes* XD.... serious now, nice blog enjoyedthe read

re: Tools at Lionhead

SfK-Pyro — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 23:20:48 GMT

I know Jontis! Im excited about the lamps too! And they also have caves!

this is preety interesting though... and seriously, two Sams?!?! Madness!

re: Tools at Lionhead

MJLOVER — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 07:19:22 GMT

Aye, great blog you got here Sam.

Very informative indeed. I hope you write more blogs in the future mate!

re: Tools at Lionhead

ProfYaffel — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 09:47:33 GMT

Much better than the stuff that other "Sam" churns out...

Hee, hee...

re: Tools at Lionhead

locater16 — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 10:32:31 GMT

I was wondering how you guys handled placement of art models you'd need en masse and randomised, like grass and underbrush. Is it a brush you can sweep along heightfields, is it tied to ground textures, or something else entirely?

I know, kinda stupid. But since I like modding games I have a bit of experience with the various ways this can be accomplished and was wondering what you guys did?

re: Tools at Lionhead

lyrae16 — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 17:56:07 GMT

hmm. this is awesome thankyou for telling us about it.
i've zoomed in on the picture and I notice you've named it something... interesting... ^^
will we see this farm/fishing hut quite early in the game, i wonder?

*dances around*
keep going everyone
xxx

re: Tools at Lionhead

goodolfable — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 02:14:18 GMT

FableEd looks impressive

re: Tools at Lionhead

Sam Swain — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 10:32:36 GMT

Replies to your questions:

> midnyht: "I am guessing nothing is concrete forever, since codes may become obselete when
> people think of more efficient or comprehensive ways of writing them. Does this ever come in the
> way of writing new tools, relying on re-using older assets?"

Not sure exactly what you're asking, but the games industry has by and large been very bad at re-using technology and Concrete represents our plan to start really employing re-use on a large scale. As far as the tools go, a large part of the editor pictured above is going to be re-used on other projects which means all the person-hours gone into developing, improving, fixing, and maintaining them is automatically saved. There are parts of the FablEd tool suite that are written to work with specific pieces of game engine technology and thus are likely to become out of date as the technology changes and moves forward. However, this is not true in all cases because a lot is written to operate in more general terms (e.g. height-field sculpting tools can be used with other height-field technology).

> sCM redruM: "How do the textures work with the adjusted height fields?? Are the textures
> oversized so when the height fields reduce or enlarge they adapt cleanly, or do the artists have to
> constantly resize on their own to limit the space as much as possible?? "

Are you referring to some other things you've heard about the height-field and textures as I'm not sure what you mean? The textures are applied with a fixed world scale and are thus unaffected by height-field size.

> sCM redruM: "...since we've seen that fences can break, are they in the editor as an object,
> because I don't see something like, "NewObjectFurnitureStaticBWFenceBroken""

The breakability is more a property or behaviour of the objects placed down. You don't need to know that they are breakable to place them down, an object is just breakable or not.

> AlbionKnight: "Is this built in C# or some other language?"

Yes, the Concrete Tools Framework is based on .Net 2.0 and almost entirely written in C#. Some of the game and engine systems that are integrated into the editor (e.g. the graphics engine) aren't, and have to be wrapped in a managed layer.

> AlbionKnight: "Can I get a copy"

I'm sorry to say that there are no plans to release FablEd (or indeed the Concrete Framework) to the public.

> locater16: "I was wondering how you guys handled placement of art models you'd need en masse
> and randomised, like grass and underbrush. Is it a brush you can sweep along heightfields, is it
> tied to ground textures, or something else entirely?"

It is indeed a 'brush'. The height-field painting tools don't just paint plain textures they paint a whole slew of information via 'themes'. Each theme can carry with it numerous attributes about the surface properties in addition to the texture(s). The classic example of this are cues for the audio system to change the sound of footsteps as the player moves over different ground types. As for the 'underbrush' you mention, this is (more or less) dynamically generated in the editor based on a set of theme parameters to do with things like density, size variation, occlusion, etc. The effect is that you can just paint flower-beds, rocky patches, and even forests.

Sam

re: Tools at Lionhead

paulecoyote — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 11:52:09 GMT

Very nice entry - I think only Sam entries have had pictures included with them so far! (programmer Sam and multimedia Sam) ;-)

re: Tools at Lionhead

Greg453 — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 18:42:24 GMT

What would I give to just get once access to one of those high level Editors ...

... I actually plan to make one on my own with XNA, ... but this woun't be more than moving objects ...

A BRUSH TOOL!! OMG!

And why the heck are the 12 errors in this sample pic?

> sCM redruM: "How do the textures work with the adjusted height fields?? Are the textures
> oversized so when the height fields reduce or enlarge they adapt cleanly, or do the artists have to
> constantly resize on their own to limit the space as much as possible?? "

As Sam coun't help you, lat me try it.
All I know are the height maps meshes that are created (everytime the game loads it) in the content pipeline based on a black-white picture created by a designer (what ever). That means that the height map is nothing 100% fix. So the texture have to be flexible. You can imagen it like the green collor map that was painted in the last diary. Each collor would stand for one little texture bitmap (or what ever), and each texture is so drawn that if you lay the texture side to side with itself that there (sould) be no real seam between them and just flow into each other.
(in elder games and sometimes even in current, you can see the repeating patterns on the height map)
Later, when the camera ray hits the height map, it more or less checks the collor of the collor map, checks which collor stands for which texture and later just displays the endless repeating texture there.

Or short:
Ther is nothing like just one big texture over the height map, but many endless repeating.

Greg the Mad

re: Tools at Lionhead

guitarscout — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 08:23:56 GMT

Can I call you Sam #2? lol
This image looks pretty cool. And I can't wait till this game is released.