Garshasp Development Blog

So we decided to come up with some updates at the far end of the production phase.

As you can see above we got new beauty shot for Garshasp with his mystical mace. This is our in game model rendered in 3ds max along with some paint over that our concept artist “Soheil” has done on it.

And here are some in game screen shots which came out right from Iranvij, our Level editor tool. I managed to grab some props too.

Hope you like it.

Optimization is the current focus of the technical team. There are three main areas that we are aiming to optimize in order to broaden the PC users which will be able to play the game with acceptable frame rate. The first area is graphics card Video Memory usage, mainly related to the textures and vertex buffers which need to be loaded in the video memory. As it appears, the first part of the game is consuming a lot of the video memory due to loading the vertex buffers. PIX from DirectX has proven to be a highly valuable tool to profile the Graphics card memory. Although for more serious profiling we are using NvPerfHud from Nvidia.

The second area is the RAM usage. GlowCode is helping us find memory leaks. Our target goal for system memroy is 1Gig.

The third area is CPU consumption and the performance of individual function calls. Intel VTune is a real useful tool in this are for measuring code run time. De-synchronizing some sub system loops with the main graphics loop is among the main things needed to be done to free up some CPU time. An example for this de-synchronization is to update the AI loop once in a half second.

On the business side of things, negotiations with distribution channels have already started.

We are glad to be participating in Game Connection 2009 in Lyon, France, which starts tomorrow morning. The extended and enhanced planned version of Garshasp will be presented to publishers.

Art by Soheil Danesh.

Hi,

Garshasp is being presented at Dubai’s 2nd World Game Expo 2009. Garshasp was also presented at this expo’s debut which was held last year around same time. This expo is important to us thus all Middle East companies are presented and we hope to find potentials in the continent. There will be other companies from USA, UK, Holland, India, Korea, Emirates,  Japan, Jordan, UAE.

It is another great chance for us to present the game and find potentials for international release of the Garshasp. Also this is another battle ground to test our might against the real competitors, the western companies.

There is not much time left until invasion of Siavoshgard by Ashmooghs and Deevs …

-Aidin

Hi,

You can get presentation files (PPT, PPTx, PDF) from our R&D section. If you don’t have Office 2007 or office at all, you can use this great tool to just view PPTx files. You can use open source solutions for PDF files, such as Foxit viewer.

-idn

The schedule for the workshops held by the Garshasp development team for the third Digital Media Festival in Tehran can be found here:

http://garshasp.ir/node/178

One of the (one of many) “What went wrong” issues in our project has been late integration of sound into the project. Here is how an issue was triggered which has been keeping us wondering about sound for a few weeks now.

The first sound files we tried to integrate for our characters have been stereo sounds (containing two channels). OpenAL, which is the sound library we are currently using, will not handle 3D sound management for stereo sounds, meaning there will be no attenuation of sound simulated for such audio files. This kept us wondering why no sound fall off is felt when the camera gets away from the characters, after lots of debugging and tweaking every parameter in OpenAL, we lost our trust in the internals of the library and decided to implement our own sound attenuation logic to handle the fall off in the higher game code layers.

Using our own attenuation handling methods meant we did not need to use the build in attenuation techniques of OpenAL and hence we commented out the sound attenuation technique set in the initialization part. This technique was an inverse algorithm, one of the three popular methods for calculating sound attenuation. Doing so enabled the default attenuation for OpenAL which is the linear algorithm.

The next round of sounds we integrated in the game where all mono channel sounds, which is the correct way to make character sounds. The mysteries started at this stage, sound was heard on some machines and nothing was heard on others, leading us to guess about anything and everything that could go wrong from code lines to hardware specs.

What we did not know was that all this time the internal attenuation system of OpenAL was working quite fine and the problem with the initial sound tests had been the stereo sound files. Now the little trick was that the linear attenuation algorithms do not work well, or at all, on the XP operating system but everything is fine on Vista. No sound was heard on XP machines for this reason.

Setting the attenuation technique to inverse again fixed this problem, the problem which made us traverse a full circle just to bring us back to the first step again, oh if we only knew the little trick about stereo files…

Lesson #1: No stereo sound files for dynamic objects

Lesson #2: The linear attenuation algorithm for sound does not work on Windows XP.

Lesson #3: Don’t lose your trust in a proved middleware too early.

Lesson #4: Sound should be integrated early in the project.

Garshasp will be presented at the Digital Media Festival in Tehran this year. Members of the development team will be at the Fanafzar booth.

There will be some workshops held at this years Festival and the following is the list of the topics presented by the Garshasp team:

1 – Texturing techniques for a 3D character, Syros Pourlatifi

2 – Demonstrating the creation of a 3D character, ZBrush and 3D Max pipeline. Syros Pourlatifi, Mohammad Modaress

3 – ZBrush tutorial, Mohammad Modarres

4 – Level creation using the Iranvij level editor, from concept to final playable. Hossein Hosseinian, Syrous Pourlatifi, Faham Negini

5 – Issues in game design. Hossein Hosseinian, Hadi Eskandari.

6 – Designing a Board Game. Hossein Hosseinian, Hadi Eskandari.

7 – Life as a Technical Artist. Aidin Zolghadr

8 – Garshasp game development process, The Garshasp Team.

9 – Rendering pipeline and Post Processing techniques, Yaser Zhian

10 – Serialization using the Boost Library, Yaser Zhian

11 – The new features of C++0x. Yaser Zhian

12 – Debugging techniques for Game Development, Faham Negini

13 – Game AI using Hierarchical Finite State Machines, Amir H. Fassihi

14 – Physics Engines and Nvidia PhysX. Amir H. Fassihi

Ashmoogh is a breed of creatures which are very wild, blood thirsty with little brains. They usually attack their targets while in groups. Every Deev is usually escorted with a few of these creatures…

The type shown below usually can be found in higher altitudes with a more dry climate …

Initial 3D model done by Syros Pourlatifi, polished in ZBrush for normal maps by Tohid Razavi.

Ashmoogh concept art done by Soheil Danesh.

GamesCom was great. We got to evaluate Garshasp on an international level for the first time. We know much better how we should proceed with the final touches of development now. Polish time. Lots of polish needed.

Garshasp will be presented at this years GamesCom in Cologne. Come on over to the Fanafar stand if you are around.

Combat is a discipline we really care about in Garshasp. The team has been spending some time tweaking and tuning the combat experience and there are lots to be configured in order to make the player feel the sense of engagement in a melee combat with monsters.

The task is quite challenging and there are lots of little pieces of detail which contribute a lot to the whole subject. Among these tiny features are, combat hit windows, character reflex animations and timing, camera shakes, time shrinks, particles, sound, enemy anticipations, enemy locks and animation canceling. Our main references for good combat are mainly God of War and Prince of Persia, the two are quite different in terms of combat style but they have lots of good little details to learn from.

The use of magic is in the wish list, lets see how we do in time.

Good combat is essential for our action game. We’ve gotta tweak and tweak and tweak.