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Showing posts from 2010

The first Leviathan Mortis has been listed on eBay

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Casting took considerably longer than planned, two days of fussing with new molds and adjusting vent and sprue size. I suppose it’s to be expected but it sure is frustrating. Because of the current production rate, I have concluded that I need to move this out of house sooner than later and will be working toward that end. Until then I had to choose a way to sell, that would allow the greatest number of people a shot at purchasing a kit... I settled on the auction format. I know it’s not ideal and bidding may go over the suggested retail but the market supply and demand will set the price and if there is extra profit, it will go straight to the contract caster to get that end rolling. I refuse to take pre-orders because I will not sell something that is not in a box and ready to ship.... Been there, done that, and won’t do it again. There are just too many things that can go wrong, and I would prefer not to anger my customers with unreasonable wait times. I apologize and hope you unde

Casting has started!

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I will have two and possibly three Leviathan Mortis available by the 31st. When they are packed and ready to go I will make an announcement here. I may list one of them on eBay in auction format, to allow those who may have missed the chance at the first run to purchase a kit if they feel they cannot wait until the production rate is up. The first few models will be a Limited Release Edition, and will include the Crusader Head and a right hand Vulkan Cannon in addition to the normal Mortis head, Scythe and Claw. The limited Edition Mortis will only be available for a short time, likely five kits. After that the Vulkan and Crusader head will be available separately. Total Package Value: $400.00  ($350.00 Mortis/ $45.00 Vulkan/ $5.00 Crusader head) Limited Edition Price: $375.00 Production will be rather spotty; I need to cast up two for Pat over at Senji Studios, a Mortis and when the molds are done, a Crusader, to take care of a trade for the wonderful buildings he made. Possibly two

Updated Website

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While I was waiting for the re-printed part, I took the time to hack and slash through the website. It is still not completely done, the Game page needs a lot of work and I threw together the pics for the Vulcan Cannon page. All in all, it loads faster and is far kinder to maneuver through. You still cannot buy anything; I have the PayPal buttons set so it will not complete the transaction without stock on hand. No rest for the wicked... I start benching the re-print tomorrow and molds to follow. Stay tuned! I will update the Blog with a final release date when I have it... Just keep in mind there may only be a couple of kits available on the day of release.

Leviathan Mortis Instructions

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Instructions for the first release are complete. That was about as much fun as a root canal, but at least its done.... Enjoy! Just click on the images below

Waiting on Prints

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My go-to guy for prints, Moddler , is out of the office for the next couple of days and slammed with work. I will likely have the re-printed part on Friday. I will need to bench the part and make a new family mold. Unfortunately, this will slightly delay the first release. It will take approximately 10 days to get everything done once I have the item in my grubby little hands. Rest assured, workers in my high tech production facility will be flogged daily until this problem has been resolved.

Player - Avatar Symbiosis

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In a recently released paper, Jeroen D. Stout (creator of Dinner Date ) proposes an interesting theory on the relashionship between player and avatar. It is related to the things that have been discussed previous post about immersion, so I felt it was relevant to bring it up. The full paper can be gotten from here . I will summarize the ideas a bit below, but I still suggest all to read the actual paper for more info! Most modern theorists of the mind agree that it is not single thing, but a collection of processes working in unison. What this means is that there is no exact place where everything comes together, but instead the interaction between many sub-systems give rise to what we call consciousness. The most clear evidence of this is in split brain patients , where the two brain-halves pretty much form two different personalities when unable to communicate. This image of a self is a not fixed thing though and it is possible to change. When using a tool for a while it often begin

Leviathan Mortis First Build

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It has been quite the journey getting here, but it is very satisfying to hold the final model. Please accept my apologies about the website, I know it's broken... I just have not had time to get to it. It's on the to-do list. I keep the blog up to date so this is where you can find all updates until I can sort out the website. As expected, it has been many long days to prep the molds for production. I had really hoped to show a nicely painted model on Pat's wonderful diorama but time will not allow that right now, I’ll have to come back to it when the Crusader is ready for the build. I wanted to make sure my customers could see a real world model and not just a CAD render, so primer will have to do for now.   Although I prefer to take my time on a build, I assembled this kit in just a few hours, skimping on much of the pre prep work and clean up so I could get cracking on the instructions. I did find one part that will need to be re-printed and new molds made so there may

Tech feature: Light Masking

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So just wanted to give a quick info on a brand new feature: light box masks. When placing lights in some rooms, it is common that light bleeds through walls, and show up in other rooms close by. The obvious way to fix this is to add shadows, but shadows can be pretty expensive (especially for point lights), so it is not often a viable solution. In Amnesia we solved this through careful placement, yet bleeding can be seen in some places. To fix this I added a new feature that is able to limit the lights range with a box. This way the light can cast light as normal but is cut off before reaching an adjacent area. This pretty much does the job of shadows, but is much cheaper. It turned out to be pretty simple to implement as well. In the renderer, different geometrical shapes are used to render lights (spheres for point lights and pyramids for spots) which make sure the light only affects needed pixels. To implement the masking, these shapes where simply exchanged for a box and then with

Bye, bye Pre-Pass lighting

I have an announcement to make. I am dumping pre-pass lighting. A couple of weeks ago I started to remaking the renderer from a deferred shader to a pre-pass lighting one. Directly after implementing it, I wrote this post . At first, pre-pass lighting sounded great: faster light rendering and more variation in materials. Having seen that companies such as Crytek and Insomniac Games used it, I thought it would be the next logical step to take. However, even as implemented it, the problems began. The first one was that specular lighting has to be made through hacks or something that makes it closer to deferred lighting. The next was that implementation become more messy. I suddenly needed to redraw all objects in two separate passes and this made the material and shader code harder to maintain. Normal deferred shading has this nice design where all material info is rendered in one pass to one buffer. But in pre-pass lighting, this spread out and makes more annoying to add new stuff and

Tech Feature: Terrain textures

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I have finally finished the part of the terrain rendering that I spent most time researching and thinking about: texturing. This is a quite big problem, with many methods available, each having its own pros and cons. I was looking for something that gave a lot of freedom for the artists, that was fast and that allowed that the same algorithm could be used in both game and editor. The last point was especially important since we had much success with our WYSIWYG -editor for Amnesia, and we did not want terrain to break this by requiring some complicated creation process. Even once I started working on the textures, I was unsure on the exact approach to take. I had at least decided to use some form of texture splatting as the base. However there is a lot of ways to go about this, the two major directions being to either do it all in real-time or to rendering to cache textures in some manner. Before doing any proper work on the texturing algorithm I wanted to see how the texturing looked

How the player becomes the protagonist

Introduction In Amnesia one of the main goals was for the player to become the protagonist. We wanted the player to think "I am" instead of "Daniel is" and in that way make it a very personal experience. The main motivation for this was of course to make the game scary, but also for the memories that were revealed to feel more personal for the player. In this post I will go through some of the design thinking we used, problems it caused and how it eventually turned out. I will also briefly discuss the future of this sort of design. Playing a role First of all, it is not required that the protagonist matches the player character in order for the player to "become" him/her. As an extreme example, I see no problem with a game featuring an animal as lead character to have the player become the protagonist. The idea is not that the player should match the physical / mental protagonist, but rather that he/she should be able to roleplay him/her and to feel like r

Leviathan VR5 Mortis (Totenköpfe - Deaths Head)

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For those of you who have not seen it, I felt I should post a description of the first Leviathan release. For those that have.... Here is some new eye candy. Grandfather of all Leviathans; the VR5 design is over 200 years old and has seen many improvements and variants. It and its variations are widely considered some of the finest designs ever produced. A balance of size, speed, armor and armament all come together to make a very formidable vehicle. The decision to design the cockpit after the Totenköpfe was primarily nostalgic and a matter of national pride. The frame of the first Leviathan was designated VR5 in honor of the 5 th Regiment commanded by Colonel von Ruesch, the first Hussar commander to use the deaths head symbol. The Prussian army Hussar first adopted this symbol in 1744. The Mortis in its purest form is outfitted with two close combat weapons, and no additional armor, this allows for the fastest possible movement and a vicious close combat capability. The massive oil

Leviathan Mortis release date

I have a (tentative) release date of December 15th. If all goes well and there are no major hiccups. There is still ALLOT of work to be done. Molds checked for vent and sprue issues, Instructions, Box art, Web store and shopping cart integration, ect. Perhaps a more realistic date would be January but I like to push myself. I may releases the first one or two on Ebay if I don’t have time to work out the cart and website issues. Pricing as it stands now: Leviathan Mortis: With Scythe and right hand Claw $350.00 Optional weapons: Right hand Vulkan $45.00   The Leviathan Mortis is a all resin model kit, roughly 9.5" tall I will be working a lot of late nights to try to get this out the door by the 15 th , so please be patient with me if the date is bumped. Please understand that they will initially be produced in house so the number of kits available will be limited due to having only one set of production molds and production equipment. I will update the blog with pictures of the fi

I am the great and powerful OZ!

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Many people ask why is this so expensive. The short answer is that nothing about making resin models is quick or cheap. The long answer requires a more in depth look at the costs involved. Unlike many manufacturers, I do not feel it is constructive to dance around this question. An honest question deserves an honest answer. So let us pull back the wizards curtain and see what hides behind... Pricing my models is a subject that often causes me a great deal of discomfort. Every kit, every release begs the question what is a fair price? What do I need to charge to keep the doors open and continue making things I, and hopefully others enjoy. While understanding not every model will be a spectacular hit, what is a reasonable number of models you should expect to sell to amortize your upfront costs? Now we look at the ugly numbers. I already own the equipment so I will not count that in the total but I show them here for general reference. Also, keep in mind this rough overview is for a rath

Leviathan Azazel sneak peek.

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Azazel will be the last of five in the series of VR5 frame Leviathan. Azazel and s ubtlety are two words seldom used together. There is nothing subtle about this Leviathan. It wields one of the largest projectile weapons mounted on any Leviathan and a whirling blade of destruction. This is the King Tiger of Leviathans Just to recap, here are the five VR5 frame Leviathans in the series.  I hope to start limited production of the Leviathan Mortis some time in December, with the crusader soon after and the remaining three in this series to follow ASAP.

Tech Feature: Noise and Fractals

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Introduction Now that I have a working algorithm for terrain rendering, I wanted to try making some of it procedurally. This would not be used in order to generate levels, but instead to help artists add some extra detail and perhaps for some effects. The natural world is very noisy and fractal place, so in order a to get a nice looking environment, these two features are crucial. Noise When doing noise for natural phenomena, one normally wants some kind of coherent noise. Normal white noise, when nearby pixels are not correlated in any way, looks like this: This is no good when one wants generate terrain and the like. Instead the noise should have a more smooth feel to it. To get achieve this, one fades between different random values, creating smooth gradients. A way to do this is to generate a pseudo-random number (pseudo because a certain coordinate, will always return the same random value) for whole number points, and then let the fractional parts between these be interpolations.