So,

it occurs to me that this has been a great year for those who like sneakin' in their video-games. Maybe it's at least partially because these last couple months have been particularly laden with stealth-type games that I feel that way, with Mark of the Ninja, ACIII, Far Cry 3, Dishonored, and Hitman: Absolution being dumped on us somewhat end-to-end over the past while. But consider for a moment that this has been dubbed "The Year of the Bow". Y'know what the bow is used for in games? Stealth. Boom. Therefore, I demand that stealth games should be given equal and/or greater billing on that dumb joke.

Quantity, though, means nothing. What's really remarkable is the stellar quality of the stealth games released this year. In fact, the three best stealth games I've ever played ever have somehow managed to come out within the same span of 12 months, and - in my mind - managed to revolutionize three entirely different aspects of stealth gameplay. And I suppose logically, the genre as a whole. Lemme break it down.

There was Klei with their shockingly nigh-perfect Mark of the Ninja.

It's a bit ironic that a Western developer has come out of nowhere and captured exactly what makes ninjas so damn cool. There's a clear and singular vision guiding the game to make sure you feel like a positively preternatural and legendary being, and they sought out to deliver that with every single mechanic in the game - which culminates in something that feels more like an action game in comparison to the usual plodding pace of stealth. It's really impressive to me that they seemed to have achieved as 'perfect' a version as possible of this game they made, particularly considering that it seems rather one of a kind. This game apparently had a very long development, and the polish and hard work has made it into a diamond.

This is was my game of the year, largely in part because it solved the ever-present problem in stealth games of lack of feedback by simply layering mechanic upon detection mechanic until it became pure, blissful awareness of the world around you. The 2D nature of the game allowed them an easier avenue to convey all this information than would be possible in a 3D game, and they do so with more gusto then any stealth game before it. Every time I was killed, I knew what mistake I made. I never felt cheated when a guard spotted me, or when a dog sniffed me out. It's almost entirely free of the baggage that comes with a stealth-based game.

There was Dishono(u)red,

which delivered on a more well-trodden avenue of stealth previously occupied mostly by the Thief series. The most telling thing they did to diverge from Thief though is the fact that they forwent a darkness system. The idea that darkness is what keeps you hidden has always bothered me, because it's kind of inherently flawed as a game concept. It's using an ever-changing state to dictate a binary one, and so there's always a seed of doubt in the player if they're going to be spotted or not. Outside of that problem, sticking to shadows is really a restrictive and not terribly fun thing to do.

Dishonored does no favours for itself by not allowing 'safe' dark zones, and that makes it all the more impressive when it really doesn't give you much information at all about how the guards will spot you, and plainly challenges the player to tackle situations simply as you would in the real world with the magical tools at your disposal. And magically, it just works. The AI is perfectly balanced between appearing truly, frustratingly self-aware and perceptibly dim - an impressive feat, given that most of the game is spent in well-lit environments, where the dissonance is easier to spot. The result is a game with very little compromised for the sake of being a game, and it works that to it's advantage in it being primarily a role-playing game. That tact of design makes it much easier for the player to wholeheartedly jump in and participate in the universe.

By not laying it's mechanics bare, it's essentially doing the exact opposite of Mark of the Ninja. Maybe the reason why there are still some frustrating problems inherent to stealth games left in there is because of that fact, but either way, while it doesn't aim to be transformatively curative of the many ails of stealth games like Mark of the Ninja tries to be, it still exceeds it's predecessors in some interesting and progressive ways in my eyes.

And then there's Far Cry 3.

Now, this isn't a stealth game strictly speaking, but that's why it's the best stealth game I've ever played. See, I like stealth games. I really do. But the inherent flaw is the fact that when you're caught, you die. Or more often then that, you're given the option to fight your way through. But that option has always been the lesser appealing of the two. In all proper stealth games I can think of, whipping out your biggest gun and start blasting in that situation is just incredibly unsatisfying in comparison to playing well and stealthily. It feels like the game is penalizing me by making me play the kind of not-good part of it. Call it the perfectionist in me, but I have never been content in just pushing through the last 30%, be it MGS, Thief, Hitman... Hell, even the stealth system in Uncharted 2 hooked me. Even if I know I'm totally capable of killing the rest of the way through, I usually just sit around and let the enemies kill me. And that's incredibly deflating to the experience, having to 'reset' like that.

Amongst it's many other triumphs, Far Cry 3 has cured me of that mindset. It does so by not making the point where I get spotted the point where the fun stops, because getting spotted in Far Cry sends you into another mode of play that's equally entertaining. And it's not even the fact that I find the gunplay totally on par with the stealth aspect that the game remains to be fun, although that certainly helps. It's the fact that It doesn't feel like it's punishing me for having resorted to shooting a bunch of dudes. On hard, both methods are equally tough and thus equally rewarding, and it's that parity that makes the stealth feel tightly knit with the shooting.

What's even more important in establishing that bond between the game's two play styles though is the degrees between them. When you get spotted in FC3, it's very much not a permanent state. You can slip back into the shadows given the skill, and you'll now be dealing with alerted and erratic enemies trying to find you in the brush. Through out every encounter, you have the ability to mix in as much stealth or as much brute force as you like. No matter how you play, it still nails the predatory nature of stealth games even when you're being less than stealthy. It feels like they learned a lot from Conviction in this aspect, except refined and invested into a much more logical place.

While the seamlessness between Far Cry's two halves is the aspect I found to be personally the most laudable, it does something else that I think is totally unprecedented in making it's open world stealth just amazingly well put together. People talk about combat puzzles a lot, and Far Cry hits that moniker better then I've ever seen. Units and unit types seem placed with purpose in each encounter, buildings and hills and valleys are important and smartly placed. It just doesn't feel at all like an open world game in it's attention to gameplay details, which is incredible. This is something that I felt ACIII really didn't make good on when it really needed to, and coming right off that game I was surprised to find that Far Cry had that secret ingredient I felt the lack of.

Far Cry 3 is tentatively my personal game of the year - tentatively of course seeing as how I'm not quite finished yet (About 75%), though I feel I've already experienced all it's warts and I'm okay with them. It is after all the only game this year that has disrupted my sleeping habits. Mark of the Ninja and Dishonored probably occupy my 2nd and 3rd slots. While two of those three games involve bows, this year will not be named as such for me. What really innovated this year was stealth. I think this year marks a rather abrupt change in thinking with these games, which makes me very interested in how Ground Zeroes is going to fair in my eyes now that I've seen another way of doing things.

Anyone feel similarly on how crazy stealth has been this year? Any other stealth games I missed out on that you thought were notable?

Once again, an update on my TF2 map. 
 

Gallery

Hi everybody! (Hi doctor Nick!) Just an update on my TF2 map. 
    

 Rocks

Water

Oh Yeah, and the Rest of the Things I Did.

•  Began to differentiate the two sides through differing architecture 
• added stairs/tentative logs across the body of water 
• animated a log going down the falls for the aforementioned idea that I may or may not carry out 
• created underground path through midpoint 
• tentative design of stairs linking upper and lower of midpoint  
• got a rough idea of how I'm going to style the unreachable scenery 
• restricted sniper/sentry views 

Gallery

 How 'Bout that Team Fortress 2?

And Lo, 

 Help Me Out

Gallery

I also messed around with a program called Chaoscope. 

This Week,

I continued on with my Zero model (From 999). I was unexpectedly busy, so I didn't get it finished, or even get it to a presentable state for that matter. Keep in mind that I usually try and get to a good point for show-and-tell when I do these. This time I didn't have that luxury.

It quickly became clear that I wouldn't be able to reproduce the illustration perfectly without resorting to drastic, borderlands-esque methods. The scale is too crazy (That boat is supposed to be a cruise ship...), the lighting is completely impossible, and the shading is inconsistent. In order to reproduce this perfectly, I'd basically have to forgo any benefit you usually gain by working in 3d, which would really entirely defeat the purpose. I decided not to worry too much about accuracy any longer and just make something nice.

I couldn't very well keep the hood so boring so I figured some fur would look nice. But then, common sense dictates that a fur-lined coat would only be worn in a cold environment, so I rolled with it from there. The fur looks alright, but it would look even better if I could replace that stupid cloak completely with something a little more natural. Meanwhile, I'm running into a plethora of issues with the background.

The ship is obviously untextured, and please ignore the floating icebergs. I distributed the icebergs with the same method described a while ago. I modeled 5 "Prototypes", just basic iceberg-y shapes. I then replicated them along the surface of the water geometry, using specific parameters to randomize their scale, rotation, and position.

Still really unsure where I'm going to go with all this. The only thing I'm satisfied with at this point is the mask itself, the rest is still looking pretty terrible. That's also kind of the problem. I'm trying to conform everything to the fraction that I think is decent, which is proving to be quite difficult. I'm also running into crippling technical difficulties, getting crashes every other minute as well as combating the dreaded NaN artifact, a well documented issue that basically causes chunks of pixels to render black for no apparent reason.

I'm not entirely confident that I can salvage this direction I've taken with this project, and under normal circumstances I'd probably be already calling it quits since it seems fate is conspiring against me on this one, but for some reason I feel like trying a little longer. If I can't manage I'll have to lower my scope a bit.

Comments/criticisms very welcome! I'd love some advice on where I should be going with this.

This Week,

Regarding my usual Edumacational Section,

This week was a bit of a break for me. I'm in the rendering stage of my guitar project which mainly consists of tweaking for 15 minutes and then waiting an hour or two for it to render out, ad nauseam. It's times like these when I wish I had a little more power under the hood, It's only been a few months since I upgraded to a quad-core but it's already starting to lose it's novelty.

I changed the guitar to the "Cognac Burst" style. I own a "Natural", as I found the burst to be rather ostentatious, but I'm none to confident in my ability to pull off the delicate simplicity of my own guitar effectively. Above is my horrendously over-lit render, it's main intention being to bring out the colors as vibrantly as possible.

In pursuit of a more natural looking lighting scheme, I threw the model into an old medium-sized scene. It certainly produces a fairly natural and realistic result, but that's also the problem. Sometimes, things just aren't pretty in the real world. This is something that I run into all the time when I'm going for photo-realism; I take a look at the finished product and think to myself: Boring. Can't help but try and make it larger than life.

I think the main thing letting these renders down are the the textures. Despite my best efforts, these were the best I could find, and for those I couldn't find I had to generate procedurally (Neck, fingerboard, pickguard). In fact, I think the body and the branding textures are the only image based textures I used.

In any case, the prettiest renders are yet to come. In the mean time,

Shaders

The world around us is entirely defined by light. The science behind light is fairly straightforward: Rays are cast from a light source onto a surface. The ray of light changes direction upon striking it, it's course altered according to the attributes of said surface. A shader is simply the container for those attributes. For practicalities sake, these attributes can then be broken down into two groups: Reflective and refractive.

Reflective Properties

The law of reflection states that the outgoing angle of a ray is always equal to the incoming angle. This makes perfect sense in the context of a mirror; if you take a laser pointer and aim it at a mirror, the angle will always be perfectly predictable in that it is always the opposite and equal angle. However, all non-transparent surfaces are defined by reflection, not just mirrors. If this law of reflection is true, how does light interact with surfaces that are not perfectly reflective like a mirror?

All reflection based shading is based on the concept of roughness. The reason that a mirror is perfectly reflective is because it's a completely smooth surface. Take a look at an object near to you that is generally not considered "reflective", and feel it. It has, without a doubt, some degree of roughness to it. This provides an inexorable subconscious link in your mind that relates smooth surfaces as reflective and rough surfaces as not. However, this is not true. All non-transparent surfaces are defined by reflection.

If you compare a rough surface and a smooth surface at a microscopic level, there is a stark contrast in their profile. Now, if you think of the rays hitting those surfaces, what will happen? The rough surface bounces the light in all sorts of directions, as well as having a good chance of inter-reflecting with itself. This is called a diffuse reflection. Meanwhile on the smooth surface, the light hits the surface and exits at the equal opposite angle in a fairly uniform manner. This is called a specular reflection.

All this is from a purely scientific perspective. Which I explained because I think understanding how light works has helped me better understand how to construct shaders. Let's look at the application of this in regards to CG.

One of the few things that is truly universal among CG programs is that reflectance is always defined by three parameters: Diffuse, specular, and reflection. 

Diffuse can be largely considered the actual color of the object; if I wanted to apply a wood texture to something, I would put the texture in the diffuse input. An example of a purely diffuse surface would be drywall, or pretty much anything that's soft.

Specular(ity) is essentially the "Highlight" of the object. Look around and you will see that almost all objects have a particular shine where the light hits hardest, but this couldn't be considered a reflection in the traditional sense of the word. I think the cause of this has something to do with the way a surface absorbs and releases light energy, though that's purely an observation. Also note that on a smoother object the highlight becomes more pronounced and "Sharp", while on rough surfaces the energy is dispersed over a larger area and as a result is not as strong. This effect is controlled by an independent parameter called either roughness or glossiness depending on who you ask.

Reflection does exactly what it says on the tin: reflect light rays. Another important part of mirror-like reflections is a phenomenon referred to as fresnel. Simply put, this modulates the reflectivity of an object depending on the viewing angle. The best example of this would be a still lake. When looking out across the lake, the water provides an almost perfect reflection, but when you look down at your feet you can see fairly clearly through the water. Another example of fresnel would be a slab of marble. Reflection has it's own roughness as well, changing it causes blurrier reflections.

The combination of these three base parameters and their interaction with each other allow for nearly infinite shading variations. Combined with texturing and other techniques, you can make just about anything. This method of reflection shading is referred to as BRDF, or bidirectional reflectance distribution function, A name that always reminds me that something must be going on that's more complicated then these three parameters. 

The significant deviation from true science in this method is that a choice was made to separate specular reflections and just *plain* reflections into two separate parameters, when in reality they are supposed to be one and the same. This leads to some artists insisting that specularity is not a real-world phenomenon and attempt to boycott it, trying to substitute it with reflections with roughness applied.

And of course, the other fallacy is that a rendering engine is never really sending out millions of light rays and bouncing them off a microscopic surface to determine how it diffuses. It's always a predetermined outcome, the entire shading system is based upon fakery of known quantities.

This Week,

Shit, I don't even know where to start... Booleans! Yeah, they're pretty cool...

Booleans

The term boolean when used in a programming environment refers to a true or false value. The term boolean in a modeling environment means, uh... This:

Booleans allow you to work with the relationship between two meshes, using your typical math with their typical meanings.

Subtraction

Operator 2 is being subtracted from operator 1.

Union

Operators are being added with equal priority, intersecting polygons are deleted.

Intersection

Operators are added with equal priority, non-intersecting polygons are deleted.

Add (Not pictured)

Operators are added with equal priority, no polygons are deleted.

Using booleans, you can make extremely complex shapes that may take 20-30 minutes using traditional methods in mere seconds! However, when you take a closer look at it from a polygonal perspective, a problem is presented.

The subtraction is very literal, operator 2 leaves an imprint of itself on operator 1. That means vertices are places they shouldn't be and certain edges are not fused properly and are disconnected from each other. Compound this with the fact that a boolean operation only works on a "closed" mesh (A mesh with no gaps) and hopes for additional booleans to achieve your final shape are lost (can be done in a single boolean, but I digress). The mesh can be repaired with a bit of hard work though, and often enough it proves to be completely justified in the face of other more arduous methods. Booleans are most often used as a means as opposed to an end.

There are programs that use booleans as the main modeling method, usually referred to as CAD (Computer assisted design) modeling. UDK is an example of one, any modelling done inside that program is done with booleans only. This is used for mapping out basic level designs. In boolean-only programs, the mesh is generated procedurally, constantly changing in order to accommodate any new changes. The only real weakness to this method is that the meshes produced are rather poorly optimized. We're getting to a point where poly counts on these models are not too much of an issue, but their's no chance that they can be animated in an organic fashion. 

CAD programs are predominantly used in engineering, creating highly accurate models of their product for proof of concept and many other purposes. CAD is a very wide and very important field, even encompassing things like simulating the structural integrity of buildings!

This all relates to this project because I used a boolean in order to create the F-note holes in the guitar.

In order to accomplish this, I used what could be referred to as a 2D boolean. A 2D boolean, as you may have guessed, only cuts in 2 dimensions in the X,Y, or Z direction. I made a single polygon in the shape of the F-note and used it as the operator to imprint the shape on the body of the guitar.

I then delete the area and start reducing the amount of vertices around the edge. The same result could have been achieved by reducing the vertices on the actual F-note shape before the boolean. Once I'm reasonably satisfied, I use a tool that gives the mesh some thickness.

Then it's just down to securing the shape so it works when I sub-divide the mesh again. This mostly consisted of deleting edges that were really not doing much in terms of defining the shape, and securing the ones that were. I used a special realtime shader that approximates the way a mesh would reflect, which gives me important information on how the mesh is smoothing. The rule that quads (Polygons with four edges) are best largely goes out the window here; It's alright to do whatever it takes in this instance as long as you pay close attention to the smoothing and shading of the mesh. The areas I highlighted are not exactly perfect but it's within the allowable limit for me, especially when the material of the body won't be particularly reflective, nor would it be viewed at such an oblique angle. I also used this exact same method to cut the hole for the pickup in the body.

Oh jeez! I have a surplus of blog here, haven't even started in on the shading part! I'll leave it at that for now, nobody likes reading long things and I don't like typing them. I might continue on this subject next week or I may just proceed onward to something new, who knows.