Let it snow
Being English, my mind is telling me that November should be cold, wet and grey. Yet, having moved to Australia it should in fact be the opposite, as it is late Spring here. The funny thing is, it has been grey, wet and almost cold here in Sydney for the past two weeks with rain battering down the dull alleyway outside the balcony which is pretty much my office and thunder disturbing the peace every so often. So maybe it's the confused weather that inspired me to add rain and snow effects to NSS4.
For the rain I've employed a similar method to that of NSS3 whereby I overlay the screen with some transparent tiles which have animated rain drops on them. It's a simple method but when I loaded up NSS3 to remind myself how it looked I realised that it's also rather crude and I needed to improve it for the new version. I set about creating better rain tiles and employed a new system where both the rain image and sound gradually fade-in and out. Thanks to the excellent transparency effects in BlitzMax I'm happy to say it looks great! Check out how muddy, miserable and typically English this screenshot looks...
For the snow I have to thank Klaas of the Blitz forums for some excellent Blitz3D code. I needed to convert it to BlitzMax and adjust it for my purposes, but within a few short hours the winter matches felt like an Alpine Christmas. The snow flakes are rendered in true 3D so it actually falls in the game world, unlike the rain which is a 2D overlay. What I like most about it is the way it whizzes by as the camera tracks the match. Just imagine how snow looks when you're driving through it and you'll get the idea. My one concern is that it will slow down the match action on less powerful PCs, but it's possible to alter the number of flakes rendered so it can be cut down to zero if needs be. I've settled for 100 flakes for now which gives a nice effect without looking too sparse. Anything over 300 actually looks too cluttered.
In another flash of inspiration I realised that if I make the snow flakes multi-coloured it produces quite a nice ticker-tape effect which would be great for Cup final celebration scenes. More on that another time though.
Talking of celebrations, one thing many people have requested is the ability to control your player after scoring a goal. Well, your wish is my command because this is possible in NSS4. I've yet to implement the animations but you can run wherever you want during the moments after a goal whilst your teammates chase after you. The plan is to assign 4 celebration animations to the four main buttons (pass, lob, shoot, call) so you can show off to your adoring fans or maybe even run over and taunt the opposing fans. It's this kind of freedom that I'm perhaps most proud of with regards to the NSS4 match engine. For instance, if you are the setpiece taker then you can position yourself by the ball exactly where you want (within a 5 yard zone) allowing you to angle a run-up or simply stand next to the ball for a standing kick. Once in position you set the strength of the kick with the pass, shoot or lob buttons then as you hold the analogue stick (or direction key) the player runs up and kicks the ball. The great thing about this is you can hold the stick exactly how you want to apply the aftertouch and not worry about running towards the ball as the player does that automatically, making it easy to apply dip, loft or curl to the kick. Needless to say, a quick tap of the pass or lob button will pass the ball to the highlighted teammate. A simple thing yes, but it's shocking to think that Pro Evolution Soccer hasn't managed to get short freekicks right throughout the series.
So that's a little update on the state of the match engine and I really, truly hope (and pray) that by the time I next update the blog that it will have properly animated players, because once that is in then the match engine will be 95% complete. At a guess I would say the the entire project is at around 75% complete. Now that's something to be happy about, whatever the weather! :D
For the rain I've employed a similar method to that of NSS3 whereby I overlay the screen with some transparent tiles which have animated rain drops on them. It's a simple method but when I loaded up NSS3 to remind myself how it looked I realised that it's also rather crude and I needed to improve it for the new version. I set about creating better rain tiles and employed a new system where both the rain image and sound gradually fade-in and out. Thanks to the excellent transparency effects in BlitzMax I'm happy to say it looks great! Check out how muddy, miserable and typically English this screenshot looks...
For the snow I have to thank Klaas of the Blitz forums for some excellent Blitz3D code. I needed to convert it to BlitzMax and adjust it for my purposes, but within a few short hours the winter matches felt like an Alpine Christmas. The snow flakes are rendered in true 3D so it actually falls in the game world, unlike the rain which is a 2D overlay. What I like most about it is the way it whizzes by as the camera tracks the match. Just imagine how snow looks when you're driving through it and you'll get the idea. My one concern is that it will slow down the match action on less powerful PCs, but it's possible to alter the number of flakes rendered so it can be cut down to zero if needs be. I've settled for 100 flakes for now which gives a nice effect without looking too sparse. Anything over 300 actually looks too cluttered.
In another flash of inspiration I realised that if I make the snow flakes multi-coloured it produces quite a nice ticker-tape effect which would be great for Cup final celebration scenes. More on that another time though.
Talking of celebrations, one thing many people have requested is the ability to control your player after scoring a goal. Well, your wish is my command because this is possible in NSS4. I've yet to implement the animations but you can run wherever you want during the moments after a goal whilst your teammates chase after you. The plan is to assign 4 celebration animations to the four main buttons (pass, lob, shoot, call) so you can show off to your adoring fans or maybe even run over and taunt the opposing fans. It's this kind of freedom that I'm perhaps most proud of with regards to the NSS4 match engine. For instance, if you are the setpiece taker then you can position yourself by the ball exactly where you want (within a 5 yard zone) allowing you to angle a run-up or simply stand next to the ball for a standing kick. Once in position you set the strength of the kick with the pass, shoot or lob buttons then as you hold the analogue stick (or direction key) the player runs up and kicks the ball. The great thing about this is you can hold the stick exactly how you want to apply the aftertouch and not worry about running towards the ball as the player does that automatically, making it easy to apply dip, loft or curl to the kick. Needless to say, a quick tap of the pass or lob button will pass the ball to the highlighted teammate. A simple thing yes, but it's shocking to think that Pro Evolution Soccer hasn't managed to get short freekicks right throughout the series.
So that's a little update on the state of the match engine and I really, truly hope (and pray) that by the time I next update the blog that it will have properly animated players, because once that is in then the match engine will be 95% complete. At a guess I would say the the entire project is at around 75% complete. Now that's something to be happy about, whatever the weather! :D
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