Almost still alive

Yup, almost! We're actually dying in the process of putting together this demo...but it's worth it. Latest results are more than encouraging..."exciting" would be the right word. Complete buildings are running smoothly and a good per-fragment glow effect is enhancing all the little "lights" on them.

Now it's almost rendering time for me. Menus should be fully online tomorrow and from next Monday on it will be shaders-optimization time.
(Oh god...the fresnel awaits us... fingers crossed! ;))

"Just beat it..."

As usual, after the first "glowing" results, Max is now convinced that glow is indeed a nice effect we should definitely include in our tech demo. ;)

Currently also screen menus are being developed...with some basic configuration options.
Structures texturing is coming along nicely as well.

As if it wasn't enough, we will also feature a famous, licensed, soundtrack for our demo...but that's a surprise! :)

Tech Demo 1

We've almost done with creating normal maps for our tech demo. The structures around the track are quite huge and detailed...so we're mixing up generated normals - from high-res models - and filtered normal maps using Nvidia's Normal Map filter.

The result is already pleasing talking about details... but there'll be no final word on quality until we see all the graphics running in the engine and we start tweaking it.

The most annoying part will be creating height maps...as AFAIK there's no tool that generates that kind of maps from high-res geometry - though future versions of Melody could have a chance to implement such a feature...that'd be nice! ;)

...back to work.

Website Fixed

Eureka!
ForwardGames' Website finally works properly with Netscape 7.
We're sorry if you experienced "ugly browsing"...it's no more!

Main menus working fine and background color fixed.

We won't tell you what kind of bug was doing that mess on the site...it's just too weird. :|

FNTC and ECTS

It's August - yeah we know it - and there's 1 month to go to ECTS 2004. We'd like to be there with some Notcom Racing's Tech Demo really. Not sure yet...as we didn't plan ECTS presence at all...we just thought we were close enough. We'll see... ;)
In the meantime, yesterday we finally implemented FNTC tex compression at 5:1 ratio!
This first implementation looks a bit slower that we expected...but there's certainly room for huge improvements within the current "codec" system.
Max did a great job implementing the whole thing...now it's time to take some comparison screenshots and make some "website work" so we can actually show you our results.

The Tech Demo looks promising... the current scene counts roughly 250.000 triangles...and we still have to add structures around. We pretty much expect a 400.000 triangles scene.

Time to go now... this schedule is sooo tight! :O) ;)