Collaborative Project Evaluation

Our project that we worked on was about how streaming is taking over the market of digital downloads across different media such as video, audio and games.

Me and Matt worked as a team for the past few months on this project using Trello to collaborate together. We would each give ourselves tasks that we worked on and then once they were completed we would move the task to the done list and grab another task that we created in the to do list. After completing this project I realised that there is a feature on trello called Butler which once you give it a task it will automate it such as "On card created assign a random member of the board", I feel like this would of helped us loads if we knew about it.

We researched about what streaming services are out there (loads), Netflix, YouTube, SoundCloud, Apple Music, Geforce Now, Google Stadia, just to name a few. We reseached them by looking for streaming services on google. We also gathered some primary research by using Google Forms to create a form for people to fill out and from that we found that eveyone steams video, about 80% streams audio and 10% streamed games. Our results came from about 10 students which is a small sample size.

In terms of the presentation, I think we were ok but I think It would of helped if we agreed which parts we would talk about before the presentation rather than during it. We did have a problem with the presentation because we used Google Slides the arrow keys didn't go to the next slide when we pressed them but apart from that it was alright.

For the feedback we got, Gemma said that that we ticked all the boxes for passes and we were close to getting merits.

To improve I would say that we need to work outside of class at least once per week. It would also help if one of us were in charge of a weekly meeting that would take place during class to share what research we've found out and to plan what we're going to do next. Another thing I would do next time is rely more on Trello to manage our Research and use automation to speed it up.

Project Ignite Devlog 17/12/19

Oh, hi there, it's been a while since I did one of these. Project Ignite is still a thing and I have been working hard on it.

During the past couple of weeks I have aquired a new job at KFC, Im still working at Heron  Foods as well, this means I won't be able to spend much time on this project as I want to but it does mean that I don't have to rely on college funds to get me throught the days.

I now have an actual story based on Aiden Cyris, a soldier that was killed during battle of World War 3. Zimeon Cyris, his son, who works in a laboratory brought back Aiden as an experiment which is a human with a robot body. Zimeon develops an artificial intelligence called Cybernet that accurately predicts the enemies next move but unfortunately turned sides. Cybernet hacks into the technologies that he created, takes over Zimeon and uses everything to destroy the Alliance.

The game will initially be released to the PC platform using the Windows, Steam and Epic Stores and then eventually after testing, it will be released on PlayStation VR.

I have mostly migrated all my blueprints I have made so far in to C++ because its much faster, especially for loops during tick! This also means that I will have to lean C++ and the Unreal API as I go.

I'm currently redoing the emtire weapon system since although it worked, was prety slow and affected performance as it mostly relied on tick.

I have also modeled a new gun, a Glock:

I have also made a Trello board so that I can track my progress because the Github one isn't the best since its mainly for issues.

Collaborative Project - 11/11/19

For the past couple of weeks I have been working on makeing the powerpoint for us, which includes creating all the slides and a bit of information to whats going to be put on it. I also got some screenshots of what the differences are between running the game local vs streaming them on good and bad internet speeds.

Matt has started putting together a google forms document so that we can get some primary research from the class. The document will include various questions from game, video and audio streaming. Once we get some people to fill it in it should give us charts that we can put on the powerpoint that we can talk about. The document should be done before next week as it will be added to the powerpoint.

Collaborative Project - 21/10/19

Trello Update

A lot has changed since the last time I talked about whats happening within out team.
While I have been working on getting the arcade research out of the way, Matt has been working on the first game streaming, why people stream video and recently he's been acquiring primary research by a questionnaire on how many people use streaming services. The results of it should be ready within the next one or two weeks. In terms of the PowerPoint, the due date is still a while away but it might help creating it this week.

Collaborative Project - 08/10/19

What is a streaming service?

A streaming service is a service that allows you to watch or play you favourite games without downloading anything*. Steaming can be split into 3 main categories:

Game Streaming

Services such as Geforce Now, Playstation Now and Google Stadia offer ways to play games without downloading them. Google Stadia and GeForce now offer the hardware to play games on but the user must own the game that they want to play. On the other hand, Playstation Now lets users play a wide range of games with the hardware supporting it.

There are also smaller streaming services that work differently like Parsec which lets users host their own hardware for them to play their own games on. This is exactly how Steam's in-home streaming works.

Game Video Streaming

Game video streaming services includes Twitch, Youtube and Mixer. Unlike game streaming, game video streaming is where users watch live content that other users make and is based around communities.

Film and TV Show Streaming

Film and TV show streaming services like Netflix and Now TV offer a wide range of movies and shows for people to watch these are much better than regular tv because you can put anything you want at any time. Services like Netflix also allow the user to download videos for offline use when there's little or no internet but limit you to a certain amount and they can expire after a few weeks or days.

Advantages

• Free entertainment (Youtube, Twitch, etc...)
• No waiting for downloads
• Doesn't use up storage
• Access anywhere

Disadvantages

• Requires an internet connection
• You don't get access to everything
• Less quality depending on internet speed

Internet Requirements

Game streaming services such as GeForce Now focus on latency because if the video is 2 seconds behind your input it might be the difference between that headshot and totally missing. Game streaming services are also required to send user input which further increases latency. Latency is one of the biggest problems with game streaming services.

Services such as Netflix only stream video content and doesn't need to send user input which means they can get away with latency and deliver higher quality videos.

Collaborative Project - 23/09/19

This week we have been researching about how mobile phones has influenced society.

I have been tasked to find the advantages and disadvantages of the modern day smartphone while matt is working on the history.

One of the major advantages of using a mobile phone is the ability to connect to with social media and communicate with anyone anywhere. The use of fingerprint sensors and face recognition has also made it much easier to access phones since you wont need to keep inputting the pin or password in every time you turn it on. Another advantage is that you can play games where ever you are and with the rise of game streaming it will take it even further to the point where you can stream any game from any platform from anywhere like PS now.

Collaborative Project - 16/09/19

According to Engadget,  the very first arcade machine ran a game called "Computer Space" which was made in 1981 by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney (who went on and founded Atari). Computer space was a 2 player Asteroids-like game. The arcade machine featured 2 joysticks for both players and was coin operated. In terms of hardware, It ran purely from logic gates on a physical board!

All the information I have found on the very first arcade machine was from Engadget

In terms of Trello, we have organised it with a beginning, middle and a end as well as a in progress for the ones we're currently researching on.

collaborative project

This year I have been tasked to create a research project with a group. The research will be based around game streaming versus just running the games.

Today we have setup a project on a website called Trello, which is a tool that lets us collaborate with people. I were going to use GitHub but that is based around issues and problem solving and not research.

Trello is an industry standard tool that companies use to track their progress a few examples of this are: Epic Games and Subnautica.

How to make a server

Yesterday I had an idea to create an mmo virtual reality game (inspired by Ready Player One). After doing some research, I was able to put together a simple server on a virtualbox.

By using Bitnami's wamp, I was able to install apache 2, mysql and phpmyadmin on a windows 10 install (education edition) and set up a database that holds all the player data such as username, password, email, friends, levels, xp needed until next level up etc... I then wrote the nessesary php code so that I can later get unreal engine to talk to the database. I prepared some php code to do things like handle sign-ups, logins and to access most of the database like adding friends, getting friends etc... Hopefully I can get it to a stage where that it could be implemented in to a test game, and if that goes smoothly, I will put it in to Project Ignite. (Imagining a cyberpunk city in vr like grand theft auto where everything is interactable)

Another feature I added was to use an authentication key, so instead of sending the password to the server every time you wish to do something, I made it so that you send your username and password to the server once and you will get a authentication key which you will use instead and every time you ask to login it will give you a completely different key every time.

Project Ignite V2.0 9th June

Over the last few weeks I have been working on some of the maps like the main menu, shooting range as well as an improved reloading and firing system for the guns.

This is a part of the shooting range that has been worked on. I like the idea of a dark room with the targets lit up. When the targets are hit they will fade from top to bottom with a hologram effect.

This is another part of the shooting range. Here some of the weapons are on the walls which can be picked up like any other weapon. The "RANGE" text uses a new material function called "Glitch" which makes things have a glitch effect to them. It also makes things like holograms look good too.

Here I also show off my new reloading system. It works much better most of the bugs have been fixed and I managed to reduce the blueprint code by 50%.

HTC Vive Review

Last week my old Acer Windows Mixed Reality (WMR) VR headset finally kicked the bucket and broke because the displays in the headset wouldn't turn on. So I did some research and bought myself a Vive because I have always wanted one and I thought it was the best option.setting it up was quick and easy, it was a matter of downloading and installing the viveport software and setting up the lighthouses. Although the vive headset has less resolution than my old one (vive has 1080x1200 per eye and my old one its 1440x1440 per eye) I couldn't see any difference. The colours as well as the brightness are much better on the vive and the black are a lot deeper too. I also saw an improvement in pixel response time as well. The controllers also feel much better.

UE4: Detecting sides with materials

Over the past week I have been playing with materials and I have found out that using the world aligned blend node, you can actually detect which side of the world its facing. There are many applications for this. For me, I will be using it for my rain function which, based on its side it will determine if it should apply splashes, the rain sliding down the side of the object and nothing (dry) at the bottom.

Dimm Drive Review

DimmDrive is a Utility that lets you setup a RAM drive for games. RAM drives speeds up game loading by instead of storing the files the game need on a hard drive, it pre-loads the files in to RAM so when the game loads them it's quicker.  The downside to using RAM as a storage medium is that if you lose power, everything stored on it is completely gone with no hope of recovering it. So to prevent saved data from being lost; DimmDrive mirrors the data back to the actual drive so that you don't lose it. Another downside is that to be able to get the game files in to RAM in the first place you must first have to load the data which depending on how large they are can take several minutes.

Although I do have 32GB of RAM in my system; Most newer games, especially the big titles can be close to 100GB which would be expensive and not really be beneficial in terms of loading speed because it will take way too long to load all that game data in to RAM.

Here's the test results for the RAM Drive. As you can see it's fast with read and writes nearing 10GB a second which is very impressive compared to a standard 5400RPM hard drive but is much smaller in size. Since I have 32GB of RAM Im able to use about 24GB which leaves 6GB spare for the game and windows to use.

Although I haven't tested it with many games I have seen an improvement in games that take long to load for example Grand Theft Auto 5 usually takes me around 3 minutes to load from desktop to singleplayer and when I use DimmDrive to load around 20GB of the games data it takes about 30-45 seconds to load. To be honest im not sure why game engines dont take more of an advantage of this technology; If the system has loads of memory lets say 16GB and its currently using 2GB of that it would be wise for the game to use that to speed up loading and release it if there's not enough RAM. It would be very helpful for games if they had a slider that the user can control to change the amount it would use.

Project Ignite V2.0 Development 8th April

Since my last update (25th March) i have fixed some uvs on the scar-h and added a new gun called the fn five seven. In addition, I have also finally implemented a proper reloading system which requires the user to pull something back to reload it which includes the sounds.

Another thing I have done is that I have removed that red debug line I used to show the line trace and replaced it with fire effects and an experimental physical bullet mode which doesn't use line traces and actually uses objects. An advantage of this is that when in slow motion, you can actually see the bullet flying in the air but this also means that the game will run slower. Accuracy is also a thing and each weapon has a different accuracy value so that some guns are more accurate than others. 

Project Ignite V2.0 Development 25 - March

Over the past few weeks I have been busy adding more functionality to Project Ignite 2.0. From today I have a fully working Scar-h gun along with the correct range, rounds per second and sound effects. It almost feels real.

Weight

Objects will now feel differently depending the weight of them. it there heavy they will feel rigid and if they feel light they will appear to bounce more when hit or picked up.

Attachments

There are now 3 ways to attach attachments: front for things like silencers, muzzles, etc..., top for sights such as a red dot, iron-sights (build-in-works) etc... and sides for flashlights and lasers to improve accuracy (these will be used later to improve the actual accuracy for the guns).

Top Attachments

When you attach a top attachment to specific guns like the Scar-h the sights will fold away so it is easier to see through the scope and go back up when you detach it for iron-sights.

Lasers

I have implemented the actual laser as a beam particle-system which has the speed and spawn rate set to 0 so that it won't move and despawn. I have also put a custom material on which uses location-panner based noise to give the laser a real laser effect.

Flashlights

The flashlight was very simple, I basically added a spotlight to the object and change the material and spotlight depending if its on or off - this gives it the shine when its off and brightness when its on.

Dual-handed weapons

the project can now determine if you try to grab an object with both hands and if it implements the "dualhands" interface and it you are already holding it, it will allow you to grab it with your second hand. There is also support to assign actions with the second hand like something when your hovering the second hand over the gun it can perform an action of some kind.

Project Ignite V2.0 Development week 1

What is Project Ignite?

Last year, I got my first VR headset (the ASUS windows mixed reality) and I wanted to experiment with making things for it. I created a testing project to learn the how the VR template worked and added stuff of my own like guns and other things. I chose the name "Project Ignite" because I thought that it would spark ideas as in igniting a fire.

What are the future goals?

Next year I would like to turn Project Ignite in to a fully fledged cyberpunk game that I might release probably to the windows store because for me, releasing it to steam or any other place is either too expensive or with similar-to-life mechanics like having to put the ammo in the gun and pulling it back to reload and flying vehicles with having to pull the levers and steering with the steering wheel. 

What have I done this week?

This week I have started Version 2.0 which is a complete redo because I wanted to remove all the unneeded blueprints and to unify all the code for the items because the way I had it setup before was that I had a static mesh actor that acted as a starting point for all the items that you could pickup, but because I also had to use skeletal meshes meant that I had to have 2 separate versions of what was effectively the same code. One for static meshes and one for skeletal meshes.

Unfortunately in unreal you cant switch the root component of an actor unless you use C++ so I thought that I could make a C++ actor that switches it's root component depending on an what enumeration was set. Sadly I wasn't able to achieve this so I found that I could use a actor component instead. Now that I have unified all the code that makes the items be able to be picked up, it makes it far easier to change and update code for both, static and skeletal meshes.

Another huge change is that you can interact with things while holding them for example, pushing an object your holding with another one instead of them having no collision and going through each other.

Zero Caliber VR review

Zero Caliber VR is a virtual reality simulator, first person shooter where you can fully customise a wide range of weapons ranging from pistols, shotguns, machine guns and snipers. All the attachments can be customisable like putting a sniper scope on a pistol or shotgun. There are a wide range of scopes, lasers, magazines (normal, double and extended) for all the guns and you can even customise the colour of them by spray painting on them. Finding cover in shooting games are a must if you want to live and in zero caliber you have to manually crouch in real live in order to get behind cover in the game.

The game itself has about 7-8 maps but it can take a while to complete each one. Currently at the time of me writing this review, you can play singleplayer or multiplayer PVE. Sadly I can't see any sign of PVP but maybe in the future, Xreal Games, the company behind it might have add it.

This game was made in unreal engine and I did something like it last year, Project Ignite, so how does it stack up against it. The weapons in Zero Caliber VR are more smoother in the way that they are handled, meaning that you have to actually pull the top part of a pistol back after you reload and you have to pump the shotgun everytime you shoot. The action of reloading the weapons is also different for each gun.

My thoughts of Zero Caliber VR are that it's a good concept and I would like to see more games that take the advantage of the hardware like this.

Green screening with Blender

For our animation we used a green screen so that we can act out the action and then use 3d modeling software such as maya and blender to recreate the actions to use in out animations. To separate me from the background I used blender 2.8 since the software I used to edit videos (Hitfilm) didn't have the tools to do it.

So I used blender to remove the green around me and replaced it with alpha. Since the camera captured more than just the green screen there were still stuff at the sides, so to remove that I simply created a mask with the mask tool around the green screen and plugged the channel key (To remove the green) in to a multiply node to remove everything that wasn't in the green screen. As unfortunatly blender isn't the best tool to do this in it took a whole day to render the 7500 frames (@ 25fps, ~5 minutes of video).


To conclude, I think that blender still has room to improve on 2D video rendering as it also rendered the 3D view too even though there wasn't a need to. One good thing about blender's compositor is that it used a node based workflow so it's easy to and and remove effects.

The Mask

London and Bossa Studios Review

Last Tuesday we went on a trip to a game studio in London called Bossa Studios, it took us about 3 - 4 hours to get there by coach and then we went on the London underground for about an hour. When we finally got there it was about 12. The studio itself was large and roomy with hints towards fun like consoles you can play on and various other things like Nerf guns. During our time there we got to play test some upcoming games and walk around the studio to see what the people were working on. The people there gave us tips to help us like saying if we want to be a programmer then we also need to know a little bit what other people do in their roles. The game engine they used was Unity.
Bossa Studios is the type of place where I would like to work for because it balances work and fun.

Keyframe Animation

Keyframe animation is where you use "master frames" (keyframes) which tells the computer where and what a specific object is doing at that frame and then the computer works out the frames in between the "master frames". An example of this is if we at frame 0 set the camera rotation Z rotation to 0 and at frame 250 we set it to 365, when we play it back the computer will interpolate between each master frame and rotate the camera 1.46 degrees until frame 250.

Here's what I currently have for the game trailer: