So, the project is titled “Prototyping” and my professor wants us to hash out some of the more technical details about the games we’re developing. Each person is doing their own game, so it’s not a group thing. Mine is a racing game on UE4. I’m using version 4.13. The assignment is stated like so. I need these elements in my document/presentation.
What I need help on are the items in bold. I think he’s confusing “polygons” with “actors”, because I don’t know why the actual number of polygons per level would be useful (or possible to calculate). That said, if there’s a way to do this, I’m all ears. I don’t have intentions to use special controllers, other than keyboard, mouse, and gamepad.
How would I go about finding out this info? I’m making a racing game featuring mostly content found in nature (trees, grass, caves, etc), and I’m going to make rather heavy use of the landscape and foliage (procedural and painting) tools. Some of my levels are going to feature watered-down versions of the foliage in the kite demo (by skipping rendering LOD 0, and starting with LOD 1 on up with most things).
I’m not sure what information they’re trying to get from those things
In terms of the limit of number of objects or number of polygons that will depend entirely on the hardware that is running the game and you can adjust the settings of the game to use less geometry on lower-end systems.
Because if I want to be a game developer, it’s not gonna help me if I get a D in Game Dev I. He wants a written document turned in, as well as a presentation, not a game right now. The game itself is gonna take another year to develop. It’s something we’re building on for the rest of this semester and two more courses after it. Apparently we’ll end up working with the visual art/graphic design students at some point.
In other words, useless as it is, since it’s probably going to change a trillion times, he still wants a first draft/guess on paper for this stuff. I think this is supposed to represent a “planning” phase, to get an idea of system requirements and framework/storyline/etc. So we’re basically waterfalling it. The intention makes sense to me. The problem is he’s asking for things I’m not even sure we can know at this point. But, that’s my assignment, so I need something for it.
Whilst it would be nice to say yeah, “stick it to the man, don’t do the assignment and make the best game you can”
They are the rings you’ve got to jump through to get your degree
Special controllers may refer to controllers for less abled persons, such as foot pedals http://amzn.eu/9upz4NK
or even colourblind options
Number of animations per character is something you’ll have to answer yourself
you’ll need to exhaustively list every animation the character will need, take your time on this one, it’s very easy to overlook common animations (idle, walk, run, take damage, death, use object .etc)
Number of colours per texture map
not too sure what this one could mean;
it could refer to a limited colour palette, which is more a creative choice than a technical limit these days (NES could only support 64 colours)
Or it could mean colour channels within a texture, for example; for PBR (Physically based rendering) texture maps it is common to pack each texture into a single texture,
using each colour channel as a PBR map,
Blue channel = metallic, Green Channel = roughness and so on
Camera and game view restrictions
Guess this means the perspective in which you’ll play from? Third person, first person, RTS style God view?
and probably covers in what ways does the player have control over the camera, can they rotate it, can they zoom, can they move the camera independently of the the character(s).
Number of characters than can be present on screen at one time
It’d be good if you gathered some empirical data for this yourself, open up ue4 and maybe, the third person example game and chuck in as many characters into the level as you can, and note the amount of characters vs your frame rate
then it’s up to you to decide what an acceptable limit is.
Polygons per level and character
often referred to as your polygon budget, is wholely a subjective limit
UE4 has no problem rendering millions of polys in static meshes,
characters is pretty much the same deal, the limiting factor with characters is normally the amount of bones in the skeleton,
but for numbers sake, WoW has characters with about 3k polys and looks great for it’s artstyle, and Ryse Son of Rome has characters pushing 80k and looks great too
so anywhere in between is fine
It’s generally a good idea to have a low as possible polycount,
but if you’re making an asset for a client, and they say you have poly budget of 3k, it’s best to make the asset have around 3k,
you wont get any points for making the asset have 300 polys
Tells you how you can see the no. of tris in your scene
not sure what the upper limit of ue4 is
I agree with the general point of view on school assignments these days : ). But it is what it is.
Looks like these points are taken directly from a book (Game Development Essentials: An Introduction) Link here for the page.
If i’m not mistaken “number of colors per texture” may be referring to the bit depth.
Slightly off topic: For the record poly count is being pushed these days well above the 80K mark, I recall Horizon had a few Robot characters in the 500K polycount. This is depending on the game and amount of characters on screen at one time plus a few other factors.
A lot of these really don’t apply to UE4 or are targeted towards older style engines.
If it was a GDD, you’d have an idea of the hard ware your targeting, the style of characters your going for etc and could answer them based on this knowledge.
In the meantime, I’d fill it in like so:
Number of Characters that can be present onscreen at once.
N/A - scales depending on hardware.
** Number of animations per character**
N/A - scales depending on hardware.
** Camera and game view restrictions**
None.
** Polygons available per level and character**
N/A - scales depending on hardware.
** Number of colors per texture map**
N/A - scales depending on hardware.
