Saturday, September 25, 2010

Dev Log - AI War "Midnight Starfields"


View Larger Version

Exclusive first peek at a new music track coming in AI War 4.0! Check out how the tempo shifts around 1:40 or so in the video -- Pablo's outdid himself, as usual. The entire AI War (and The Zenith Remnant) soundtrack is fully remastered for the upcoming AI War 4.0, but there are also some new tracks (even outside of the new Children of Neinzul expansion), and this is one of them.

This music track is set to a visual display of the new starfields and nebulae in the AI War 4.0. The quality and variety here is incredibly better than in the older 3.x versions, and really gives each planet a unique feel. Some of the ones right at the very end of the video happened to be particularly awesome -- they were generating at random as I clicked through them, so I never knew what I'd get (there are two billion possible starfield/nebula patterns, this shows only a couple of dozen).

Note that this is from within the Unity 3D editor, in sort of a programmer test mode, so the bar along the top of the screen, plus the little graphics status window at the top right, are both part of the Unity 3D Editor and not part of AI War itself. Programmers in the crowd might note how little graphics memory and how few draw calls are actually needed here, though -- pretty cool, it's far less overhead than what the uglier 3.x stars/nebulae needed! The fact of fraps recording was dragging down the framerate into the 30-60fps range, but without fraps on this same scene was rendering at about 600fps on my machine.

Just a little status update from our progress with AI War 4.0! A public beta is coming within the next week.

4 comments:

  1. Color me extremely impressed.

    ReplyDelete
  2. That is really great. I'm a professional composer myself and i love this song. It's really awesome how you have access to this great composer for your games!

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.