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21 Sep 2011 No Comments
Posted under Uncategorized
We moved to our permanent servers. So you will not see any more updates here. But yes, we are active on our new address -
http://detlabs.com/blogs/22yards
See you there.
We are looking for resources–2D/3D Artists, Programmers
16 Aug 2011 No Comments
Posted under Work Done Tags: Resources
Hello Supporters,
I hope everyone is doing well. We are going through a rough phase. We are running out of resources (rather time that is put by the available resources). We have hardly progressed any further in last 5 weeks because of this. Me being a programmer and limited expertise on 3D Modeling and Animations, have no choice but to wait till we get some great resources. Our current resources are engaged in some personal commitments for which they are unable to lend enough time required for the development of the game.
We are at a stage, where I am waiting to integrate Bowler (Model and 1 animation), Fielder(Model and animation) and Fielding AI. But we need the first two things before we can integrate all of these. Once this is done, that would be a major advancement for the project. But we are stuck at this point. I have been trying to advertise the fact that we need 2D artists, 3D Modelers, 3D Animators and programmers. If you have the passion and the skillset or if you know someone else, do let us know. We will make sure the hard work and talent is rewarded when the time comes. Candidates interested for helping on this game and candidates interested in the overall effort and beyond, can contact me on das.vicky@gmail.com.
Hoping for continuous support.
–Das
All play and no work
25 Jul 2011 No Comments
Posted under Uncategorized
Hello All,
Hope everyone is doing well. “Lazy week” would be a massively understatement to describe our work in past two weeks. As everyone knows, we all work part time on this project and there are other priorities that needs to be taken care. Considering that I would consider ourshelves lucky that all 4 of us were pulled into some other priorities at same time. It means that the loss is time is minimal. Our 3D modeller was pulled into a commercial modelling project and was out of 2 weeks. Simillarly our 2D asset developers got into something personal. As far I am concerned (das), I thought it would be a good break for me as I have been toiling hard for past 3 months and hardly gave any time to family.
It was a refreshing break. In the meanwhile, I just bought myself a new Development machine with high end graphics cards etc..Soon I will be getting another monitor and working on the new Development machine, because the features we are adding is rendering slow on my laptop. Ofcourse you should not worry because these advanced features can be turned off so that its playable on low end cards also.
So this week marks the reboot of the work and I am sure it will take atmost 2-3 days to gain full momentum. At the same time from a “Business” perspective, we are in discussions of moving us to a new webspace and manage that full time. We are now getting into stage where we need 3D Animators. So if you are interested or if you know someone who may be interested do let us know and we would be happy to speak to them.
–Core Team
22 Yards
Lot of work these days!
06 Jul 2011 No Comments
Posted under Uncategorized
Hello All,
Hope all are doing great. Welcome to new and returning users. Last two weeks has been pretty hectic as usual. Pradeep trying hard on Bowler model and its animation. It may take some time till he gets that done. In the meanwhile, I was hell bent on implementing some important effects.
1) Shadows
2) Bloom
3) HDR
My current shadow implementation is a Shadow Map with 4×4 PCF filtering and took an unexpected 6 days to implement. For details, you can search using in your favorite search engine. But my scene is really big and to get more quality I may have to use Parallel Split Shadow Maps. But I will look into that later. My laptop which has ATI Radeon HD 3670, runs the game at constant 60 FPS (as I am using Fixed time step) but with the shadows it comes down to 25 FPS. But on some research found that this is expected and shadows are some of the most taxing parts of Game rendering.
I also added a basic Bloom Effect with a basic Blur. When I next get chance I would change the normal blur to Gaussian Blur. It has some variable parameters that can change the overall bloom effect.
Sharing some test pics straight from Debug view without and with Bloom Effect respectively.
Haven’t started to work on HDR but will be doing that very soon. In the meanwhile we are also borrowing support from Vikas who will be helping us on 2D textures. So if you don’t like the Pitch/Ground textures, you know whom to catch (just kidding).
From a game engine perspective, I can now formally make it public that we will be implementing a Dynamic Time of Day. What does it mean? Well, basically we have an inbuilt timer which in conjunction with the game timer will simulate time of day. So based on time of day, the light direction color changes too…so you can expect same behavior in game as well 
.
Sorry for more-than-required technical details, but unfortunately nothing else was done either .
Current Dev Progress
21 Jun 2011 No Comments
Posted under Uncategorized
Hello All,
Its exactly 15 days since my last blog. Work has been at constant progress ever since we started work on March 27th. So what were we working all these days. Let me put out as point list
1) Our game is a unique combination of 2D gameplay and 3D gameplay. So there should be a smooth transition from either. And yes, that’s what we were working on.
2) Work on 3D scene has also started. That means, Ball, Bails, Stumps Pitch, Ground (not stadium) models are being worked on with integration into 3D engine.
3) We have started to implemented Physics into our game now. During due course we found that real world physics only sounds good. It does nothing more than reducing gameplay. So we will be simulating “real life like” physics by manipulating the physics variables.
4) Implemented few more cameras with enhanced Ball chase support. So what the heck is the Enhanced ball chase.. Well, for that you need to wait for release
5) Not to forget those bug fixes that we find during dev phase!!
6) Not to forget the changes made to numerous Code to enhance robustness by enforcing various guidelines, OOP semantics etc..
There’s lot more, but that would look more like a code review so I will skip that point!!
So what are we upto now in next 1 month or so
1) Bowler model with 1 basic bowling animation for testing in game.
2) Custom code to handle importing of animation data and Skinned model effect.
3) Physics implementation on Wickets, bails and correct collision detection behavior for ball, stumps, bails.
3) Use that to generate ball delivery point, ball pitching point and direction of ball
4) Use above information to generate each delivery of ball (all calculation at real time) for other custom data we have.
Hope this provides some valuable insight of what we are doing these days!
Debugging…that was
06 Jun 2011 1 Comment
Posted under Uncategorized
Hello All,
Hope everyone is doing well. The last couple of weeks had been very hectic and low on productivity. No, its not because I was busy on something else, because its very hard to find out own silly mistake and as a result of which , spent almost 3 days debugging a silly code mistake. But all was not bad, during those debugging session, found some places where I could improve performance.
Also added a dynamic loading page. What this means that we have a scene where we can plugin any draw code and have that display when you get those dreaded loading of assets. Yes its trivial, but we got to do it. Then I modularized lot of code. Did some major changes to the Custom model class now allowing to associate Lighting Material and Texture Materials to be associated with each mesh of Model and consequently change it anytime per mesh. Also added some more elements to the 2D Gameplay engine making the screen fill with life slowly and steadily.
Now this entire month is dedicated for the AI game engine. So time for lot of Mathematics and equations. GameAI Engine would consist of 4 DLLs. Completed the first one and successfully added test code and ran multiple tests and pretty satisfied with the results. So for this entire month, I will share some more mathematical equations. I am expecting to complete 1 and half modules more this month. Hope this goes on as its going.
Internally we were also discussing the possibility of buying 3rd party solutions for UI (Buttons, ListBox etc..). We would definitely like to build one of our own, but looking at the time constraint and me being the only programmer at this point, cannot afford to work on UI for POC release. So in case if any programmer is interested to create a skinnable UI framework for XNA, do let us know. we will more than happy to get you in our team.
Work done in last 10 days
23 May 2011 No Comments
Posted under Work Done
Hello All, Continuing with this new trend of updating once every 10 days(instead of every 2-3 days), here comes the update. Also please pardon me as me being a developer and doing the development work, I can only think of “updates” from a developer point of view.
So what have we done since the last blog? I would say a hell lot. Lots of code being written, lot of work done by Pradeep on creating 3D models. He has ensured to deliver great work with the minimum turnaround time. But wait…we were working on 2D gameplay screen right? Right, but without subtle 3D elements, the feel wouldn’t be nice. We have some gentle yet pleasing transitions during 2D game play. We have also spent almost 4 days planning out 1 specific model for the screen which is a key model in the 2D screen. We have discussed a lot about the Usability and accessibility of buttons and screens, so hopefully the results should show up when game releases
Now this game is also not built as a standalone game. Its being built on top of a game engine which is being built on top of XNA framework. So think of Game as a house. To build it, we need Doors, Bricks Wood panels etc.. We are also building the Doors, Bricks, Wood panels (read as game engine components).
During this 10 days, we wrote the basic HLSL code too, because our game would be using some cool effects, which is not possible without HLSL. Now in due course we would be improving on this HLSL code and adding lot more. We had always mentioned about easing out modifiability in the game, so some basic structures were built with that in mind.
With a lot more background code in place(the code that handles all processing etc..) and rate at which the weight of Foreground code(the code that makes things display, animate on screen) is increasing, I would dare say – we are extremely happy with the development progress.
Where were we??
14 May 2011 No Comments
Posted under Uncategorized
Last update was on 2nd May and today is 14th May. What the hell is going on? Are we back to being ignorant, being less focussed? The answer to this is ABSOLUTELY NOT. We have got multiple feedbacks that most users do not understand ( read as not interested) in too much Technicalities of the process or the game itself. So we thought of posting limited updates for some time and see how it goes.
As of now, work is progressing smoothly. In this whole week, Das has implemented some “Behind the scenes” stuff for Team Selection Scene, Playing11Selection Scene, Toss Scene and 2D gameplay scene. With these background stuff in place, now Das would work (along with Pradeep and Anand) on giving the 2DGameplay Scene its meat (its content). We are hoping we should be on verge of completing 70% of 2D Gameplay Scene by end of June, considering that staring first week of June Anand would be available to work on this too. That would be a significant milestone for our Development cycle because that would mean, we can squeeze in lot more stuff in POC release.
So things continue to look very good… for us, for you!!
Update 2nd May
02 May 2011 No Comments
Posted under Monthly Meeting, Work Done
Hello All,
We continue to bring all relevant (and sometimes) irrelevant updates as we promised. This Month’s meeting that was supposed to happen on 8th May was shifted to 1st May as Das is on vacation from 4th May to 10th May. All our core members joined in the meeting where we discussed only the current status of the development so far.
We am proud to say that our Development is absolutely on track and we are making terrific progress. Though we are not mentioning the task numbers but all the tasks we had undertaken with Internal Deadline of 1st May has been completed by 1st May. We are now working on the biggest thing for the POC release – the 2D gameplay screen. As we had mentioned earlier this game is a combination of 2D and 3D game, so in order to achieve 40% feature complete in 2D for POC, we have started working on 2D Gameplay screen. Ofcourse there are some cool features regarding the 2D and 3D gameplay, but we have decided we won’t be bragging about it till we implement it in the Alpha release Time frame.
For this complete implementation of 2D gameplay screen, there are other things that needs to be done as well
1) Workable Implementation of Match Class
2) Workable Implementation of Tournament Class
3) Workable Implementation of Player Class
4) Workable implementation of AutoPlayEngine
5) Database of atleast 3 International Teams with 20 players each.
6) Game scenes like – Tounament Selection/Match Selection, Team Selection etc… leading to the 2D Game play screen.
7) Placeholder Textures for each of the Game Scenes
Creating and Fine tuning some Subtle animations
So all of these will be done simulateously. This game has already started taking shape, though the Textures, backgound etc…that we are using are for Dev purposes only, so that we can position game elements appropriately. The looks of the game would not be final look till Beta release but the feel would be. In about two months from now, we am certain, we should be able to release some teaser videos with 2D gameplay in action
–Core Team
Prelude to next meeting – 1st May
28 Apr 2011 No Comments
Posted under Monthly Meeting, Work Done
Hello All,
Das is back from his first vacation. Yeah first, because he is going on vacation again from 5th May to 9th May. So that means Das has more than 1 week and half to program lot of things and thats exactly what he is doing. He has laid out the basic Scene Engine and closed that task. He has now moved to the next task (C2) of Finalizing the structure of Player Stats and Team. So basically he is finalizing the structure of the Player and Team Database. As you might imagine, it should not take very long. So its quite expected that Das completes C2 and Jumps to next Programming/Developing Tasks.
In the meanwhile, the Storyline is progressing and we are expecting it to be complete before 1st May. Our initial idea was to design the complete menu system, screens etc simultaneously, but we thought that would mean that the look and feel of the POC release would look exactly same as final release, which also means there would be no “Surprise”. So we have thought, we would document everything and implement the very basics so that the final look and feel is implemented right at the beta stage. So we are trying to tie everything up as a boilerplate fashion so that we can add, modify the final looks whenever needed. Remember that the whole developement is also focussed on allowing as much customization as possible.
After the storyline is complete, the first set of 3D model creation would start. It was anyways part of POC release, but we are starting it way earlier, which is actually good news.
Stay tuned for more news post the 1st May meeting.
-Core Team
