Welcome to the Motel Arizona
Good artists copy, I use Google Image Search
In the last couple weeks I’ve moved my entire development environment over to a new 27″ iMac running Windows 7 x64. My old setup was running in VMWare Fusion on a 20″ iMac, but this didn’t allow for the game to run in Windows, only the Xbox360. The migration turned out to be more painful than a horde of zombies… I had issues Synergy-ing the 20″ and 27″ Macs together, then issues with .NET “security” not liking my code being on a networked drive, then issues with my Xbox chatpad lacking Windows drivers (unfixable), then sporadic issues with XNA’s HLSL Compiler locking up and taking Visual Studio down with it! After a couple of days working countless issues out, I was finally able to get started porting Dead Shift to Windows, and that’s where the real fun began.
It took me an embarrassing amount of time and sanity to track down a bug that was causing every polygon in the game to explode, preventing me from working on anything else… Apparently, on my Mac’s GPU at least, the POSITION1 semantic overwrites/conflicts/kills/destroys/violates the POSITION0 semantic, and I was happily using both… *grumbles*
Anyways!…
In the tradition of Body Harvest, I’m foolishly designing Dead Shift as I go with no real plan. Recently, Skunkie and I tried to work out the best possible location for the game based on the following criteria:
- It must be a town that I’m capable of designing in Sketchup, which means simple architecture
- It must convey a sense of isolation, atmosphere, fallen civilization, etc, and work well with wide cinematic camera angles
- It must feel like a real place, despite being rather empty (due to my lack of artistic abilities).
- It must be hard to escape on foot in real life… Muhahaha!
Amazing how much Dead Shift's renderer improves this crap. 
The answer was a place we have driven through more times than I can count… A little town called Gila Bend (wiki), located in the middle of an Arizona desert, about hour or so from the Mexican border. There are cheesy signs, buildings, and sculptures sprinkled amongst the derelict buildings, motels, and gas stations. I can’t imagine a more perfect location for a zombie outbreak, and you gotta love that welcome sign. I’m not going to recreate the actual town, but I will be using it as a source inspiration. 
@Nelxon
I’ve been following his engine since before he was planning on releasing it! I think it looks great, but I haven’t had the time to give it a test run yet. I’d be willing to pay $1,000 for it (at least) if it can handle my game…
@Tim
I didn’t know you could multi-thread GPU-related calls, that sounds dangerous to me! I would consider instancing your lights, rather than multithreading… That’s something I planned on looking into before I decided on a day-time game… Maybe for a sequel.
Haha you can’t as far as I’m aware
I’m refering to the culling before shadow mapping begins
You cannot cull away objects not seen by the camera but you only need to get the depth of objects visible by the light so that should give a great boost.
And for indoor areas you dont need shadows for each one but will you still implement point and spot lights? Also, do you plan on doing day/night cycle?
@Tim
I’ve been doing multithreaded frustum culling for scenes/lights, and it works nicely.
As for point/spot lights and day/night cycles… I’ve spent over a year working on this game, and recently I’ve decided to stop wasting time on things that aren’t necessary like SSAO/gfx tweaks/etc. Additional lights and day/night cycles would be great, but I’m going to try and finish the level/gameplay/physics/animation/missions/etc first, then see if I have the energy to add extras.
I have a serious problem of overreaching my grasp that I’m trying to stem. I want this to be a series of games, so I should probably leave something for the sequels.
I know exactly what you mean, I always start off with the least important or unnecessary features,
when working on the basics of components, including physics, is not only more productive but more beneficial when building up to the cool useless features haha
The idea of “sequels” is a really comforting idea, I never thought of it that way
It’s sortof like building your engine around a proof of concept rather than having the final product in mind
I recently took a large step back in physics,
I started with concave-concave mesh collision then jumped over to convex mesh collision & response(can you see the problem here)
The triangle-triangle concave mesh collision worked but was innacurate,
my convex mesh collision worked but the response was jittery, the SAT was buggy and I realized I didn’t have nearly enough experience or knowledge to debug it.
Basically I’ve gone back to just primitive collisions, and in doing so I realized the proper way to do SAT and build the contact manifold, I also fixed the crap in my impulse calculations.
Simplicity really is a beautiful thing, knowing how to do something and implementing it cleanly and quickly in code is just an unrivaled experience
@Tim
Yeah, I really want to finish a game for once, and not just play with tech demos! Sometimes I think I have A.D.D.
Physics -is- a real nightmare… I do hope that the Jitter engine works out, I would be more than happy to scrap my engine. But playing with more physics engines isn’t high on my list of priorities at the moment.
I make all my engines by myself,
I wish I didn’t care but I just can’t bring myself to use the free stuff on codeplex or anywhere
But yeah I feel ya on the tech demos, it always seems like I’m working on engines and never on games
And A.D.D is to convenient an excuse
@Tim
Convenient AND plausible.