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Particle Systems

What Is a Particle System?

A Particle system is a technique where hundreds/thousands of very small sprites, 3D models or other graphics are combined to create special effects. Every videogame uses this one way or another as a way of displaying visual information, they can do this through colors etc, e.g red being hurt and green being health.

How I made Mine

Our task was to make a particle system that could be used to signify health for players, here is my design –

To do this I had to create many different materials (sprites) which i spawned hundreds of in smaller sized which when combined together gave me the floating effect of all the small particles. Instead of making them spawn in a straight line I had to set it so that they could spawn anywhere within a pixel radius, this was hard to match to the outline of the circle as the radius was in a square shape so I had a few particles outside of the edge.

This is a screenshot of my effect being created in Unreal Engines Particle system editor.

 

Where/How/Why are they used?

Particle effects are in essentially all video games whether it be pick-ups, smoke grenades etc.. They are a very good and easy way of making these as it gives the creator full control on what they want to create as they can use their own assets to create something completely unique.

Examples Of Particle Systems In Games

League Of Legends is a great example of where I can show particle systems because of all of the champion abilities that you can use, here we see a spinning attack, toxic gas, death effects, healing effects and shielding effects.

The effects used here are very colorful and you can distinguish which each one represents, healing being green and any harmful ability being a darker color.

Adding Additional Cameras in Unreal Engine

MiniMap

Today in Unreal Engine we were experimenting with what we could do with different cameras, we started off by creating a mini map, to do this we had to create a blueprint actor which was scene capture 2d, this meant that we could use it as an overhead view, which a minimap does.

Security Camera

 

Project 3 Task 2 : E-Sports

Evolution of E-Sports

E-Sports is a mass “sport” involving playing video games competitively for large pools of money, which can be crowd-sourced. It has been the subject of controversy since the beginning because sports are often physical activities and gaming is considered the opposite. E-sports started off with games such as Counter Strike 1.6 but was in very infant stages. Since the release of Counter Strike Global Offensive the E-Sports scene picked up pace and attracted hundreds of thousands of viewers and inspired many other games to implement E-Sports features, including Rainbow Six Siege. Another key game in E-Sports is Dota 2 and League Of Legends. The prize pools for the Dota 2 tournament is crowd sourced whereas CS and LOL uses sponsorship money. Prize pools have also grown exponential amounts with the winning teams now earning millions. Recently games such as Overwatch have introduced a whole new type of game to e-sports as the easy to play but hard to master gameplay and art style combined with very smooth and professional spectator tools mean that it is more optimised for E-Sports streaming which has encouraged other games to follow suit and develop features exclusively for E-Sports.

How are games affecting the games development industry

With the rapid growth of E-Sports in video games many game developers are trying to tailor their games so that they can be used in the E-Sports scene which obviously means rapid growth and attention for these smaller games, the e-sports scene is giving smaller developers an opportunity for their games to be exposed to the masses purely because of E-sports.

With this there are always going to be the positives and negatives of the effects of E-sports on these games.

One major positive is that there will be many more breakthroughs in game play features purely because everyone is trying to top each over and create the best E-sport game that they can, a prime example of this is PLAYERUNKNOWNS Battlegrounds and its competitor, Fortnite. Both games are constantly trying to top eachover which is a nice thing to see as it shows the developers care about their game and gives the player new features to play with in both games, everybody wins!

The negatives is that the market is flooded with clones of these games which are just plain boring or a blatant cash grab, we see this with games such as CSGO and rainbow six siege. Both games are superior to all of their competitors.

Social, Cultural and Ethical perspectives on E-sports

For a long time gaming was seen as a waste of the players time and it wouldn’t get them anywhere but over time with the popularity of E-sports these views have changed because people are making literal millions by competing in these video game tournaments such as CS-GO majors which have prize pools of multi millions which is split between the 5 players teams and their managers. The growth of video games inspires the growth of E-Sports which is a nice incentive for an improved stream of video game quality and competitive similar to the likes of football and basketball.

I feel that in a few years E-Sports could be seen as an actual sport with even larger tournaments and public appeal.

My Game as an E-Sport

My game will work as an E-Sport because of the competitive and strategic thinking required behind it. I feel that it will be interesting for viewers to watch as it will be constantly tense and when the big climactic fights happen it will bring excitement. This is why games like CSGO succeed so well because it starts of slow but gets interesting as soon as that first bullet is fired. The first person aspect works well for this because when the viewer is in spectator mode and can see anyone, they know that the players are locked to first person meaning that when two players are extremely close together the tension builds intensely.

Another reason it might work well is because killing the ai rewards players with drops adding a RNG element where a player could get health or more ammo but has to take the risk of giving away their position by firing their gun.

Assignment 3, Task 1 – Are Games Good For You?

Analysis of video games

Video games are often the source of mass controversy for murders, school shootings and violent behavior. It is believed that playing these games encourages the person to act in these violent ways because the game brings it out. an example of this is Chris Harper-Mercer, (https://www.bustle.com/articles/117705-oregon-gunman-chris-harper-mercer-acted-like-he-was-playing-a-video-game-according-to-survivor-chris)

Who according to a survivor was emotionless as if he was playing a video game throughout the shooting of his college. He was quoted as saying “I’ve been wanting to do this for years”. Chris was known to play many violent video games and gathered support for his plans over 4chan.

After the shooting the blame went towards video games as it is believed that the violence seen inspired his actions.

Likewise , video games have been praised for improving brain functions and claims have been made that it improved memory, reaction time, hand-eye coordination and basic cognitive functions.

In 2013 a study was conducted by Simone Kuhn, a psychologist, which studied the effect of prolonged video game exposure on the brains of younger people. The study required them to play Super Mario 64 for 30mins everyday for the next 2 months. Mario is a platformer game which required you to think about your approach to each level. At the end of the study, and MRI scans he found that the prefrontal cortex, hippocampus and cerebellum  of those studied had all expanded compared to a normal persons.

Source (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/is-video-gaming-bad-for-you-the-science-for-and-against/)

My Conclusion

In my personal biased experience, I play video games a lot. Mainly in the action/fps genre which I have first hand experienced how much games affect someone, since I’ve started playing video games like Counter Strike I’ve noticed a decrease in my reaction times as to be good in the higher levels you have to train yourself and use muscle memory to predict where the next enemy will be and also be prepared to react to any surprises. The player “Hiko” was praised for having “inhuman reactions” due to the amount of training he has had on the game. There are many videos on youtube showing this clip but you can clearly see his reaction time is vastly different to a casual players

I believe that the pros outweigh the cons as people are responsible for their violent behavior and blaming it on video games is just silly as it is an excuse not to take responsibility for your actions.

 

My Game Design Document

My game would be an action game but locked to first person as this means it relies on the users reactions to find enemies instead of third person peaking over walls. There will be the usual stance features, including leaning, prone, crouch and standing. I also like the idea of the enhanced stance system as seen in Arma 3. The game will focus on pve/pvp combat where in there will be AI enemies (zombies) as well as other online players so the players will have to distinguish their targets before shooting to avoid wasting ammo and giving their position away to other players. This will encourage the player to think about their actions and not play like a zombie and shoot everything they see. I believe that when combined with the first person view this will be a good concept for a game that encourages my players to use their brain and think smart to get the advantage on enemies.

Assignment 2, Task 3 – Review

After finishing the design and creation stages of my gun I can say that I am not as happy with my finished result as I hoped as the rifle was a lot larger than I think I expected and so trying to get everything to appear to scale was difficult, although, this being said I am glad with the futuristic aesthetic that my gun holds as I added the attachments found on it based on my personal preference and thought it looked too dull when painted in traditional black and silver, I experimented with different colors and was a lot happier with what I turned out with, I settled on the red and white with the black body as the actual rifle itself is based from an old Mossberg patriot hunting rifle but has had a futuristic touch up via attachments and paint.

This project has taught me a lot I didn’t know about Maya and I am happy that I chose such an ambitious model as it shown me what I can accomplish when I decide to try something new. It has definitely reinforced my understanding of how to import images and different materials onto my mesh as I played around with adding small logos but thought it took away from my gun’s theme.

My biggest downfall on this is that the body looks to blocky which when I tried to smoothen completely destroyed my dynamics of the weapon and made it completely disproportional, next time before I start I will need to make sure I am aware of my proportions to prevent mistakes like this happening again.

Assignment 2, Task 2 – Design

Using Photoshop I created a completely unique sniper rifle using the Mossberg Patriots body, this included a thermal scope and a extended magazine which I recycled the design from the game PLAYERUNKNOWN’s Battlegrounds.

The design needs a bit of refining as some of the surfaces on the thermal scope will be hard to recreate but this is the design that I am going for.

I’m also going to add a custom texture that I have created which will likely be some form of camouflage to give it a more tactical and realistic look.

The body of the gun is made out of a polymer material so I will use the Lambert material to avoid any shininess which is a quality of a metal body. Lambert is more of the matte color and so does not show reflections, the back of the gun is also rubber so I can add smaller and rougher textures to show this.

The Barrel will be made of metal and so I will use the Blinn material to give it this appearance.

Project Management 

 

Above are screenshots of my finished result, as you can see I changed from a more serious theme of color to a more futuristic red and white whilst retaining my original black body, to create this look I used the Blinn material for my metallic parts of the gun and Lambert for anything that wasn’t metal such as the plastic scope and body.

To create the barrel I stretched out a normal cylinder and thinned it out until I had my desired length of barrel. The rest was easy to make as all I had to do was resize, rotate and fit shapes together to give me the basic body, I also included the metallic dish on the stock of the rifle to give it the impression that it folds, even though right now it cannot do that.

 

Here is the download for the maya file :

http://www.mediafire.com/file/hsq3q4e61hqq6ic/Sniper.mb