Brice Vandemoortele

PlayStation2 Project: Churob

I was student in an infographic school (3 year bachelor). As last project we had to build a demo for pc or console, by groups of 3 students. Fresh engine was put at our disposal by the company fresh 3d, allowing us to devellop for the PlayStation 2 platform, with its specifics pros and cons..

We have chose a pretext-kind of scenario. Because we are graphists and not programmers nor game designer the subject was free. We just needed to prove we had a good knowledge of the videogame workflow learnt during our studies.

Despite this Jérôme already had a bachelor in programming. That was a major help. In the game you control two redneck-looking people ("barakis" as called in belgium) from space. Yeah, rednecks from space. Both are send by some capitalist company on a beautiful, untouched, pure planet to extract the natural ressources.

You are driving some four-legged exploration tank (might be an old one bought from the alaska war) throught the jungles of an unknow world. This isn't fun with loads of guns, so bad evil insects want to kick your ass because they don't like you. Good story, now we can put monsters and robots :P

Images here are either concepts or screenshots taken directly from the PlayStation with a network interface. This leads to some problems: Contrast is very different from a tv to a monitor, the image doesn't "blur" as well. Dynamic objects seems (oddly) to be rendered on half-buffer. They are lacking half resolution on their height, shorter: "it's ugly" :P. For those who likes to scream at big studios they touch up their screens, I almost left the original buffer size (600px, 640 for the actual front buffer), producing nice looking aliasing ^^ (this is only for ingame screenshots, creatures are downsampled, even if it's also images produced by the ps2 gpu)

Jury is over (the project was due to june 2006), so we have a first feedback (and marks too ^^). The biggest problem - we knew it but, hey, too late.. - is the terrible differences and/or inconsistency of pixel-ratios. Overall everything is way too detailled. It's a good thing from a portfolio PoV, not from a production one. Spending useless creation time, generating aliasing (no mip mapping). Vram is full (100% of the ~2Mo of textures available used) so no extra space for oversampling or more effects, diversity etc.

PlayStation2 Project: Churob Video

Download Video (~70Mo)

PlayStation2 Project: Churob Models

churob samples

churob samples

churob samples

churob samples

churob samples

churob samples

The demo was still well reviewed by the jury, between other things because of the technical constrains. Everything except the core API is written in LUA script, including AI, hud, anim synchro, collision planes, loading, etc, etc. Lua might be 15 times slower than a compiled C++, by times the console lags because of cpu instead of gpu. It's a topsy-turvy world :P

As the engine as no mainram to vram memory manager the entire demo is loaded in vram (textures). This implies everything is quantised on 4bits palette, most of the time with 128². The game is running at 50hz PAL (not enought vram for full buffers and a zbuffer occlusion system that needs high refreshing rates).

PlayStation2 Project: Churob Concepts

churob samples

churob samples

churob samples

churob samples