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Interesting you should say that.. I related a similar opinion to a friend of mine.. so I'm not the only one.
Gooball demonstrates Unity, Marble Blast demonstrates Torque... maybe Unity is hoping for a mac package deal? Of course that would mean having two ball games ship with one computer.. not a good idea.

Well, when David makes his new engine... Or while he is making it... Perhaps, he could post some screenshots?.. I would also really, really like to know (Where do i sign that DND agreement?) what technologies will be implemented.

zip wrote: maybe Unity is hoping for a mac package deal?

The engine is on macintosh&windows. Not sure how much it costs for licenseing but from what I heard, the engine costs around $200.

It's a hell of a lot more fun than that, plus it's much more pretty.

Marble Blast=steep learning curve

Gooball=pick-up and play

Now let's get back on topic shall we? I hope david will reveal some screenshots of his new engine, possiblely making a tech demo to download. I would love to see a tech demo of the updated engine. I can see it now, Turner looks as good as the animals in black or white 2, Turner fighting 5 wolfs all at the same time, high frame rates on a G5 tower.

Any chance that David will use real people in his upcoming secret games? I'd like to see something besides animals and the SoS robots

Personally, I like the idea of using animals. Presents interesting abilities, instead of boring old humans. That's what I love about Lugaru, although I would like to see more animals besides bunnies and wolves.

More thoughts come to mind about the engine. Support of bump mapping and normal mapping. And it's done with open GL.

Lugaruman100 wrote:More thoughts come to mind about the engine. Support of bump mapping and normal mapping. And it's done with open GL.

.. Do you even know what that means?

Bump mapping is a texture with lighting and shadows that looks like theres bumps on it, while tricks the naked eye to think that it has more geometry.

Normal mapping is taking data from a high polygon character model and turning it into a high res texture of some sort, I could be wrong though.

crisp textures, high-poly models + speeeeeed. that's the challenge.

leDoOd wrote:@Natyr

That game looks suspiciously like the GarageGames game Marble Blast Gold, but with prettier graphics.

It uses the same sounds and controls too, sans being able to control the camera.

^ Hmm. Sounds like a quick way to make a buck to me.

Ragdolls pwns.

Lugaruman100 wrote:Bump mapping is a texture with lighting and shadows that looks like theres bumps on it, while tricks the naked eye to think that it has more geometry.

Normal mapping is taking data from a high polygon character model and turning it into a high res texture of some sort, I could be wrong though.

Bump mapping and normal mapping are two ways to the same effect.

A bump map is basically a height map, which is a grayscale image where white is high and black is low. The face of a polygon being drawn is shadowed based on the angle between the incoming light and the angle implied by the bump map. I'd imagine most (if not all) bumpmaps are converted to normal maps long before rendering, because it's unnessary and expensive to do the math required to get a normal out of a bump map in real time. However, it's still useful to keep the height data from the bump map around for parallax mapping.

A normal map can be viewed as an RGB image, but instead the RGB values for each pixel signify the components of the normal vector at that pixel.

Normal maps and bump maps create the same visual effect. Bump maps are much easier for artists to create, and normal maps are easier for the GPU to crunch.

Technologies that take a high-poly model and turn it into a normal-mapped low-poly model would create normal maps instead of bump maps because:
- The artist has already created the height information, in the polygons of the model, so they won't need a bumpmap for easy manipulation.
- It's probably easier for the software to make a normal map.
- The game will like the normal map better, because then it won't have to convert a bump map to a normal map.