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GES Weekly Update 4/29/2007

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Sean [Baron]:
There have been a number of questions recently asking when there will be an update available, what will be included, and what you guys can expect. And while I don't have any answers to those yet, or any I'm willing to announce yet, I will tell you that the team has decided on a date in which we believe would be a good time to release some new content and we will be working toward that. We'll make that date available to you guys when all content we are working currently on has been completed and implemented and we have begun internal testing.

I said last week that with the recent addition of 'Lkruel' to the team, whom works at Electronic Arts, that he was brought on the team not only for his valuable experience in the industry but mainly because he has the knowledge to work on some of the things we feel will really spice up the project greatly. Some of those things would be graphical enhancements. Recently we have been discussing the possibility of Skin Specularity, Sub-Surface Scattering, Fresnel Reflections, Motion Blur, among others that we feel will be great additions to the technical aspect of the project, and will be some nice eye candy for those who can handle it. If you don't know what these are, this might give you some idea.

Subsurface scattering (or SSS) is a mechanism of light transport in which light penetrates the surface of a translucent object, is scattered by interacting with the material, and exits the surface at a different point. The light will generally penetrate the surface and be reflected a number of times at irregular angles inside the material, before passing back out of the material at an angle other than the angle it would reflect at had it reflected directly off the surface.

The "Fresnel" effect is also called "facing ratio", it's the way a surface and its attributes change depending on the view angle. It essentially measures the angle a normal is facing relative to the camera and shades those points based on what angle they face the camera at. Facing ratio is used a lot in shaders, especially for dust effects, electron microscope effects, toon shading (for the outline) and rim lighting shaders. If the package you use gives you access to the facing ratio of your surfaces you can make some really great shaders.

Continued developing in the programming department has been on-going over the last week, with many bug fixes, some gameplay fixes and minor additions such as; Weapon Sets are now implemented, and by that I mean the loadouts of Pistols, Automatics, Power, etc. that the user can choose when creating a server.

Next week we should have some more character renders made available to you, as well as the possibility of some new level screenshots, and more updates on the technical work thats always getting progress

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