Super Mega Baseball [updated]

[delphenium]

Hello everyone,

We are a small indie startup and have been working on our first title for a while now. We wanted to share what we have so far here, as it is using the (fantastic) Ogre renderer. BigFly Baseball is a fast, light-hearted and accessible game that is true to the atmosphere and sport of baseball. Let us know what you think

The games site is here: http://www.bigflybaseball.com
We are: http://www.metalheadsoftware.com/

Here is the first preview trailer:
[youtube]V1pNtkV1T1E[/youtube]

Here are a few more screens from the game:

[spacegaier]

Looking real good already. Hope to see more soon!

[Jabberwocky]

Really nicely done. The art looks extremely polished. What tech are you using to render your crowds?

[areay]

Wow, what a great art style, I like the GUI too. This must've taken you ages to create, what is the size of your team? As Jabberwocky asked, what are you using to make your crowd? Instancing?

[Nauk]

Nice!

[duststorm]

Wow, very good!
The varied crowd makes it look real interesting. How many unique models are there? Or do you have a system for parametrically creating them?
The grass effect is real interesting too.

All in all I think it has a nice and coherent visual style that's also quite original.

What platforms are you targeting?

[delphenium]

Thanks for the kind words

Really nicely done. The art looks extremely polished. What tech are you using to render your crowds?

The crowd is, at this time, instanced. It is not really using either of the built in Ogre instancing systems (old or 1.8 new), rather a variation of the 1.8 instancing system. At the time we started implementing this, the 1.8 instancing system didn't really do all the things we wanted to do, so we implemented our own using some ideas from the 1.8 system. Fundamentally, it uses this approach: http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGem ... _ch02.html, with the exception that it runs on DX9 (no SVInstanceID) etc. I had written a post in the instancing dev thread: http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic. ... &start=100 9(its on page 5) about what we have done. The scene as you see it is ~200 batches. This approach is working well on the PC, but based on what I have read may not be the best way to go about it on whichever target hardware this is released on. We shall see...

Wow, what a great art style, I like the GUI too. This must've taken you ages to create, what is the size of your team? As Jabberwocky asked, what are you using to make your crowd? Instancing?

There are three of us. 2 with a software engineering background, and 1 artist.

The varied crowd makes it look real interesting. How many unique models are there? Or do you have a system for parametrically creating them?

All the characters (crowd, players, umpires) are assembled out of body parts. We have a tool that churns out character definitions during the asset build step. There are a bunch of different heads, body styles, hair styles, etc etc, in addition with random scales, skin tones, hair colors, etc. In theory, there should be no two characters that look exactly the same. It attempts to keep the characters reasonable looking, but it allows outliers (such as the very dark skinned guy with blonde hair ) I'll post some screenshots using NVPerfMon once I am at work that shows what this looks like.

What platforms are you targeting?

TBA, but we should hopefully know soon.

Christian

[areay]

I like how in the screenshot the other team mates sitting on the sidelines (I've no idea what the proper baseball terminology is - dugout?) are moving their heads to watch the ball too.

About the crowd instancing, the first thing I thought of was the skinned instancing demo that nvidia made for DirectX10
PDF http://developer.download.nvidia.com/SD ... ePaper.pdf
Video http://developer.download.nvidia.com/SD ... ancing.wmv

Nice that you got something similar for DX9 though.

How long as it taken your team to reach this stage? How far from 'done' do you think you are? What platforms will you be releasing for?

[delphenium]

Hello,

As promised here a couple of screenshots taken with NVPerfHUD on.

Drawing some bodies. All the orange wire-frame meshes are 1 batch.


Further along in drawing this frame, drawing some heads, (which don't have LOD's yet, which is why they are drawing near&far with a really high poly model)



Christian

[cyrfer]

I love it! Finally, a game made by the OGRE community that I would be interested in buying. Good luck with your project.

[jimmiey]

I love it! Finally, a game made by the OGRE community that I would be interested in buying. Good luck with your project.

anything you buy from here??

[mingi]

dude you are seriously talented, I love the animated graphics. Good job, send us more screenshots

[delphenium]

Hello everyone,

Here is a bit of an update on this project.
Currently working like crazy to get all of the gameplay elements finished and working on console port.
If you happen to be coming to PAX East this year and this is your kinda thing, swing on by to check it out! We've got a booth and a somewhat [s]playable[/s] crashable build

We have got a new preview trailer:
[youtube]TjMATi4vQz8[/youtube]

Also, this being a simulation and all, the AI can play against itself. The following is a full 9-inning game being played by the AI, unedited, bugs and all
[youtube]AOVFJYy_uA0[/youtube]

For those interested in what the CEGUI system can do, here is a video of some of the UI in the game, all done with CEGUI.
[youtube]-9j1BEue7xo[/youtube]

And a couple of in-game images:






Christian

[bstone]

Beautiful stuff! And yeah, CEGUI is very powerful but damn I hate how slow it initializes itself and parses XML files in debug builds, grrr.

[Mind Calamity]

I love how the game looks. Great job!

Beautiful stuff! And yeah, CEGUI is very powerful but damn I hate how slow it initializes itself and parses XML files in debug builds, grrr.

Indeed, it takes ~4 seconds to initialize CEGUI in my case, which is a big chunk of the bootstrap time of my engine. (~6 seconds) And it's mostly due to texture loading (although it's my fault for using large atlases).

[areay]

That is looking absolutely grade-A awesome! What you've done with the GUI works very well for you. Looks like you've spent plenty of time on the environments too.

I like the power-ups you've in there, stopped the YT clip a bit and looked at them 'spiked sluggerade' ha, 'corked bat ... don't get caught using it', can you actually get caught?

Also, are you doing the PS3(?)-port yourselves? And what does mojo do?

[TheSHEEEP]

Good work!

[mkultra333]

Looks great. I especially like that new screenshot from the back of the stadium looking out over the field with the city in the background.

[delphenium]

I like the power-ups you've in there, stopped the YT clip a bit and looked at them 'spiked sluggerade' ha, 'corked bat ... don't get caught using it', can you actually get caught?

Also, are you doing the PS3(?)-port yourselves? And what does mojo do?

Well, the powerups system isn't exactly done yet, so no, you don't get caught, YET! (As are many, many other things in the game... this thing is still a ways from being done...)
Mojo is intended as the general spirit & form of the player. If they got no mojo, they'll perform terrible. If they got great mojo, they will do better than they would normally. If you cheat (by using a corked bat for example), your mojo goes down. If people keep hitting dingers off the pitcher, his mojo will nosedive (The batters however might go up). Basically, its a mechanic which is supposed to summarize a players mental state based on what is happening in the game, and adjust how well they perform.

Christian

[delphenium]

One more video.
When things don't go so well...

[youtube]en0KRZ9h3Ag[/youtube]

Christian

[areay]

When things don't go so well...

Christian

NSFW! Dudes with tits!

[delphenium]

Hello,

There is an update available for this game. We have now officially announced it, you can check it out here:
http://blog.us.playstation.com/2014/09/ ... this-fall/

and at the games official site here:
http://www.supermegabaseball.com/

I regret to say that Ogre is unfortunately not the renderer which we ended up using for the final version, but without a doubt we would have had no hope of making this game without being able to prototype it, demo it and test it using Ogre. So although the final game is not using Ogre, it would not exist without it. So thank you all for providing this great renderer to people like us that had little clue of what we were doing when we started out on this adventure

Christian

[Thyrion]

what render engine do u use now?

[delphenium]

@Thyrion

We use Phyre, a renderer provided by Sony to licensed partners. (Its existence is no secret, you can find it on wikipedia).
The option we faced was trying to make Ogre run on the PS3 or make our game work with Phyre. We choose the latter, and I believe it was the correct decision. It was a titanic PITA, but it now runs at 60FPS on the PS3, so I'd say it was worth it.