Published on 9/7/2011

Finally, a much anticipated moment has arrived... Click through to see the real Stingray model in action.

The office asked me to do a presentation on Stingray for one of the Knowledge Sharing Sessions they have on a monthly basis. A couple of guys at the office have been keeping tabs on the progress and they've deemed it worthy of a recommendation for a session. We'll mostly cover the performance side of things - optimal code with optimal structures - to keep it relevant.

As part of the preparation for it, we decided to wrap up the production on the actual Stingray chopper model and stick it into the game for real. Ramon had actually delivered the model to me a while ago, and it's been lying in my inbox ever since. But the weekend I decided to take it in, clean it up, finish the unwrapping and well... see for yourself...

I decided to start with a 'stealth' texture. There will be more options later on, which will be determined by your upgrades. The other neat success about this is that the canopy of the chopper is the first real transparent item in the game. I've had to tweak the shaders a bit to get the sun/moon reflection off it looking good, and it pretty much all worked out well.

I've also built some more items for the levels and overall there's much more going on in the scene than before. The frame rate on my laptop seems to still hover around 30 after I revised some infrastructure and optimised distance sorting, but I think that's the limit of the hardware on here. I should start taking screens from my gaming rig now. All in all it's now really starting to look like a game... At least that's what Ramon said :D