Inner Circle Update for September 25 2017! (Patreon)

I’m squeezing in an update here because we’re at a good stopping point before we dive into converting Neon to the new rendering engine. It’s been a tough week because Uber has been almost completely down and out due to his eye condition, which turned out to have the potential to be pretty serious (he actually had to get an injection… in his eye). The good news is his check-up this morning showed it was improving, so hopefully his recovery continues to go well. In the meantime, TK and I have had to climb the learning curve of our map project without Uber there knock out the more advanced stuff related to the new artwork style; ultimately a good thing for forcing us to learn, but I would have liked to have had more to show you this update. I’ll hopefully make some solid progress on the Neon conversion in the next few days and have another post ahead of the monthly update. 

Map Progress

The map shown in the video is the player’s introduction to The Void. I wanted this one to have a lot of impact since it basically is where v0.06 begins to heat up. This video was actually shot in RPG Maker, so it should be the quality you can expect for v0.06. 

We showed some earlier work on the map last week, and since then TK has pretty much entirely retextured the platform after learning some new things from Uber. This is only his second texturing job using physically based rendering, so it’s exciting to see him improve so quickly. 

On the other end of things, I’ve been getting a real trial by fire with the background artwork for this map. It’s the first real map I’ve had to work on in Maya with the Redshift rendering engine, so while I’ve been learning a lot, it hasn’t been super speedy for me. It’s a pretty complex scene due to the number of structures, and I had to learn a technique called proxying which allows Redshift to instance geometry to conserve memory. I basically built two huge slum tower segments from assets Uber had prepared previously, then instanced them around the scene to build the towers. After my first test render of the scene took 12 hours (without even finishing), I spent a full day learning and testing the intricacies of Redshift’s render settings. It proved useful as I was able to get the render time down to 3.5 hours for all the layers needed for the parallax effect shown in the video with virtually no loss of quality. I also spent some time learning the required Maya skills for using Ubercharge’s procedural damage technique we showed off awhile back with the intent to make the slums really grimy looking. While I got it all set up and working, it still requires some time in the oven and I figured we’ll save it for after V0.06 once the maps need upgrading to 1080p. Lastly, since this is the first map we’ve gotten to test in the new widescreen format, APL and I spent a day tracking down bugs and making necessary improvements to the map system. Anyways, you can check out the full size composite render of the background here!

New Track Added to Soundtrack Rewards

The music in the video will most likely be the song used during the Void exploration. I’ve uploaded the full track to the Soundtrack Rewards!

Neon’s Armor PBR Conversion

When his eye wasn’t bothering him, Uber was actually able to work for a few hours today on Neon’s armor conversion to the new rendering engines. He was able to get a preview mock-up completed. While I wanted to have a full day working on it, I was only able to spend some time testing out emission/glow for the armor’s lights in Iray. That said, if the early test suggests anything it will look completely awesome once finished. Here are some images from our brief work on it today (note that the glow/emission test images don’t contain Ubercharge’s conversion work). 

ARIS Revamp

APL, Uber, and I spent a morning a few days ago drumming up solutions for how to accomplish the ARIS units with the new artwork style. The problem is largely that the ARIS event requires the character sprites (in all their eventual variations) to be embedded into the ARIS graphic. This wasn’t a big deal with the old art style since lighting was flat and ARIS machines would fit into any scene. With the new art style the lighting has to be dead on else it’d look completely out of place, meaning we’d need to do a sort of “save room” type deal that some games do; basically all ARIS machines would be in similar looking rooms to prevent needing an exponential crap ton of versions of the ARIS/sprite graphics. This would be a pretty big encumbrance for map design throughout the game, so I wanted to find a better solution. I got to thinking about the reason we wanted to include the character sprites in the ARIS event anyways. While neat, it’s not adding much. This led us to our solution: we can add some sex appeal to the ARIS events by changing the screen to show the characters up-close and in high detail inside the ARIS unit.  

Basically, the player would use an ARIS unit like normal: press the action button and the door opens. The screen fades, and instead of fading back in on the character sprite in the ARIS machine, the game would go to another scene in which it shows the party inside the ARIS unit (kind of like a mech pilot camera in the cockpit). The event would play out like it does now, but it’d be done within a modified version of the game menu where you get to see some detailed artwork of whatever state your character happens to be in. Once you exit the menu it’d be like exiting an ARIS unit in the current version of the game – the screen fades out, and fades back in with the ARIS unit closing behind the character.

It’s a little tough to explain without a mock-up to show off, but hopefully the description got the idea across. Doing it this way will allow us to have ARIS units anywhere in the environments, and at the same time add a neat component to the H system. Let me know what you think!