Inner Circle Update for January 7 2018! (Patreon)

Hey guys!

So, without beating around the bush too much, we'll need a few more days for the battle test release (potentially a couple past my late estimate of the 9th). Things have gone relatively smoothly however, and I'm now working on pose conversions for Malise and Neon. The conversion method is working well, but as it turns out there's a lot of room for improvement with these basic battle poses since they were some of the first ones I did for the project, and it's taking more time than I scheduled. I'm about halfway done with Malise and still have Neon's poses to finish, then we should be good for the monthly update/test release :D.

Anyways, I figured I'd sneak one more Inner Circle update in before then, so here we go--

Battle Test Release Progress

As hinted at above, this is pretty much done and ready to go... other than the fact that it looks like Who Framed Roger Rabbit at the moment since we have the new environment/enemies loaded with the old character graphics. Aside from all the back-end stuff and the 16:9 aspect ratio, here are some additional features you'll see in it once we get it out to you in the next few days:

• APL's concurrent battle time system will be on by default. These means enemies/actors can perform actions simultaneously, and it adds a pretty cool new layer of interaction to battle. Granted, enemies won't have skills in this release, but hopefully you can see the potential :D.
• There’ll be an updated options menu which will allow you to play with the new battle speed mode settings. As APL discussed in a previous update, you’ll have much more flexibility with battle speeds.
• Added a parallax/3D effect that shifts the camera to the side when a character's turn is available. This makes it unmistakably clear whose turn it is, and also looks pretty slick. We will likely make it optional based on feedback since we think some people may find it distracting.
• An enemy animation system improvement allowing for some variation in enemy poses by choosing them semi-randomly. 
• AltairPL finished an early version of enemy sprite scaling which will allow us to scale enemy sprites to achieve correct perspective with the battle background. 

Also, here’s a GIF of the animated police enemy ready for the battle test. I’m close but not 100% happy with my processing for shadows yet. It’s tough because the faint shadows need to be stripped out so that only the dark part is left, otherwise they’d go outside the boundary of the sprite frame. I think that adding reflections to battle down the road will help a lot, as really there should be one in front of him (similar to this).

Posing Stuff

Here are the first few poses for Malise that I have completed. The renders were taken using the battle test scene lighting. I tried to keep them as close to the originals as possible, but improved them where necessary.  One big change is that the camera used is configured the same as the battle background camera, so they will be correct perspective-wise during battle scenes. H portraits will require a more elaborate camera rig in order to maintain consistency with the environment lighting that I haven’t set up yet.

I’ve also been taking a mess of screenshots and some impromptu renders while posing that I’d like to share with you guys. I’ve additionally made a few final(?) body edits that became obviously necessary after some posing, and I think you can really see Malise come to life in some of these now that I’ve been working with her expressions :D. 

Keep in mind there are a few issues with these renders—mainly having to do with the holsters, which we unfortunately overlooked in our eagerness to get the suit working properly. That’s on the list to fix.

Anyways, one other thing I wanted to mention is I scored a script that mirrors poses perfectly for Genesis 3, and am now looking at the possibility of mirroring poses in 3D as opposed to mirroring them in post. This hasn’t really become an issue yet in releases since only Neon and Malise have been in the party, but since we are adding more characters we will have to make it so Neon/Malise/other characters can be on either the left or right side of the interface. Anyways, doing it in 3D would yield correct lighting and, more importantly, it wouldn’t flip flop features on the characters (anyone notice Neon’s gun switching hands between poses by chance in the past releases?). The downside is we need two renders for every pose. I need to run some calculations to see if we can afford the hard drive space for it, but I think it’s worth it if possible.

TK's Remodel of Neon's Armor

We definitely underestimated the amount of effort required here, but the good news is the results are looking really promising. If you recall from the last update, we’re removing the need for displacement mapping (something that adds a ton of rendering woes for us) from Neon’s armor and adding the details in to the model itself. TK is doing this by baking the displacement to the geometry (resulting in a 4 million polygon model) and then using that as a guide to edit the topology of the base model to add the necessary details. 

Here’s an image of Neon’s remodeled chest. As shown in one of the prior updates, minor details will still look 3D by adding them via bump mapping.

TK won’t be finished in time for the test release, but it shouldn’t be much of an issue other than I will have to fight the rendering bugs I’ve been putting up with thus far.

New Map Work-In-Progress

I finished a block-out design for one of the new maps at the end of the year and now that Ubercharge is back he has since been working on that. The map is for the first ARIS station you'll encounter in v0.06. We had done a previous version but decided we wanted to carry the dark vibe of the perimeter wall structure inside. He's working to get it at least close to complete by the monthly update, but here's a gallery showing his work so far.