Inner Circle Update for March 6 2018! (Patreon)

So, it’s been pretty rough for me since the last update. I’ve put in a ton of hours and not everything panned out.  A major goal in preparation for Battle Test Release 3 has been to update Malise’s base scene files, as this hadn’t been done in a long time and there was a huge set of fixes and changes that needed implementing. I’ve been working really hard to improve the characters as I haven’t been entirely happy with certain aspects, and this week Malise gave me a big headache. All’s well that ends well I suppose, as we now have an updated body, face, and hair that I’m happy with (see link for full size version of the above image). Please let me know what you think! There are still a few days’ worth of fixes TK and I need to apply, and then we can get started on the remaining work for Battle Test 3.  Apologies for not having it ready for this post ☹.

Malise Updates

TK and I went through probably three different variations of Malise over the past couple weeks, and it’s been both very frustrating and a solid learning experience in how to manage stylization with the new art style. Our most realistic version, which we put three days into, looked great on her own but simply didn’t mesh with the body, hair, or other characters. While that sucked, it did help me to learn what features work with our style and what doesn’t. For the past few weeks I’ve been studying artists like Jon Troy NIckel and Paul Kwon (League of Legends), as I think segments of their work are approximately the level of stylization we need for faces/bodies. At any rate, our work resulted in quite a few changes. 

Below you can check out the new face model, as well as the more realistic one we passed on.  The most obvious change is probably the much better eye shape.  You can also expect better facial expressions once we’re done.

• Head Model Comparison
• Head Model Comparison (Orthographic Front View)

There were also a host of changes/fixes to the body. The biggest difference however is probably the hair, which I know some people felt was too plain. One especially good thing about the new hair is that it should be much easier to pose.

• New Body 1
• New Body 2

Lastly here’s a small set of some random shots showing the (almost) finished face. The hair wasn’t entirely done yet when these were captured. Please let me know what you think!

Imgur and Patreon

We complained about having some issues with imgur a few weeks back, and it’s likely you’ve experienced these issues if you’ve been checking out our updates recently. It turns out imgur believes Patreon users are breaching their TOS by using their services for profit and have therefore blocked all traffic from Patreon. If it’s as big an issue as they feel it is then it seems like they are missing out on an opportunity to monetize, but whatever. Anyways, we’ll be using something else from now on, so hopefully there are no issues with new image links. 

AltairPL’s Coding Progress Update

Just before I decided to take a break from the battle engine overhaul, which resulted in URGE’s conception, I made 2 serious mistakes. I left the targeting system untouched AND I made no notes or comments about it. Both came back to haunt me when we started releasing Battle Tests... the 1st Battle Test had some serious issues with invalid actions being performed, and the 2nd one was riddled with similar unwanted behavior, mostly caused or made apparent by fixes for issues from Battle Test 1. What a mess...

The only thing I could do in a situation like this was to finally rewrite the targeting system, but after starting this, I've learned that all action progression was depending on more or less vanilla RPG Maker behavior and some other wrong assumptions. So, the only choice I had was to redesign and recode the whole action progression with new target determination in mind.

The new design was relatively simple on paper, but actually coding its prototype required some pretty nifty work. I must admit I'm very happy with both the speed and the results. Suffice to say, just this one thing eradicated most of the current problems with in-battle actions. The new system is not only less buggy and more stable, but also allows for some additional action features to be implemented, including one or two already done or planned. Also, while implementing it, I've made a lot of notes about things that may require some more attention sooner or later - possible death-traps (including stuff actually related to character/enemy death), things to optimize, good places for planned features and so on.

A lot of work, but well worth the effort and time. It still needs a lot more work and testing, but after a while I got fed up with it, and since Ero required assistance with something entirely different, I've changed gears for a while.

What Ero needed from me was some answers about how well the engine handles diagonal stairs. As some of you remember, the last time those were used in a game was in the “Old Town” maps from v0.02 (area with Splicers and Stigmata), which was a long time ago. In the Old Town maps, diagonal stairs were handled by a 3rd party script, which did its job, but was extremely limiting and a bit clunky. On top of that, it's nowhere near being compatible with my implementation of map levels/layers, so I need to code it more or less from scratch. Problem here is that stairs is pretty much a part of movement code, which is in shambles and needs to be dealt with before I even start adding to it. Fortunately, I made some conceptual design of stairs and gave Ero his answers, so he and Uber can continue working on maps with stairs while I revamp the code needed to handle it.

Ubercharge’s Map Progress

Eromancer here again.  I helped Uber out with a block-out diagram for his new map, for which he intends to use his procedural shaders that I showed off during the monthly update. He just got to the point where he is able to test them out, but so far it looks like they will perform great. Once he got it working this example took all of a few minutes from plain geometry -- no texturing or UV mapping required.

Portrait Lighting System

Ubercharge has the first test version of his portrait lighting processing system working. The goal here is to simplify the battle lighting process so we don’t need to move lights around for every environment (something really time consuming as you saw from our work on Battle Release 2).  

It works by using a lighting rig consisting of ten or so pre-designed light groups. When I render out a battle portrait, I simply have to render each light group individually, and then I’m done with that portrait for good. This will also work for enemies. Then, using Uber’s black magic, we can actually blend those light groups’ intensities and color in post to create lighting for any environment we may come up with in the future. All three of the very different lighting examples in the image linked above were generated with the same set of renders. Eventually we may even be able to do this in-game in real-time, which will cut down on the hard drive space required for portraits by a ton.