Inner Circle Update for April 24 2017! (Patreon)

Apologies for being a day late!  I'm wrapping up a project to rewire my work room after I realized yesterday morning that it's a death trap (especially for my cat, who loves to chew wires).  This update isn't about me or my fat cat though!  I hadn't included AltairPL's progress or TK's environment work in the last couple of updates, so here's where they are at with that stuff!

AltairPL's New Engine Progress

Your eyes don't deceive you!  That image above is MATM running in APL's new URGE engine (at a lovely 1300+ FPS).  Here's an update from APL about his progress these last couple of weeks:

Since previous IC update had not a word from me, I'm just gonna make a double update today. Don't worry, it will still be brief.

The beginning of the previous week was pretty innocent.  Wrapping up Unicode stuff, taking a short break, etc.  Then family started to nag me about Easter preparations and traditional spring cleaning, so I was constantly interrupted and wasn't able to start anything bigger.

I decided to make a crash-test: running the actual game using URGE. There were few problems and bugs, and I also had to disable some custom Ruby scripts and add workarounds for some not yet implemented things, but in the long run it was a success; MATM is looking and working just fine.

Not having any text in the game was making testing some things problematic, so my next venture was decided: implementing font handling and text drawing. All preparations and some very basic stuff was ready before Easter Sunday, and the plan was to finish this in the coming week. Unfortunately, I underestimated the amount of work needed to implement font handling. At the moment only very basic font handling is implemented, but this will have to wait for a while. Currently, all my attention is directed towards text rendering. I had a lot of problems with making the italic/oblique style function properly, and this style is used in MATM only all the time. I've already managed to fix 3 major issues, but the remaining one is above my skills at the moment. I still have one more thing to try though. Slim chance it will solve the problem, but it's still better than nothing.

I don't want to sound completely depressing, so here are some screenies from the game working with URGE!  

TK's Environment Artwork Progress

TK here!  I have a dozen or so little projects in various stages of unfinishedness, so apologies if this update from me looks a little light! At the front, I have been adding parts and sketches to the sewer tileset as well as the texture sets.  It's still looking very dull at the moment, Eromancer and I decided early that it should look very high tech. So, now that I have all the basics worked out, the next step will be adding more flair to the sci-fi-ness of the place like the yellow panels and black pillar and channel parts. I also pulled some more parts from a kit we picked up from Vitaly Bulgarov  and spent entirely too much time doing cleanup and UVs on them. I'll probably go back to simply using projected textures on some of his more complex parts in the future to save time. Essentially, I can do it "right" and do good UV layouts (but this takes time), or do an automatic layout and leave it as is and hope an automated substance texture can look decent. Lastly, the projected textures don't use UVs at all, but then I have no chance at tossing details like edge highlighting or properly placed staining and grunge.

Elsewhere, I keep getting started on making a pipes kit that I can use through the whole project but keep getting distracted with other things. I'll have to focus on that for a couple days and get it all finished in one shot. Really they're just tubes with sticky outy parts. But it's handy if everything all follows the same layout logic from the start with pre-made angles, bends, transitions and add-on parts that all fit together without shoehorning in parts as I go. In future maps, I can just drop the basic styles in, swap out textures and adjust accordingly from there.

I've been examining methods to make map renders look better and realized I had forgotten all about some super basic stuff- Maya's Color Management! In the initial tests with the Access Tunnels I had turned it off for probably no good reason (maybe some issues with the textures I was using at the time?). The benefit here is that my shaders will actually look like they should without making dumb adjustments, and I get a wider color pallete to play with in comparison to having it off. This in turn makes setting up lights much easier to do, as there will be fewer extremes in the lights and darks when it comes to transition or pulling lamps closer together. I'll talk more on lighting as I test the next batch of maps.

I'm still very frustrated with asset management in Maya. I have a decent workflow for now, but I keep saying that something somewhere is going to explode and lose me a bunch of work. I dislike being this reliant on backup saves of master scenes and having bloated map scenes. I saw some neat stuff going on in Blender that realllllly makes me want to swap over from Maya. I don't think I'll make that gamble, as it would be a huge time sink with potentially no payoff. But it's tempting.