Dev Blog #60 - New Environments, Voxels and Engine Improvements (Patreon)

With only one day left in October, this blog post came just in time!

Last week I mentioned how Selaco’s first chapter is almost fully playable from start to finish, but there are still a few holes here and there that we have to iron out. These last few weeks have been spent getting rid of those, on top of further finalizing our systems to get things ready in time for our Early Access date.

Let's talk about what is going on.

Life update

I don’t usually do this, but figured this is worth sharing.

I’ve been officially diagnosed with a pretty bad case of ADHD. I always assumed that I had it because concentration has always been a problem, and sitting still for a long duration of time never worked well for me because there is always an urge to move. I never felt the need to get it officially tested because I never assumed it would really change anything.

It’s always been a nuisance, but I always managed to get by just fine. At least I did, up until last year when I dropped out my final year at University to become a full-time developer for Selaco. Being at home a lot has worsened my condition. Getting any work done throughout the day became increasingly more difficult to the point that I only ever got a satisfactory amount of work done at night time, when people are asleep and the streets are quiet. Until then, I’m just distracted and doing simple chores while I wait for my concentration to arrive.

A few weeks ago I figured that enough is enough and started talking about it with my therapist, who then recommended that I get it officially diagnosed and treated. Today, I started treatment against ADHD by taking meds. I’ve always refused to do sp because I’m very stubborn. Surely, I’ll find concentration through natural means, right? I recently turned 31, and it’s clear to me that that day will never come. After multiple sessions with my therapist, I agreed to take the meds and accept that it’s a perfectly normal thing for people like me to do.

It’s still too early to tell if it will work for me since I just took my first pill 2 hours ago, but the fact that I am actively working on a Patreon Blog post at 1:00 pm might be a good sign. Time will tell if this is the placebo effect at work; perhaps I’ll follow up on it on the next blog post.

Enough about me, lets talk videogames!

New batch of voxels!

All of these are either interactable or destructible.

Letter Blocks. You can find these in the toy store and probably some other areas. I managed to make a very simple fort out of them but ShadowPlay failed me and didn’t take the screenshot. Maybe bother me long enough about it on our Discord server and I'll re-attempt my Block Fort.

Gym stuff. Very fun to throw against things because of the metallic sound it makes. Please ignore the debug eye icon at the end there.

We have some silly ideas here, like giving 1hp when you lift these up and down repeatedly until your muscles get too sore to continue doing so. Will we implement this? No idea. Try it when we launch!

Water Melons and plastic crates, which have 6 color variations. Comes with classic John Woo-isms where  the contents of the crate start flying all over the place when destroyed. Including classic watermelon destruction.

This is a For Sale sign voxel. Not much else to add.

Flour Bags with varying degrees of dirt. Fun to shoot because of the particles it unleashes upon the world.

Arcade Machines. No, these won’t be playable, these are conveniently out of order 🙁 Don't worry, I’m sure there is a SPACE BRO arcade right around the corner that actually works. Those folks over at Onami made sure that they work even during an Alien invasion.

And yes, you can destroy them all!

We’ve also added a Protein Shake that the player can drink. Upon drinking, your next 5 Melee Attacks or Object Throws will deal additional damage and knockback. It’s nothing major, it’s not going to become an important item to seek out, but it’s a fun little addition to add! You will find these scattered around the game.

Ah, Fresh Meat! These are sprites and not voxels, but will be converted eventually. We have a serious lack of kitchen props right now that we want to address.

Fun fact: At this time of writing, our 3D folder contains 726 items, the vast majority of which are voxels. It’s absolutely wild to me how we have access to this many props to make the world come to live. Borion is an absolute monster at these things!

Environments

Got some new environments in the pipeline too. A rooftop section, and the starting rooms of the Plant Cloning Facility.

Rooftops (Part of Level 2)

Don't adjust your monitor! These are meant to be dark. The exterior levels get brighter as you progress since the night transitions into morning.

The rooftops pose a challenge from an art perspective. All of our efforts regarding the skyline are made with the implication that they will be seen from below, looking up. But with the Rooftop, the exact opposite happens. You are now above (or on the same level) as the skyline, resulting in a vastly different look. There is also the issue of looking down when standing on the edge. What do we show? It must look like there's something down there even though the level ends at a certain point. It's clear that we have to fake it but make it convincing.

So far, I've settled with fog banks that are shown at different height levels, moving independently from one another. We also spawn big dynamic lights at random portions of the backdrop to give the illusion of two factions fighting a war with each other in your absence. Since the backdrop is relatively cheap from a performance standpoint, we can get away with casting big dynamic lights.

I don't feel comfortable enough to show the work in progress version of these effects, but I'll make a note out of it to showcase it in a later blog post. It currently doesn't look even close to how I want it to look.

Plant Cloning Facility (Part of Level 6)

Level 6 is a big one and consists of 3 different floors (every floor is their own Area (our term for 'level segment')). There's an elevator that the player can use to switch between floors at any time, using an interactive elevator panel.

Floor 1 and B1 are mostly finished, Floor B2 only has a starting room and still needs a good amount of work. My goal is to get this finished before the year ends, so we can enter 2024 with all levels fully intact.

Ace Security

We’re working on a model for a friendly NPC. They won't be a common occurrence in Chapter 1 and are mainly used for corpses, but are going to be used extensively from Chapter 2 onward where they aid you in certain battles.

Here is the current status of their model. We use this model to render the spritework.

Current 3D model status.

He currently looks like a nude individual wearing some random bits of body armor to cover up his skin. Bare with us as we give him some proper clothing! I expect him to be finished when the next blog post arrives.

Concept art for the ACE Security Guard

We are still not entirely sure how we are going to tackle friendly NPCs in Chapter 2. With Dawn’s position as a Captain, it would make sense if the player can give out orders ('Follow', 'Stay put', 'Move to this location) during certain sections of the game, like set pieces where you have to hold a zone for a set duration of time. All we know is that friendly NPC’s are a must if we want to sell the large conflict taking place in Selaco, and want to do a proper service to the story outline that Ken has written for us.

Engine Stuff

Brace yourself. Cockatrice is going to deliver some technical stuff about some engine changes we’ve made. Ready? Here it comes!

(Cockatrice)

In an effort to decrease startup times I added a texture database cache called TEXTURDEF. When we build the PK3 (the file that contains all the game data) we can now compile a texture database which skips a step during startup; The game has to index every single sprite and texture upon startup, reading the header from each one on disk. Since we have something like twenty-thousand image files to date this could be quite slow on some hardware. It was especially slow if you are launching the game from an SD card on the Steam Deck. This was something that had to be addressed ASAP.

The texture database simply indexes each texture in one file and contains the offsets, color and transparency information, and SPI (Sprite Positioning Info) for every texture so the game doesn't have to look it up during runtime, or scan each file at bootup.

The other thing that significantly slows down boot times in the engine is that it loads every single model file at startup. We intend to change this so model files are loaded from disk when needed instead of at startup. Since we have a LOT of models, and the models are quite complex being OBJ versions of voxels, this should decrease load times noticeably when combined with TEXTURDEF.

In addition I have replaced the GZDoom's default font-sheet loader. GZDoom would typically load a font sheet by making a custom, individual image for every character by making a Multipatch Texture. A Multipatch Texture is basically just a set of instructions for combining image files into a custom texture.  These multipatch textures would have to load the entire sheet every time a new character needs to be displayed, and since UI graphics do not currently load in the background like sprites this would result in a big frame hiccup when the first notification with a large font would appear on screen.

Now we render every character in a sheet font by simply using UV offsetting and a single texture image, which drastically reduces the amount of load time required to just render text for the first time. Now we load the fonts at game startup which adds no noticeable load time, and this completely eliminates hiccups caused by text rendering.

Some misc things we are working on

• The entire menu is now interpolated, meaning it is no longer limited to GZDoom tickrate (35 FPS). This results in a UI that feels infinitely smoother and utilizes whatever framerate you are currently playing the game at. If you want to see an example: Load up the demo, open the Datapad and start dragging some windows around. Notice how it’s laggy? That has been fixed.
• We have reworked our Weapon Bar icons. Still the same simplistic design, but redrawn from scratch to be in a higher resolution since we prefer to keep HUD elements crisp and readable.
• Started working on preparations to fully rewrite our Item Pick-up messages since these are still based on ACS and don't properly scale to resolutions (This makes the game awful to play on 4:3 since text cuts off!). It also looks visually a bit dated, so hopefully we can spice things up a notch.
• The majority of the levels have been made playable with Selaco Must Fall.
• An Item Scarcity mode has been added, significantly reducing the amount of pick-ups in the game. This can be enabled after selecting a difficulty.
• Two new music tracks have been made! I’ll make sure to share one in #Patreon-Showcase this week!

Conclusion

It’s been a very traditional couple of weeks for us. Nothing quite groundbreaking has happened outside of the life update, but significant progress has been made towards finalizing Selaco's initial release. May hits in 185 days and, assuming no complications arrive, we are well on track to hit this target

As usual, I want to thank all of you for still being here and supporting us. Hopefully we see you in November as well! 

Wesley de Waart