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Starting on the NPC outfits.  This one is meant to be one of the local farm girls in town.  Not sure what to do about her shoes just yet.  

The caves are starting to come together.  The new torches are in and I've started doing the prop placement / detail pass.  I've broken it down into roughly 8 areas that need to be detailed up and I'm almost through 3 of them right now.  

Torches have rough animations when the player has them equipped.  It's mostly just the player holding their arm up in front of them and they stay pretty static during other combined animations.  Going to test them like this and see how well things work for now.

Chipping away at the Imp's animation sets.  I'm going to try and get all the basics for him covered and in game for the next build.

I might be able to get the next build out before the end of this month.  That's the goal I'm shooting for at least.  I'll keep all of you updated with how things are progressing!

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Comments

Anonymous

Are you aiming to have dyes and changeable colours on the clothes like Fable?

Artem

Looks cool, very atmospheric! When you're making the cave scenes, be sure not to make them too dark, as players usually don't enjoy running around in a total darkness (remember first release of Agony, lol)). That's what the floating point color output, Eye Adaption and tone mapping are for. Like, that scene with the torches look ok (well, maybe a tiny bit too dark after all), but once you move camera away from the bright light sources, you'd expect the virtual eye to adapt to the darkness and brightness go up a bit with a duller color at the same time - that's how our eyes work. Many games still don't take that into account for some reason, but most of AAA do.

slaen

I've actually been trying to figure out how to do this recently. The biggest problem is when I designed the armor system I wasn't thinking of having dyes and right now if someone changed the color of their armor and then dropped the armor the color info would get lost as soon as it left their inventory. Not too ideal. The other issue I've always worried about with dye sets too is then the color variants end up being a little bland or there's only one slot that can be changed per outfit and it's sort of monochromatic. I dunno I'm currently leaning towards doing it on my end and giving the player premade armors of different colors. So like with the farmgirl outfit that I've been working on the base color set could be the blue / pink. But then the player could also find a red / gold, or green orange color combinations instead. What do you think?

slaen

Thanks! I totally hear you. I need to mess a lot more with the eye adaptation systems in Unreal. My lighting skills also aren't all that advanced so I'm not sure how to balance the scene to deal dynamic exposure stuff. I should send a message to one of the lighting people I used to work with and see if he has any tips or advice. I'm assuming there's also a balancing act too with things like torches and light spells. Like I want there to be value for the player that has a torch in their inventory. But also not punish the player that forgot their torch. But then I think back to playing Oblivion and in the dark dungeons I would always just crank up my gamma settings rather than use a torch. Hmm, time to read about eye adaptation stuff!

Anonymous

I actually really like the atmosphere in the cave image you posted. The only thing I'd worry about is who lit all the torches for me lol. Does Unreal let you have unlit torches that can be lit if your character has a torch? They did that in DA Inquisition and sometimes in Skyrim and I liked the feel of "conquering" the environment

slaen

Thanks, yeah I can add in the lit / unlit functionality to torches pretty easily. Maybe try and tie it to stealth somehow? I was never sure if in Skyrim the amount of light the player was in changed their stealth checks at all. I'll try to add something in one of the future updates and see how well it works with the AI perception stuff.