Hey everyone!
Quite a bit to talk about this month! I have two major announcements this update that I'm excited to share with you, as well as new artwork from v0.06 and updates from TK and AltairPL.
Story Progress
The first major announcement is that as of May 27 the main story for the game is finished! Now that it’s done I’m focusing all my effort on v0.06, as will TK once I pull him back onto helping with the map design.
The story was obviously a much greater task than I ever anticipated, and I have a newfound respect for quality writers that work on games; especially since it’s something that often gets severely overlooked. In all I wrote what I can only guess to be well over 200 pages in the last few months. The story document now sits at a lean 90 pages with an additional 50 pages of notes and a main plot consisting of 5 chapters and 26 subchapters (it’s grown some since I presented it in April).
Keep in mind this is the main story, so at some point additional work will need to go into finishing side stories. Also, while I have a solid 25 pages of story-critical dialog written, there's still a lot left to do in that department, but it should be ongoing and not hold up the pipeline like this has.
New Artist Starting in September!
The second major announcement is that we will have a new artist joining us in September, so please give an early welcome to Ubercharge!
Ubercharge has a strong background in CG for movies, and out of all of us he has the most professional experience in 3D. TK and I are already learning quite a bit while the three of us bounce ideas off of each other. His resume is pretty impressive, and includes work on Wonder Woman as well as two Ridley Scott projects including the new Blade Runner movie
(the latter being why he’s joining us in September).
While I’m sure his background will help us improve workflow in some areas, his modeling experience will mean his key task will be custom asset production.
V0.06 Progress
Having wrapped up the story just five days ago, we still don’t have a solid release date for V0.06. Now that the story is done however we can take the details and finalize a map layout for the Void, the section of New Babylon that you'll visit in V0.06. This area will act as sort of a hub for a lot of the gameplay during the first half of the game, which is why the design of it has required so much fore-planning. Once we're past that we can really start burning the rest of the work down. My main goal for the last few days of May however was to get back into the swing of things with some new artwork for V0.06!
The image above is a sample of what I’ve been up to these last few days. You can find the full uncropped 4K version here! Hopefully it’s obvious that the lighting improvements I set out to accomplish back in April have paid off here. I’ve uploaded a comparison (using the cropped version) showing what this scene would have looked like with the pre-April lighting and processing setup. Something new I’ve had to figure out over the last few days to accomplish the above are volumetric effects, which in my opinion work well with the art style.
AltairPL’s Update on the New URGE Engine
Not going to lie, May was a tough month for me. Problems with the engine's font handling mentioned in last monthly update were just a start. Perhaps it is because I decided to do something I wanted to do for quite some time that commonly sends people into a tailspin. Suffice to say, after 20 years of active addiction, I'm nicotine-free for around 30 days, which makes me very happy and proud. Why am I telling you this? Because it is the reason why my progress was unusually small.
My work this month was a continuation of working on font handling/rendering.
I spent probably an inordinate amount of time attempting to fix an issue involving italic fonts, and while I wasn't able to fix it my numerous attempts resulted in a lot of notes that will be helpful when I get back to it at a later time. In the worst case, I have one or two possible workarounds lined up, but I don't want to waste any more time on this for the time being. All things considered, this issue is relatively minor which makes my obsession over it so freaking strange and unlike me.
As I've also said in the last update, I've seriously underestimated how much work implementing font handling really is. When I finally gave up trying to fix the italic issue, I had to replace temporarily hard-coded stuff used to test font rendering with fully functional and proper font handling. On top of learning a lot more about the C programming language, it required a lot of reorganizing and intricate planning, but it came out great if I can say so myself.
Unfortunately, when testing font rendering in game proper I stumbled upon huge performance issues and figuring it out took me some time. It turns out that the URGE implementation of one of the RPG Maker features is really slow and it negatively affected creating/updating custom text caching, which had to be slightly modified to fix the problem. The good news is that not only does the new version fix huge slowdowns in URGE, but it's also working a bit faster in RPG Maker as well. Text drawing is still faster in RPG Maker, but I think I did all I could without modifying/rewriting the 3rd party proxy font handling library -- and rewriting it will be... somewhere along the line.
To recap font stuff: everything we need is already implemented and working as expected, and a lot of things which may be needed later are noted and marked down.
I'm still finishing and cleaning up font-related code, but I'm still unsure what will come next. I would like to implement audio handling next, but after the font problems and reading audio library documentation a bit, it may get ugly and take a lot more time than I can spend on it now. Since Eromancer finished the story and is now focusing on 0.06 content, I probably have to get back to my 0.06 stuff as well.
Regarding Pledges
Eromancer here again! Let me preface the following with the note that this does not apply to the vast majority of our patrons. We’re extremely grateful for your continued patronage and faith in us to bring this project to fruition, and we’re progressing well because of it. I’m also grateful for criticism, as there are plenty of examples where I’ve adapted stances based on it. Now, for an ugly bit.
I get that a fair number of crowdfunded projects fail and a lot of people feel that they’ve been burned by them. Unfortunately, my choices to focus on the long-term quality of the project, and thus our resultant inability to produce a meaningful release these past months, has created a climate where a few people are under the impression they’re being “scammed”. I feel the need to explain to these people that there’s no gun to your head preventing you from pledging only when a new release is made. As I’ve said previously I’ll publicly announce major releases ahead of time, meaning if the releases are all you’re interested in you can get them at your leisure.
While disappointment is completely understandable, let me be clear that I won’t tolerate someone who attempts to poison the well by making false public claims that disparage the project. It’s important to remember the success of the project doesn’t rely solely on money, and whereas a select few may think their pledges give them the right to be an asshole, I’ll tactfully remind them that they don’t.
TK’s Environment Artwork Update
I <3 Substance Designer & Painter! Now that I've settled nice and comfy with Designer, it's definitely my go-to for textures and processing images now. I'm still growing a number of materials and techniques using it, and it just blows Photoshop out of the water for doing texture work. Some of you may be aware that 3d artists generally use several texture maps per asset. When we build up a look, anything we add, remove or change needs to be reflected across many layers for each map, and if the model ever changes significantly we need to adjust those changes as well, or just restart the whole process. With Substance, the setup for a look might a little longer, but a properly created set can totally automate a vast majority of the process, one can even skip a repair process entirely by feeding in new model data. And so many more bonuses that come along with working in a node tree instead of a linear set of layers.
So, previously I showed off an idea I was working on; a "paint by numbers" scheme for floor layouts. Initially it seemed promising, but I lack the programming knowledge to make such a system actually useful. I've found a much better solution that mixes hand placed models, semi-automated texture generation and a couple other goodies using Substance for some types of layouts.
Normally in 3d games, the ground only has a couple of blended textures, and obvious tiling is broken up by having scattered props, grass, roads and the like so you don't see it all at once. City streets are always a bit tricky since we can't rely on that always, and our camera's view almost makes the ground you walk on more important than walls. Since the bar has been raised since Eromancer’s first sprite-based maps, I felt it's worth it to set up a big "patch bay" that gives me a lot of freedom over standard tiled textures. It's not finished for a proper showing in this update, despite the time I've put into the chemistry here. We'll be visiting lots of city scenes, which means a lot of concrete and asphalt.
What I have here is the framework for mixing a series of substance materials in a "smart" way that gives a lot of control, again, very much a work-in-progress. The columns on the left are the starting materials and variations. Along the top are various detail layers that I can paint and place where I please. This all mixes down the center row down to a final texture set that I can load back in to Maya. Along the bottom, I have a section where I'll pull in mesh data from Maya, namely the ground and markings for certain props. Something like a light post or some hastily slammed down industrial barricade would impact the pavement, which is where the automagic stuff happens. In some ways, this is a like what ID Software had been doing with their Megatexture concept. Here’s an example GIF showing some possibilities from this example in action!
It might seem overly simple or overly complicated depending on how you look at it. A huge part of this style of blending is done by painting masks and mixing those with the height maps as they are built up and knocked down through the graph here. In this way, I not only get a nice surface relief in the renders, but a much more natural blend between the materials without needing to meticulously trace out the blending with a paintbrush. And now that I have the framework down (mostly), all I need to do is swap out the materials and I can use it for flooring of any kind, which will be a huge timesaver in making more maps. I'd love to show the textures it produces, but it wasn't finished enough for this update.
In a similar vein, I bought a nice processing node called "ST Panel and Vent Maker", which just might replace a lot of modeling I'll be doing for some of the games later more high tech areas. Initial sciencing went mostly well with it, I should be able to feed simple shapes into it, and get nice beveled ones out of it. Much, much faster than poly modeling if this pans out, since I get displacement and textures in a snap. Here are a couple pictures of that for now.
In addition to the above, earlier this month I revisited some city assets and laid down a look for the nastier parts of town. Lots of trash, lots of ramshackle buildings and piecemeal networks. First I needed a good way to lay out many, many wires and cables to connect everything. I started with some prefab power poles as a test run. It took a while but I found a pretty decent method by creating instances of little planes, randomized around the center to act as checkpoints for curves to flow through. This works really quick with a nice script I picked up years ago for finishing the wires. I can lay out hundreds of guided/random lines with ease, but I found that getting a nice artistic chaos a tough balance. Naturally I'm trying to minimize time making each wire look passable, starting with scribbles is easier than a blank page, no? It's the perfect sort of repetitive "fun" that's easy to zone out on and doodle out some neat looking effects.
I know, while not very exciting (or playable!), this sort of development is huge for us in the long run. Anyways, expect to see some of this stuff in v0.06, which we are getting back onto now!
. I do want to point out however that using the current $$$ value on the Patreon page as a measure of the project's overall success is misleading, and is probably why Patreon allowed for creators to hide the figure. We're doing well enough that we are even adding a new artist once he's off the new Blade Runner movie in September. 
