Inner Circle Update for November 28 2019!

Hey guys!

Firstly, I apologize for not having the release ready yet.  We pretty severely underestimated the amount of work it would take to merge our combat and physics updates with our latest stable build and still get things polished.  We are however nearing completion!  

I also apologize for not having an update sooner -- I simply thought we could power through and get the release to you, but with the end of the month coming up an update felt important.

Mr. Kittyhawk has been working hard every day since the last update, and the skinny of it is that there's just not enough of him to go around.  Our update is a bit smaller than usual since we've been putting most of our effort on getting combat polished, but we've also continued pushing forward with things on the art side while Mr. Kittyhawk works through the code bottleneck.  The Inner Circle release should be ready with a few days more work.

I have however included a couple of GIFs as proof that combat is functional :D and almost ready.  Aside from a couple bugs we're very much in tuning and polishing territory.  

Animation Progress

TMX and I have mostly wrapped up the Splicer Thug's combat animations, and I've begun working on non-aggressive idle animations, as well as new H scene bystander animations (shown in the image above).  This will accompany some new AI that will make the bystanders far more interesting and believable. 

Since we've just gotten a chance to test combat within in the last couple of weeks, we've also been working on Onyx's damage and knockdown / stand up animations.  TMX is also making nice progress on the H scenes, and it's already looking like they will be more varied than we could do with 2D anims.

I've posted a few examples of our recent work above :D.  

Performance Testing

A little over a week ago, we released a performance test on Discord (if you haven't hooked up your Patreon account to it yet you should!) for Inner Circle members to try out.  

Overall it went very well, and we've learned we are doing well as far as our polygon budget goes.  The requirements are absolutely higher than they were for the 2D version, so for now I don't think you'll have a good time with an integrated graphics chipset.  We did however learn that we're CPU bound at the moment and not utilizing the GPU as much as we should be, which means we've got a lot of room for improvement. 

Stylized Explosions

Ubercharge and I spent a few days developing a process for creating anime-styled explosions in Houdini.  They're 3D simulations, but will get rendered to sprite sheets to be utilized by Unity's particle system.  This will make them extremely light-weight performance-wise, but they'll still have dynamic 3D lighting from the environment due to normal maps generated during the rendering process.  Between grenades, police and robot weaponry, and explosive traps/barrels, there are quite a few FX that demand some beautiful booms, and I think these will add a whole lot of character over standard-looking assets.

Vioreaper Low Poly Model and Rig

Aside form his work on the Splicer boss' low poly models, TK has also done the entirety of the low poly Vioreaper model as well as the rig in the past couple of weeks.  He was able to get the model down to 32k polys -- half that of our previous model.  I haven't gotten a chance to transfer the materials over to it yet, but he's pretty much ready to start animating once we finish up this upcoming release :D!

New Guns

Limbo has completed four new gun models since the last update -- which brings us up to six!  I haven't had time to complete the textures and materials for all of them yet, so I have some catching up to do.  It's looking like we'll have all the temporary weapon assets ready to go for when Mr. KH is ready to start on the code side of things.  We still have to add the animations for both enemies and Onyx though, so we'll likely start on these sometime after the release.  

Slums Tunnel Map Tile Set

Lastly, Ubercharge has been revamping the original tunnel map we did for the Slums level into a tile set, meaning we can use the workflow we created on the sewers tile set to make more varied and dynamic maps.  He's still in the early stages of it, but he already has some renders of lighting variations to show.  These are still unprocessed and kind of bare, but expect them to start looking great in the next week or so!