Armor Damage Concept! - Inner Circle Update for April 20 2018

Hey guys!

So, don’t get too startled by the mosaic pixilation :D. Some people asked if I could limit spoilers, which I know I also appreciate, so I’m going to test out doing this on nekkid artwork I put out in the open. You can see the uncensored version below if you so choose.  We’ll see how this works out!

For some not-so-good news, our new sculptor has to go abroad for a few months on short notice, so I’m not quite sure what the situation is there. There’s also good news though, and that is that we’ll have another new artist starting part time Monday. Assuming things go smoothly, he’ll be joining us full time in June. There is, regrettably, more bad news, and that’s that Ubercharge will remain on limited availability for at least a few more weeks due to the pressure that’s on him to make progress on his master’s degree project.  We’ll likely prioritize time he has to go toward helping with armor damage and training up the new artist, so that means maps won’t receive much love for a little while. 

I’m pretty sure I was supposed to sandwich the bad news in between two pieces of good news instead of the other way around, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Malise Armor Damage Concept

Here are the full uncensored versions of our first Malise armor damage concept!

Malise Armor Damage Concept (Zipped)

Malise Armor Damage Concept (Open Suit)

Malise Armor damage Concept (Wide Open Suit)

It’s important to note the word ‘concept’!  This is a hand-painted composite I made to test out the general look/positioning of the damage.  I have a few alternate versions as well that I didn’t flesh out. We’ll need to do more testing before we get serious about the 3D version, as there are a lot of things that make this difficult. Not only do we need to need for the damage shape/lines to look good with the structure of the suit, we need for it to be positioned appropriately so it doesn’t look weird when joints bend so that we can minimize the number of joint correction models TK has to make. To top it off, we have to validate our solutions for overcoming the problems that originally kept us from doing armor damage in 3D.  Point is, we may end up with a different design, and will almost certainly have to troubleshoot some issues.  But yeah, TK will likely be starting on this soon-ish since he’s almost done with Ven’s armor :D.

One other thing I wanted to point out is that we are planning on making armor damage and lust sickness completely independent of one another, meaning you can end up with additional variations that weren’t possible in previous versions of the game (hence the three configurations above). I’m not certain if APL had implemented this yet in the code, so this may come a bit later.

Light Mixing / Render Optimization 

I spent the majority of this week following through with most of the remaining necessary work on the light mixing system.  I wired up the light mixer to all existing portraits and now have the ability to save light presets and apply them to any new render sets. I also have the ability to change the lighting on all game portraits simultaneously via master faders I created. There will be one of these for the left portrait, right portrait, and enemy group, meaning for any given environment there can be three variations of the preset. I also learned how to use logical expressions in the compositing program in order to code some extra control into the light mixer. This will allow for certain lights to remain on at a minimum level for specific poses that turn out too dark in a given preset. An example of this could be Malise’s attack pose, which is one where we’d always want at least some light on dat booty, even when the lighting preset doesn’t have a strong front light. I’ve re-lit and re-rendered most of Malise’s poses for compatibility with the light mixer, and am happy to say it works well; not only this but the poses look great in the (admittedly few) different lighting setups I’ve tried. I’ll need to adjust a couple and re-render for things I didn’t consider, like Malise’s left-hand gun making a shadow on her face when the right side light is on.

Another thing I spent some time on was experimentation with a program called Altus Denoiser. I mentioned last week that I was able to cut render-time needed to use the light mixer for portraits/enemies by 95%. While this is great, larger cutscene images (ones that will get close-ups in game for example) will still require an hour or more for a clean render. This is especially true for images with a lot of liquid since subsurface scattering is slow. This Altus program seems promising, as it’s able to take two low quality renders (with some extra passes for input) and create a high-quality, noise-free version. My best test showed I could take two 7 minute renders and get one of similar quality to a 38 minute render. I suspect that ratio will improve even more with more complex scenes. It’s not very compatible with the light mixer since I’d have to manually process all the various light group renders (unless I can figure out how to script it), but I never really intended to use the light mixer for cutscenes anyways. 

AltairPL’s Coding Progress Report

As I've mentioned in last update, my priority for this week or so was to continue implementing logic for multi-teaming holds.

It started pretty good and I managed to implement pretty much everything needed for it, but my fears from the last update came through and something did blow up in my face. While recently testing the last batch of edits made to action conditioning, I stumbled upon an isolated issue with one of the skills. Said skill is not really needed and was added by me some time ago as a proof of concept, so I just swept the issue under the carpet thinking we won't have any similar troubles. I couldn't be more wrong. Multi-teaming handling for an already-holding enemy (waiting for another enemy to join the fun) is affected by the same exact issue, which threw a wrench into my gears and made me lose all my momentum. The problem is that the responsible code is part of something much bigger and complicated and every possible solution I could think of would require a lot of time and effort to implement and neither of them is perfect.

After trying to figure it out for a few days I got really tired of this particular problem and coding heavy stuff in general, so I've spend the rest of the week on pretty light stuff, like organizing my notes, cleaning the code in few places, adding some missing documentation to the code and other "mundane" stuff like that.

I'll probably keep slow pace for the weekend, gather my strength, and strike back at the action conditioning issue... maybe taking a break from it will allow me to find some better solution I haven't considered yet.

Ven and Splicer Asset Progress

Last but not least, we’ve got some more assets to show off! Here are the final assets for the first variation of the Splicer gang’s boots/pants: 

Splicer Pants Type 1

Splicer Boots Type 1

Additionally, TK is nearly finished with Ven’s armor overhaul. Here are some images of her new arms, remodeled from scratch!

Ven Arms 1

Ven Arms 2

He’s made additional progress on improvements to the textures and materials for both the legs and arms, but I won’t have those until tomorrow at the soonest.