Inner Circle Update for January 31 2018!

Hey again!

So, now that the loose ends are all tied up, here is the more fleshed out update I wanted to post a few days ago :D…. and it got really big. Check below for the link to our little cutscene demonstration video. This little project pushed us to learn, implement, and calibrate a lot of techniques and features we’ve been working toward. Where practical, you can expect to see these throughout all the future artwork, especially now that a lot of the heavy lifting has been accomplished. Check below for more details on each, as well as some news regarding our crowdfunding, and a report from APL on the battle test release!

Cutscene Demonstration Video 

Issues with Imgur

We’ve all been having some issues with Imgur recently, so if you can’t view any of the linked images try refreshing the browser window or viewing them in an incognito window, and definitely let me know if issues continue. Something else I wanted to point out is it compresses images on mobile to hell and back, so kill the “m.” before the address if it redirects you to its mobile site. I like that it allows me to post albums with captions (something I can’t do hosting images directly via Google Drive), so if anyone has ideas for alternatives I’m all ears :D. 

Expanding the Crowdfunding Campaign to Enty

If you recall back around October we had some issues with Patreon. We’re not sure what direction they are going to go with their tolerance for adult content, but if that bump in the road was any indication it’s not going to become a smoother ride for adult projects anytime soon.  Don't worry, we don’t plan on going anywhere, but in the event Patreon backs off from hosting adult projects we will obviously still need funding. Therefore, we’ve decided to establish a campaign on Enty, a Japanese crowdfunding site with virtually the same model as Patreon. The key difference is it is largely designed for adult content projects. They have created an English side to the site (which still has some Japanese UI elements, but they seem to be working on it), and after discussing it with their staff we shouldn’t have issues receiving funds from them.  In addition, I’ve hired a translator to help manage a Japanese version of the campaign, and I’m making it my next immediate goal to get that page rolling. Not only will this provide as a safety net for us, but it will allow us to expand our audience in a way we haven’t been able to before. I’ll be sure to post more about it in the monthly update!

AltairPL’s Post-Battle-Test-Release Report 

Any release, even as small as the recent Battle Test is very stressful - last minute fixes, the strange feeling that something important is missing, fear that something goes horribly wrong, etc. Well, the Battle Test release was no different, but thankfully everything went relatively smooth, and only two major problems were found.

The first one is related to incompatibility of RPG Maker's full-screen mode with our 16:9 aspect ratio modifications... I tried to find a way to somehow overcome this, but it's one of those vanilla RM things that is pretty much impossible to fix and the only workaround results in sub-par quality... still better than the alternative for some. A fun fact is that absolutely everyone testing the game so far has completely missed it, so it's good to know that such a problem exists.

The second problem is basically caused by some missing additional action condition checking, which results in some weird behavior like a character acting even though it's already dead, or character being revived via item/skill used moments after getting killed. This one is also related to how healing items are used in what is still vanilla RM code for item/skill use, which I should probably check and fix as well. This was actually a known problem, but notes about it were made in my notes file, as opposed to in-line code comments, and it was done before I started working on URGE, so it got buried deep under a lot of other notes. Still no progress on that, but it's not critical, so I decided not to interrupt my current task and leave it for the next Battle Test.

Soft Body Dynamics Simulation!

Something kind of subtle you may have noticed in the cutscene demonstration is Malise’s skin deformation. This is my first test of simulated soft body dynamics, a technique meant for exactly this purpose. Previously, when something interacts with a character it would simply clip through their skin instead of squeeze it. We had a few cases in the old artwork where we manually sculpted fixes, but ultimately simulation yields quicker and (in complex scenarios) better results.  For this, I’ve learned the basics of Maya nCloth, a tool that is primarily a cloth simulator but doubles for soft body dynamics when you “pressurize” the target object. The above image is a simple example of the preset I created for the purpose of simulating interaction wit dem jiggly bits. Here is a video I made showing it in realtime. Note that it’s a lot slower on a more complex figure like a body, so practical simulations usually take a minute or two.

Wetness Maps and Improved Liquid Simulation

This cutscene demonstration is the first example we’ve done of a fully processed scenario with liquids. It contains the results of two liquid simulation passes, a dry pass, and pass created using Ubercharge’s texture-based wetness mapping technique. These passes are composited via masking in post. While the masking is manual, this process works in such a way that we can apply our edits to future renders in different lighting scenarios with no (or few) manual corrections required—something that absolutely could not be done with hand painted liquids. The downside is the liquid takes a long-ass time to render without noise, and multiple passes multiplies the render time. Eventually I will need to update my custom render manager code to work with the new rendering engine so I can automate the rendering process.

I rewired our Houdini procedural network for liquid simulation for easier navigation, and in just the past day Ubercharge improved the ease of use and results yielded by the bubble-izer.  He also added control nodes allowing for me to change all useful variables from one spot.   

Composing Cutscenes in Adobe Premiere

By now you probably know our cutscenes take 2D images and emulate moving them in 3D space to make them more interesting. Up till now I’ve been doing this entirely via code, actually programming coordinates and zooms by hand with no preview. If you remember a while back I did a test where I reconstructed a portion of the Ven cutscene from v0.05 in Adobe Premiere to see if it could work as a solution for composing new cutscenes (see the ‘Story Cutscenes in Adobe Premiere’ section in this update). It worked great, and this cutscene demonstration is the first chance I’ve gotten to try composing from scratch in Premiere. I found that it speeds up the process something like tenfold, and allows me to try things I couldn’t have done previously since I can see what I’m doing in realtime. 

Something you haven’t seen thus far in our cutscenes is smooth camera movement, something Premiere (and any decent 2D animation or video editing software) accomplishes by adding curves to zooming/panning/transitions. As this demonstration makes use of it, it’s worth noting AltairPL has since added it to RPG Maker (and will do so in our new engine).  Not only do we plan on using it in this way, but we will be able to add curved movements/fades to pretty much anything, which once calibrated should make things look a whole lot more professional. Below you’ll find the details of his work on that!

AltairPL’s Bezier Curve Implementation

The stuff that took me most of the time since the monthly update was also the most fun and fulfilling task in a long time. Even though it was in a very early prototype stage, Ero decided to add it to the list of things I did since December monthly update. The Bezier curve algorithm now been implemented for some practical application, so I can go into the details.

If you ever used some more or less advanced image editing software, especially vector graphics, you probably are familiar with Bézier curves. It's a very handy tool for drawing, but it may also be used for other things, like in our case, 2D animations and stuff. At the moment, pretty much all effects and 2D animations in-game, like slide in/out, appear/disappear, etc., are using linear transformations. This means a moving element in an animation moves with the constant speed, like two pixels per frame. It causes the game to look sometimes very stiff/static/mechanical. Utilizing curves will give us the ability to break that monotony and to make various effects much better/nicer and even easier on the eyes... see below for few examples.

The beginning of Bézier curves implementation was a major pain in the butt, since I forgot a lot about the much-needed math, but after few initial problems, the rest was kinda fun. For some weird reason, every little thing added to this code, no matter how small, brought me a lot of joy and sense of fulfillment. Progress looked like this:

• started with simple numerical value representation of simple curves with 3-4 control points
• added simple curve visualization
• curves handling was extended and pretty much unlimited number of control points is now supported
• added more and more settings to curve visualization, including animated preview of curve values in time, which is very useful considering how we want to utilize those curves.

With this update in mind, I've prepared simple in-game turn indicator animation showing difference between linear and curve-based movement, which you can see here. After that I've started and pretty much finished implementing curve support to vanilla RM pictures used during events. I was pretty sure I won't be able to pull it off before the IC update, but I'm pretty sure we can now achieve in the game what Ero did in his event video. 

Another nice thing about all that is that I will be able to simplify some parts of the code significantly with only slight performance cost, but with much easier transition of some effects to non-linearity when needed. Most likely doing this will be my next step.

High Dynamic Range (HDR) Processing

I’m really glad to have this feature in our workflow for character art.  If you check out the cutscene demonstration, the realistically modeled light glares and bloom are a facet of this new capability.  As I mentioned in the monthly update, this is something Uber is doing for new maps as well.  He spent a day teaching me the basics of the procedural program he’s using, and I’ve been using it since.  Due to the scripted nature of cutscenes it’s simpler to utilize there (and probably in menus), but portraits are a bit tougher. Until I came up with a solution for doing so, it wasn’t possible to use this feature on any graphics with transparency because it won’t render on transparent pixels.  The solution isn’t as simple for portraits. I have an idea about how it can be done, but it would require new code, so I haven’t bugged APL about it yet. 

Goals for the Monthly Update

Actually finding a translator for the whole Enty thing has thrown me for a loop, so I’m not really sure what we can accomplish in the next week, which is when I’d like to post the monthly update so we can get back to posting them near the beginning of the month. What I will likely try to do is test my theory of rendering portraits from a better perspective, and if it does work out I’ll update the poses and we will release the Battle Test Release with those. Additionally I'd like to try to render Neon's poses so that the initial Enty debut can feature the battle test release with both characters. APL will likely attempt to add smooth movement to the battle UI elements and camera.  We also want to run a test with working map event animations in the new art style (basic stuff like the ARIS opening/closing). I wanted to have a playable test map to show some things like this off but APL reminded me we haven’t moved the advanced sprite lighting system from the test environment to the engine yet. So much to do @_@.