v0.056 Battle Test Release / January Progress Update!

Hey everyone!

Thanks for being patient while we finished up the battle test release. It’s been a lot more work than I anticipated, largely due to the fact that I haven’t just had to iron out kinks with the new style/procedures, but also with the new character models.  Anyways, lots of stuff to cover, so here we go!

V0.056 Battle Test Release

As mentioned previously this release is very basic with the simple goal of showing off the core mechanics of battle in the new art style. There will absolutely be at least one more of these for the $3 tier prior to v0.06 in which we make some fixes and reintegrate the remaining features. Check the writeup below for the download as well as a detailed list of what’s being presented in it. I really ask that you guys do me a favor and don’t share these test releases publicly since it would be A) really confusing for people without the context of the Patreon posts, especially since the public mostly isn’t aware we’ve been working on an art overhaul, and B) the release isn’t fully representative of the quality we’ll have for v0.06. When we start promoting the project publicly again I want to blow people’s minds with v0.06.

You can download the test release here.   

Please be aware this test release still requires the RPG Maker VX Ace Runtime Package. Also, please follow these few steps when reporting a bug to make our lives (or rather, our programmer's life) much easier:  

• If game screen is not empty make a screenshot (preferably with error message out of the way),
• Add a description; where the error occurs, what was the last action (or few last actions) -- the more details, the better.  It doesn't have to be a novel, but every detail counts,
• Send description along with '!Error.log' and 'Options.ini' files (both in the System folder) and optional screenshot to us (eromancergames@gmail.com).

So, before we get to the features, first here’s a list of things missing from the test release:

• Neon =/. Long story short, her poses aren’t updated yet and I wanted to get this thing out the door. It’s actually given me a chance to push forward 3D mirroring techniques for poses though, which I’ll explain below.
•  H skills and armor damage will be added in as we complete requirements to add them back in.  Full concurrency requires some work done on holds by APL, and we need to get 3D armor damage working with Malise's new suit/model still. 
• No proper battle effects animations for the new art style yet besides Malise's muzzle flash (which will be improved still). We’re still using the old RPG Maker effects for the damage/hit/etc. graphics, so they look pretty out of place. The positioning of the effects on the new sprites is also sort of off.
• Enemy/effects reflections are something we are planning on looking at, though they probably won’t make it into v0.06(?). We are pretty sure the technique we are using for reflections on the map will also work in battle, and it would help ground the enemies within the scene better. 

Here’s a list of things you will find in the release:

• 720p resolution (with 16:9 aspect ratio)
• A new perspective/format for the battle scene. Characters will now appear in the correct scale and perspective with respect to the camera.
• Malise’s battle poses have been updated for the new character model and artwork style. There are still a few issues with them, mostly having to do with the holsters. They didn’t get the attention they need yet since we were consumed with getting the variations on her suit working last month. I’m also strongly considering rendering them from a different position so as to better capture perspective… if it works it should make the action poses way more interesting and readable, and for the non-actiony ones she will be looking in the direction of the player instead of head-on. 
• First look at the new police enemy in action. Apologies for the sound effects – they are goofy RPG Maker sounds for now.
• APL's concurrent battle time system (discussed in detail in last month’s update) is on by default. These means enemies/actors can perform actions simultaneously, and it adds a pretty cool new layer of interaction to battle. Granted, enemies don’t have skills in this release, but hopefully you can see the potential :D. You can turn this off in the options menu.
• There’s an updated options menu which will allow you to play with the new battle speed mode settings. This allows for much more flexibility with battle speed customization. You can also recreate the old battle time modes by setting the ‘During Input’ and/or ‘During Actions’ settings to 0% (Hold the shift key while changing a value to change it by 10% increments). This will become simpler and clearer once we add difficulty presets.
• New battle music (new mastering / fixed guitar for less angle grinder sounding action since I showed it off last).  I'll upload this to the soundtrack rewards.
• Improved (and animated) turn indicator.
• Added a parallax/3D effect that shifts the camera to the side when a character's turn is available. This makes it unmistakably clear whose turn it is, and also looks pretty slick. There’s an option to turn this off in the options menu if you find it distracting. We're still working on this, so it's possible you may see some portraits cropped incorrectly due to the sliding motion.  We also intend on improving it with curve-based camera movement for more fluidity once we get it working.
• 3D mirrored portraits. This is still something I need to confirm that we can dedicate hard drive space to in order to carry it through the entire game. So far this hasn’t really been an issue, but since we now plan on having additional characters besides Neon and Malise, characters need the ability to appear on either side of the UI. Mirroring in 3D takes more work, but is definitely preferable to mirroring in post since characters’ features are also (incorrectly) mirrored.
• An enemy animation system improvement allowing for some variation in enemy poses by choosing them semi-randomly. 
• An early version of enemy sprite scaling which allows us to scale enemy sprites to achieve correct perspective with the battle background.  We’d like to automate this so enemies will appear correctly in dynamically generated battles.

Please let us know what you like and what you think could be improved upon (or even what you miss from the old style)! Pretty much everything about the new artwork style is still experiment for me with respect to battle, so feedback now is very valuable!

Neon Converted to Genesis 3!

Fair warning >_>, the next few paragraphs are techno-babble heavy.

While working on the Iray conversion of Neon’s bike last month I discovered the source of a bug that I’ve been dealing with since we converted Neon’s armor materials over to the new style. The bug would seemingly randomly cause the rendering engine (Iray) to switch from using the graphics cards to the CPU; something GPU renderers do when they’ve run out of video RAM. This is turbo bad, and basically locks down the computer for something like 10 minutes while Iray tries to initialize the render with the CPU (I opt to just restart everything, which is the next best thing to blasting it with a shotgun). Well, it turns out Iray is reporting incorrect VRAM usage -- and the main culprit in most of our cases is displacement mapping… something that we use pretty heavily and is all over Neon’s armor. 

Displacement mapping (also called parallax mapping in games) is a technique for generating faux geometry from textures. Well, turns out Iray creates *actual* geometry… which saves no resources whatsoever, and eats up VRAM like crazy. The saving grace here is that while I was converting Neon’s bike I discovered good ol’ bump mapping works extremely well in Iray at very high levels, and even looks better than Iray’s displacement mapping does on assets that weren’t designed with its displacement algorithm in mind (most of our assets weren’t, and this can cause some really nasty artifacts). The downside is you lose out on the parallax effect that displacement offers, meaning that while lighting looks great, large features look very obviously flat. Since Neon’s armor has a lot of these features, we’ve decided that TK would optimize the models for use with bump mapping by adding the larger features straight into the geometry. While it may seem relatively minor, the benefits of this are: 

• Saving my sanity by not having to restart my PC every time I want to render Neon
• Saving my sanity by speeding up my viewport from a crawl when working with Neon’s render-ready assets
• Not having weird melty metal blobs all over one of our main characters from displacement artifacts

Since editing the base models for her armor required re-rigging it, we decided to kill two birds with one stone and knock out her Genesis 3 conversion. Here are some of the major changes, as well as a gallery to show some of them visually:

Neon Genesis 3 Gallery

• Her body has been reshaped, but as opposed to Malise we kept this one quite similar to the old one. The geometry is a lot cleaner, so there should be fewer weird lumps (these didn’t stand out a lot with our old rendering style, but would be really obvious with the new one). 
• I improved her skin quite a bit by taking techniques I’ve learned while working on Malise (Malise also has some skin improvements in the latest portraits). The biggest improvement is the addition of translucency and subsurface maps, which selectively block light from passing through to give the appearance of stuff like veins and imperfections; something important for making skin look more like skin and less like silicone or wax (or simply opaque).
• Like with our old Neon, she has a couple separate versions: one without her lower body armor and one with. One major difference is TK has created custom bend morphs for her thighs for each separate version so there aren’t deformities or overly bendy metal parts like with the last version.
• Neon’s now using the same upgraded genital system that Malise is using. 
• Slightly edited her face shape to fit the new style better, but left it very similar to the old one. She had a bit of a Battle Angel Alita thing going on with the bigger eyes and it was weirding me out. Genesis 3 has much lower polygon density on its base shape than Victoria 4 due to how it is made for high resolution morphs, and this means some details on her unique, pouty lip shape were lost. I may get TK to make a morph to fix that.
• TK has been working on the displacement to bump conversion of her armor since we finished the Genesis 3 conversion, but it will take him a little longer to finish it; which leads us to…

TK’s Armor Remodeling Progress

It required quite a lot more effort than initially anticipated, but TK is nearly finished remodeling Neon’s armor to fix our rendering woes. TK has been doing this by baking the displacement maps to the geometry (resulting in a 4 million polygon model) and then using that as a guide to edit the topology of the base model to add the necessary details. 

Here’s a gallery showing his progress!

Amazingly he’s been able to do this while keeping virtually the same polycount as the original geometry (which looked like this). Keep in mind that minor details will still look 3D by adding them via bump mapping.

New Genitals / Universal Wet Mapping / Geo-Grafting

I think when I left off last month I had started working on configuring our new genital system for Malise. That’s taken care of, and now that Neon has been converted to Genesis 3 she gets to use it as well :D.  I hadn’t done much customization in these promo images, but I intend on differentiating them somewhat between characters. I also plan on improving the materials when I get a chance.

One thing I’ve been trying to do is to make these promo images serve as examples for new techniques we’ve figured out with the new art style. Something this Malise pic shows is our work on wet-mapping. Even though we were pretty much without Ubercharge in December due to his concept art apprenticeship, he took some time to hash out some experiments which should allow us to easily and quickly make any material we need to look wet. In the Malise image at the top I purposely made her boots wet, whereas the gloves of the same material are dry to show the difference. I did another test with the Neon image in which I made the water bead up on her armor. Taking this kind of thing a step further with masking in post, we should be able to make our 3D simulated slime and cum a whole lot more realistic. 

Another thing I want to point out in that Malise image is the skin bulges around the gloves/boots. This is the effect we’d like to replicate with 3D armor damage. We are planning on doing this with geo-grafts much like the nipples and genitals (geometry that replaces parts of the Genesis 3 model, but also behaves as part of the body system). TK did some rough testing with Daz geo-grafts and they were pretty successful; they inherit joint correction morphs from the Genesis 3 figure, which was one of our major obstacles preventing us from doing this with Victoria 4.

AltairPL’s Programming Progress Update

If I had to describe December in just one word, it would probably be the word "HELL". When holidays finally came, I was just too damn tired to be in a festive mood... or to work, so I had to take few days to recover.  What took the cake however, was New Year’s Eve and New Year totally ruined by aching tooth... fun.

Anyway, I somehow managed not to hang myself, and spent the majority of January on catching up... below is the list of stuff I did since the last monthly update up till now.

Exclusive to Battle Test Release:

• Made a slimmed down version of the game containing only assets used by the Battle Test Release
• Attempted to implement series of variables and flags that would make creation of special builds like this much easier - few things work flawlessly, but unfortunately, RTP dependency threw wrench in my gears, so it's left for the beautiful day when we finally say "Bye Bye" to the RPG Maker runtime package.

At least remotely related to Battle Test Release:

• Modified and optimized turn indicator, including addition of animated glow effect to improve visibility and indication who's turn it is
• Added slide effect to actor's action input start and end to further improve indication who's turn it is
• Added scaling capability to enemy sprites; manual for the moment, but the plan is to allow easy scale automation to emulate perspective, etc.
• Added possibility to mirror some effects, like actor's muzzle flash animation - needed by test release, but may be very handy if/when we decide to implement possibility of reordering actors in the party
• Improved portrait handling to, among other things, allow using dedicated portraits for each side of the screen for which a portrait may be shown
• Improved/fixed enemy pose handling - there were some problems revealed thanks to Policeman's multiple idle poses

Unrelated to Battle Test Release:

• Fixed potential, in certain conditions, bug/crash in Audio sub-system related to music playback
• Made some changes to internal files/folders structures, naming schemes, etc. - a lot more stuff like this is added to notes, waiting for its turn
• Made a lot of notes and experiments meant to determine possibility of some future optimizations, features, etc.
• Coded algorithm for creating Bezier curves that will be used in everything from smooth non-linear camera movement and cutscenes to fades and effects. I’ll go into more detail on this in the next update.

ARIS Station Map and HDR/Procedural Post Processing

Ero here again.  I finished a block-out design for one of the new maps at the end of the year and now that Ubercharge is back he has been working on that. The map is for the first ARIS station you'll encounter in v0.06. We had done a previous version but decided we wanted to carry the dark vibe of the perimeter wall structure inside. He’s not quite finished with it yet, but you can check out a gallery of his progress here (updated since the Inner Circle post)!

A big step forward for us since Ubercharge came onboard is that we’ve begun transitioning a lot of things to HDR (high dynamic range). From the Wikipedia page, HDR is defined as a technique used in imaging to reproduce a greater dynamic range of luminosity than is possible with standard digital imaging or photographic techniques. For us, this basically means we can edit lighting in post much better, and achieve far more realistic lights and glare effects. Thus, while working on this new map, Ubercharge has been developing a procedural template using HDR in Nuke for post processing maps. 

In addition, I’ve recently been working with ArionFX, a suite for Photoshop specifically for HDR effects. I’ll eventually use Nuke for this (once I learn it), but I’ve done some tests that show an improvement over my current techniques. I also used it for the new turn indicator graphic.

Volumetric Fog Testing

Ubercharge has been working on some initial testing with volumetric fog / area light beams / texture projection in Redshift, which reminded me I needed to figure out volumes in Iray for the Ven scene in v0.06. Volumes are really useful not only for a standard fog effect, but also for darkness, which you see in this test render with the Corruptor. This’ll be useful for saving time with H scenes where a lot of shots from different angles are needed, but where we don’t necessarily have background environments. Depth of field can also look good, but I find a lot of artists cheese the hell out of it to avoid putting effort in. 

Looking Forward

I’ll probably need a few days to figure out a trajectory for the next monthly update goal, but it’s likely there’ll be another battle test release next month. There may be an additional one for the Inner Circle crowd in between, depending on what we choose to focus on and how long it takes. Once we get a second to breathe we’ll be able to better judge what features will be in it, and I’ll be sure to make another post in a couple of weeks or so once I have the details :D.