Inner Circle Update for June 21 2017!

Hey everyone!

This post is pretty big, so I’ll jump right into it!

New Character: Onyx

I’ve been hitting the character design hardcore since the last update, and I’ve been putting this post off while finishing up the promo artwork for Onyx, our newest character for v0.06. She’s a relatively minor character to the main story, however I like her design so much I’ll probably work her into some side events as well. Here’s additional artwork, as well as the above image in high resolution (zoom in!):

Full Body Poses

Profile View

Closeup

Her design required a lot of work. I decided that I wanted to try designing a character from scratch using Daz’s Genesis 3 (G3) body since we had talked previously about updating the other characters to utilize it. There was naturally a learning curve, but I’m glad to say it’s better in nearly every aspect than the Victoria 4 (V4) body we’ve used for the characters up until now. Not only is it easier to create polished looking stylized shapes like the ones I’m after, it poses far easier and has a bunch of highly useful features such as full access to the facial rigging. That last one is why I was able to try my hand at piercings, since with V4 it wasn’t possible to get a lip ring (for instance) to follow the lip when the character’s expression changed. Of course, literally the day after I bought the morph kits for Genesis 3 they came out with a new Genesis 8 body figure, which is probably the one we will end up using down the line due to its improved backwards compatibility with other body figures/assets. 

Ubercharge, our artist that wasn’t supposed to start until September, also jumped in and helped out by creating her knee guard and designing her tattoo! Having him around will be a huge benefit as we move away from relying on licensed assets and try to innovate with completely original designs.  

AltairPL’s URGE Engine Progress

This is becoming my mantra lately, but I didn't get as much done as I would’ve liked.

RPG Maker divides audio into 4 types:

• SE (Sound Effect) - self-explanatory.
• BGS (BackGround Sound) - ambient sounds like a howling wind, chirping crickets, trickling water, etc.
• BGM (BackGround Music) - self-explanatory.
• ME (Music Effect) - basically the same as SE, but silencing/halting BGM when playing.

Every such type can be played with own volume and pitch (50-150%). For BGM and BGS play position (time) can also be retrieved or set (at least for some audio formats).

URGE is using the SDL_mixer library for audio handling, and there's really no other choice. Prototypes for BGS and SE playback were working fine, so I started working on more proper versions of them. And that revealed few problems that slipped under the radar of initial tests:

• Pitch-shifting is not supported by SDL_mixer library and at the moment I see no way of implementing it. Even though it's available for every audio type, I'm pretty sure it's only used for few SEs. If I can't find a solution, we can always prepare duplicates of SE files with shifted pitch and load them instead.
• SDL_mixer library provides separate channel for music playback. It differentiates from sound channels a lot; playback is streaming so there's no initial file load delay, it's possible to set playback position (time), and few other features. A possible problem with streaming implementation is that the stream is not converted to proper output format and it's causing audible distortions, e.g. playing music file with 44100Hz frequency while output frequency is set to 22050Hz will results in music being played at half speed. I may have to be forced to switch music playback to normal sound channel, since audio distortion is much more critical issue than slight load time, if you ask me.
• Position (time) setting is available only for one audio channel dedicated to music, so it would be unavailable for BGS, which is a minor problem in the grand scheme of things. Another problem is that there's no way of getting current position of played music track - working around this should be possible, but will require a lot more work that I'm willing to put in it at the time. There's also a possibility that streaming issue will prove to be above my skill level, and I will be forced to move BGM playback from dedicated music channel to normal sound channel, which will put BGM in the same basket as BGS; it's much harder to implement positioning.

I did my best to troubleshoot those issues and look for answer on the Internet, but without any luck. The only thing I didn't do was to dive into source code of SDL_mixer and SDL itself and look for some answers, hints there. At least all issues so far are not critical and work-around is relatively simple, so I can sleep at night.

To recap:

• SE playback is as ready as it can be. Not counting outstanding pitch problem, there's one aspect that could use further optimization to decrease resource usage, but it could be a problem only in certain situations, and I haven't noticed any excessive usage of memory or CPU when testing such cases, so I'm leaving it for later.
• BGS playback is basically ready. Only non-critical pitch shifting and position setting are not working.
• BGM playback is working with problems, but workarounds are relatively easy to implement.
• ME playback is only partially implemented. Playing files works, but considering that ME playback changes how current BGM is played, and BGM handling may be reworked soon, interoperability between ME and BGM was left for much later.

Anyway, I completely forgot about it when I had problems with fonts, so here's the updated URGE-RPG Maker compatibility sheet. The status changes on the left are based on last sheet update which was in the second part of April.

I'm still not sure what I will tackle next, but looking at the compatibility sheet makes me want to tackle Tilemap or Window class. The reason is kinda personal: after all the problems with fonts and audio, I need some kind of a victory, and since those two classes are based on GFX, which is a much more stable base, I should be able to do this.

TK’s Progress Update

I've been bouncing around between fixing, polishing and making new things in preparation for the new round of map content. From the city tilesets that we picked up, one chore is that many of the building textures were just too clean or bright, so fixing those had been on my list for a long while.

I did a small bit of kitbashing, noodling out some of the look for retrofitted buildings to tap into some of that industrial/cyberpunk look on the old brick buildings we have. We need a car for one scene in v0.06, so I tried my hand at a blockout on a car design as well! Sort of a bentley-benz-cabby-cab. A few more tweaks to this and I'll make a final model soon. I also helped Eromancer a bit with the new character design, particularly the shorts.

The asphalt/concrete mixer I've been making in Substance Designer moved along some.  I've hit a couple bumps in the road software-wise, but totally fixable. Creating this demo from the parts that do exist now was very helpful in finding them. Here's a picture of where it's at now (it’s not ready for rendering yet, so this is just a viewport preview), though it looks terrible at the moment! The part of the chain I've been building takes some shapes as input, and outputs cracking along the edges, and sets up a guide for laying down patches of other asphalt materials. The sort of thing you see when repairs are done on a street. However, I discovered the whole thing falls apart in a couple of ways when I bump the resolution up to 8k. I’ll also be testing out creating wet maps and how to set them up in our map scenes so that we can give the streets a moody rainy look.