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Dev diary number eighteen : Drawing Lessons

Posted by Germain on 16 Jun 2012 / 22 Comments



Jun
16
2012
 22
Helloz!

Things have been going smoothly again this week. We finally got our american business bank account, so this means another step in the legal side of things has been done before we can make the Kickstarter.

Game wise, we are still touching up the game for the trailer. Here’s a few things we did this week:

  • Experimented with a tool that comes with Unity-Pro, the Static Batching Utility. In an attempt to tame the draw calls which have gone rampant across our entire game, we decided to see how the Static Batching Utility could help us. It’s an internal tool in the Unity engine designed to manually tell the engine to combine draw calls for specific objects that have the same materials (terrain in our case). Draw calls occur before every frame of the game, and consists of the CPU sending the required information to the GPU so that it can draw the objects. You can imagine this as a painter who has to dip his brush in his color palette to be able to draw a certain color. If you draw a series of objects that have the same material, you could theoretically dip your “brush” only once for all of them. We call this “draw call batching”. Unity3d does this for you automatically unless the objects are too complex. The problem is our objects are very VERY complex. The static batching utility lets us tell the engine that the objects can be batched even though they are too large to be analyzed.
  • Practiced our shader programming skills by re-writing and optimizing a couple of custom shaders. We optimized the skybox shaders and realized we didn’t gain a lot of FPS, so it seems like they were pretty lightweight already. We also stumbled upon a very weird bug, in which a built-in shader would apply very strange colors on one of our characters. We found out that the shader read vertex colors on the mesh, and that one of our 3dsMax skinning tool wrote some information in the vertex colors of the mesh and it somehow got exported. We simply rewrote that shader, and next time we export, we’ll delete the data.
  • Wrote a text parser that reads text files so we can write the stats of our units in a text file. This is very useful for example, to change the hit points of a specific unit type on the fly.
  • Spent some time adding particle effects on a lot of game events. This makes those events a lot more satisfying. For example, when a Bricktron hits an earth block with his pick, a particle effect throws some dirt particles in the air. This feedback is essential to the game, if the Bricktron swings his pick or axe in the air and nothing happens, how would we know if he missed?
  • Progressed in the filming of the trailer. The most complicated scene is mostly done, and for the remaining scenes, they are either very short and easy to film, or there’s a bug that needs to be fixed before we can film it.



How to draw a Bricktron

We are always very touched by people who send us fan-art. This is something very special to us. We all start off by doing fan-art of something, so I decided to give you guys some tips on how to create good Bricktrons… Who knows, a future Miyazaki or HergĂ© might be out there.

Anyway, for the sake of brevity, I’ll keep the whole thing to an 8 step process.

That’s pretty much it. Try it yourself!

Send us your drawings on our facebook page so we can give you some tips!



Soundtrack of the week

Not only is this great work music, you’ll also look like a king if you put this at parties. Jon Kennedy‘s sound is just flawless and Take My Drum to England is just one of many great albums.


Anyway, see you next week!

Team Sauropod





22 Comments for Dev diary number eighteen : Drawing Lessons


Seth
11 months ago


Great work again guys! Saddened to see that the trailer won’t be out this week, but I wait in anticipation! Great tutorial, I’m not an artist myself but I love to see other’s drawings. Jon Kennedy is brilliant too.

Chris Artzoglou
11 months ago


That was the cutest tutorial ever :3

Oh and your human verification method is soooooooooooooo much cooler then anyone else’s, congratz!

Phranx
11 months ago


Hi guys, thanks for the weekly updates! Was hoping you might be able to afford a little time on your forums to answer some of the questions?

http://castlestoryonline.com/threads/multiplay-mode-question.475/
That one in particular is mine, I check up on it every now and then to see if it’s been answered :)

Ben
11 months ago


I don’t know about the guy in the tutorial, but I thought it was pretty nifty!
Good job on the bug fixing and progress and good luck for the coming week!
ciao!

ghisl
11 months ago


Merci, continuez comme votre travail.
J’adore le tuto :)

Electrum
11 months ago


Nice work guys, keep it up!
Also don’t forget to post it on twitter( I noticed you hadn’t done that yet!

satamoto
11 months ago


WT% WHAT drawing lesson? Are you trolling?I though you aren’t kidding about the kickstarter video!

”Made significant progress in the filming of the trailer. One scene in particular was very troublesome: a 30 minutes timelapse of a large castle being built by a small army of Bricktrons. For the entire duration of the scene, we could not intervene, and any significant bug would ruin the entire shot. At 30 minutes per shot, I can safely say that this scene gobbled up several of my days. The result, however is pretty spectacular, and I consider it as the centerpiece for the trailer. I can’t wait to show it!”

no serous are you trolling ? This joke actually is one of the thou!

    satamoto
    11 months ago


    SUPPER WORK WITH UNITY-PRO

    I forgot to mention!!!

    Menekis
    11 months ago


    Trailer will come off course with the kickstarter, it is our video promo for it.

      satamoto
      11 months ago


      0-0 …

      Suuuup
      11 months ago


      So should we expect it within the next two weeks? I want to buy this game so badly!

      Menekis
      11 months ago


      sadly I cannot give any date. We can still encouter many obstacle (mostly administratives ones) so giving a date for delaying after it that would be very frustrating for our fans and ourselves.

      suuuup
      11 months ago


      I appreciate your response; I like that you guys communicate with your fans :)

      I understand. I just love your work so far, and thus I become impatient :P sorry. Hopefully you don’t have to deal with much more red tape!

satamoto
11 months ago


BEST SOUND TRACK EVER!!!!

    satamoto
    11 months ago


    /I’m not talking about this soundtrack on the whole!!!

pippoppeo
11 months ago


I plan a german blog of “Castle Story”. But, can i copy the HTML? And musst think on the Comments. Pls answer!

    xXMarvinXx
    11 months ago


    I could help you scince i am german ! Stil talking english cause i dont know if you are…………………………………..HI wie gehts?

snoeg
11 months ago


hope to see it online soon

Kuzyn
11 months ago


“This tutorial sucks!”
Hah! :D

James
11 months ago


Your site was down yesterday… I almost thought, that something would happen… :-P

10 months ago


yay thanks so much i drew this on paper transfered it onto my conputer by taking a photo then i just tweaked it a bit till it looks like it was all done on a pc thanks so much my pics look great :D

My Homepage
3 months ago


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