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Dev diary number sixteen : Saturday night at the movies

Posted by Germain on 03 Jun 2012 / 36 Comments



Jun
3
2012
 36
Howdy!

Yeah so, once again, a technical problem prevented us from posting our blog on Friday, namely barrels not exploding anymore and ragdoll heads separating from their bodies. We had to debug this instead of writing this blog. But no worries! I think it paid off because we have another animated GIF for you this week.

Progress Report

So yeah, while we were waiting for our bank to send us the legal documents that will allow us to run our Kickstarter, we have made significant progress on every single part of the game. Our milestone chart is now so long that the milestones at the top of the list are now older than the universe. We also hired 3 immigrants full-time to scroll to the bottom of the document for us every morning. Here’s what it looks like:

Here’s a few things we did more specifically:

  • Finished editing the interview video for the Kickstarter. This was a long and arduous process that consisted mainly of us listening to our stupid faces talking for hours and then selecting the scenes where we look the least like retards. I think the video will be OK, but honestly, I’m just glad this is over.
  • Started eliminating memory leaks, and worked on RAM management. Our biggest problem right now is the amount of geometry that our islands require. A very large island right now brings the game dangerously close to the 2Gbs limit that the engine can handle. So we will focus in the next weeks on creating additional Levels of detail so we can replace detail mesh with approximate meshes for faraway terrain.
  • Speaking of saving geometry, we have started working on mesh simplification for the bottom of the islands. The problem right now is that since the undersides of the islands are not smooth, we can save very little geometry when simplifying the mesh. One of the main methods of saving geometry is to combine redundant vertices. These duplicate vertices usually have the same position, but do not have the same UV coordinates or the same normals. These duplicates are necessary to make tiling textures and “hard” edges. However, at a distance, tiling and hard edges are not necessary, so combining them becomes a possibility. The problem with the current island underside is that every single face has hard edges, due to being voxels instead of smooth terrain. We are working toward a solution that will let us smooth the bottom of the islands at a distance.
  • Unified the damage dealing mechanism. Now, characters, explosions and physics impacts deal damage and several types of objects can receive it. For example, an explosion might kill a bad guy while also blowing up a door right beside it. The two entities will have received the same message and will react according to their own behaviors.
  • Added several new tools for the cinematic scripting engine. Having used it for 3 weeks now, I can safely say it’s becoming pretty powerful. It will be the subject of our blog post this week:



A cinematic scripting engine?

We realized a few months ago that we would eventually need to show specific parts of the game by video in the form of a trailer. The problem is that Castle Story is a slower game than the average and that setting up some of the scenes would be an enormous pain in the posterior. For example, say we have one army attacking a castle. The scene involves a player and an AI. Now unless we want to specifically capture gameplay footage, we would need to give orders to our units while recording the scene, which is quite hard to do for a single person when you think about it.

In my brief time in the video game industry, I was tasked with recording gameplay for trailers. We would be paired into teams of two, one had to play the game while another would control a camera to record the action. The thing is that we were playing a third person platformer, Castle Story is a real-time strategy game with complex player-driven actions.

We searched for a few solutions to this problem, and we came to the conclusion that we would eventually need to be able to procedurally send orders to the various characters and objects in the game. This meant that we would eventually need to write a script-based event sequencer.

What we have right now is a text parser that reads a text file. We’ve created a simple syntax that allows us to spawn characters, interact with objects and send orders to anyone in the scene. Additionally, we’ve created a large selection of camera movements that allows us to film the scene from any angle imaginable.

Here’s a little scene we created today in about twenty minutes:

This scene shows off many features of our engine:

  • Waypoint-based movement for units or groups of units. In this case, the archer and one of the knights have orders to move along a predefined path. The worker is sent through the door to the barrel and back at the door before running away.
  • Specific actions like picking up and dropping objects. In this case, the worker carries a barrel and places in in front of the door. These orders can be mixed with movement orders by putting delays.
  • Complex camera movements. You can see that in this case, the camera orbits around a position. But other subtle movements have been blended in, a slight translation of the camera and an upward rotation. Finally, a good old camera shake effect has been synced to the explosion to give the appropriate effect.
  • Trigger specific object behavior. The barrel in this scene had been given the order to blow up toward the end. In another scene, a catapult might be given the order to aim and shoot at a certain position.

The scene before being played looks like this:

Needless to say, the possibilities that this tool gives us is pretty exciting. Not only will this give us the ability to script in-game cinematics with ease, it also helps us record video for us to post on Youtube if need be. The option of also releasing a simplified version of this engine to the public combined with sandbox level editing creates immense potential for machinima, don’t you think?



Soundtrack of the week

I’m not much of a hip hop kinda guy. But Nujabes‘ music really has something special. Too bad he’s not around anymore to make more of this.

I had a hard time choosing which album I should include, but I think Modal Soul represents his work best. Also check out Luv(sic) on Youtube.


Team Sauropod





36 Comments for Dev diary number sixteen : Saturday night at the movies


Alex
12 months ago


Man you got me good with the Progress Report… Touché.

Maddix
12 months ago


DON’T CLICK THE PROGRESS REPORT PICTURE!!!

OT: Nice work guys!

    Matt L
    12 months ago


    Sees someone telling him not to click the progress report in all caps with three exclamation points. Immediately is compelled to scroll up and click the progress report.

    Curse you suggestible brain!

      Teknonick
      10 months ago


      HAH! I clicked it, then I closed the page before I got to see ‘the results’ :3 XD

Wanting to play
12 months ago


Is everything on the first list compleated?

Mr. Banana
12 months ago


This isnt dev diary #15! This is #16! :P

    Germain
    12 months ago


    Whoops! Heh, I didn’t write last week’s blog so it wasn’t in my list. My bad!

kobolddoido
12 months ago


You like of same music style of me…
bonobo, chill out , lounge and the master nujabes!!!
And yours game is really cool!

Gameovergames
12 months ago


I realy like the progress of te game and hope that we can get a small demo soon,
Good luck guys ;)

Silwerbullet
12 months ago


It looks brilliant. Wow….. Can not wait for this game. Please take your time.

ghisl
12 months ago


“ragdoll heads separating from their bodies.” lol ça pourrait devenir la décapitation sur les rumble critique des chevaliers : ).

Space Narwhal
12 months ago


YAY!

LarsG
12 months ago


Take your time guys, and make this game as great as I know it has the potential to be.. :)

My money will be waiting for you when kickstarter is up!! :D

Tobias
12 months ago


Nice to see this coming along. I can’t wait to send you my moneys :)

I assume this has been asked before, but will there be a way to get a blueprint or something of a destroyed castle? To make rebuilding it less of an annoyance.

Zileon
12 months ago


I can’t wait one more second for this awesome game !

Marco
12 months ago


Well played sir.

Eric
12 months ago


Good god guys, You are doing this in a rapid pace! sweet job! :D

Manuel
12 months ago


Nice to see things coming around.
“where we look the least like retards.” Totally understand this, have the same problem when i record myself.

satamoto
12 months ago


Cool GREAT PROGRESS GAYS !

I think i saw a strange sentance ” We have finshed the kickstarter video!”
Thins means ONLY ONE THING NEXT WEEK NEW VIDEO YAEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE EVERY ONE WITH ME YAEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

    satamoto
    12 months ago


    Sorry for spam!

    Mathijs van Nimwegen
    12 months ago


    I don’t think they’ll be happy with you calling them gays! ^^

      satamoto
      12 months ago


      SORRYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!

Chris
12 months ago


“Finished editing the interview video for the Kickstarter. This was a long and arduous process that consisted mainly of us listening to our stupid faces talking for hours and then selecting the scenes where we look the least like retards. I think the video will be OK, but honestly, I’m just glad this is over.”

LOL, anyone who does videos knows the brutal truth in this. Looking forward to seeing it.

marik
12 months ago


please make a alpha/beta like wolfire did with overgrowth you have to preorder and you will get the updates every week think about it. also don’t make healthbars use realistic stabbing like a stab in the heart dead and on the arm not dead but he will bleed out if he wil get no help from others.

Phaiak
12 months ago


Maybe i am a bit strange, but i could not laugh about the immigrant-joke.

    Germain
    12 months ago


    Yeah, it’s of bad taste I admit. My track record as a comedian is less than stellar.

PlzBanMe
12 months ago


Will get to mess around with this scene maker? I would love to have fun with it!

Marvelous Mr. Cactus
12 months ago


Looks like an incredible game. Can’t wait until the release.

ntmark
12 months ago


Looks like it’s coming along really nicely.
Great work on the game so far.
Can’t wait for the next installment of the devblog, or even better the Kickstarter!!!

James
12 months ago


i think it would be great, if you guys could release some new screenshots… maybe of a big castle… it would be nice, to have a wallpaper of a big castle ;-)

    ntmark
    12 months ago


    Yeah some screenshots would be nice.
    What about SS of some coding blunders that have unexpected consequences, like characters attacking their own side, or trees rendering upside down.

ION 6
12 months ago


Keep up the good work guys.

satamoto
12 months ago


Starting in the period between Beta 1.7.3 and Beta 1.8, Mojang began to publicly release testing versions of full updates in order to get major feedback, especially for bug reporting, so that the official update is considerably more stable. While these versions were public, they were not auto-installed by the game and are completely optional.

Why don’t you do that ? Get a nice feed back and release a more stable version LOL :D!

    Ben
    12 months ago


    A kickstarter is a good alternative to what you said. It gives them enough money to fund a more stable version :D

Mpik
12 months ago


Can’t wait for the next blog post !

Space Narwhal
12 months ago


Gonna be late again?