Quests & System-Planning

By Maja - CEO, Concept Artist

Hi! Maja here. Me and Marius have worked on a quest system for the game loop this past month. Note that this is NOT programming, but pre-production for it. Which means we have to first divide the different categories of quests, which as of now is 1. Breeding, 2. Training (Stats and disciplines) and 3. Behavior training (Spooking, bolting, etc.). 

The next step was to define how to change the difficulty within each category, and that may include for example; tiers. 

We want these quests to have a formula that lasts forever and never stops giving new quests. Kind of like a randomizer. 

The hardest one to work on was breeding, since there are so many factors that can play into this category. Breed, size, gender, coat color, markings and so on. All of the genetics. Some clients are pickier than others.

An example can be this for an easy quest:
“Hello, I want a Brunblakk (Bay dun) Norwegian Fjord horse, can you breed me one?”. This requires two Norwegian Fjord horses (dam and sire) and that the foal inherits the Brunblakk color gene.

For a more advanced quest it can be:
“Hi, I am looking for a Norwegian warmblood, but I want a stallion that is red tobiano with a blaze (face marking).

Here you will need Norwegian Warmbloods where the foal inherits a red base coat with tobiano, and also has a facial marking and is a colt/stallion. Much more challenging, right? The challenge is strongly based on the percent chances it takes to get either of these traits and some luck. Maybe you get in the first try, or maybe it requires multiple tries. But hey that’s horse breeding for ya.

But this is just two examples out of many.

The formula we have planned here needs to be tested and approved before we can confirm that this is what we are going to use. But I think this is a good idea. Small to major change may occur.

Stories and other quests
On the side of the core game loop, we have also written a lot of more story based quests. Both for the game loop and in-world quests. This has been fun, some quests just arrive by themselves and some others need a little bit more research and planning. Some are interesting, some are funny and some may even be sad. Like it should be. Variation is good.

So yeah, lots of writing has been going on. Proof reading, rewriting, and testing is another part that must be done for it to be programmed and implemented into Astride. Many steps, but that’s how it is.

Stabbur & Skigard

By Tirna - Project Manager, 3D-artist

So, this month has been a little different from the previous months… With challenges from every angle, but I managed to make two new assets that will be added to the game. They are made to make the environment feel closer to what you can see on a lot of older farms around Norway.

This little house is called a “Stabbur” in Norwegian. They used those buildings to store food, and sometimes people were sleeping in them too. Especially in the summer, at large farms where a lot of people were working, since the temperatures inside were a nice escape from the summer heat. The year we put on this Stabbur was a very good year for many farmers in Norway, and brought in good wealth.

Another very typical thing you find a lot here in Norway, till this day, are a type of fences called a “Skigard”. When they are in a row, they make quite a cozy vibe to the environment. 

I’m really looking forward to making more of these assets and putting them into the game world.

LOD's & Animations

By Marius - Animator

May, as every year, is a weird month. And this year hasn’t disappointed in that regard. Other than our constitution day and other usual national holidays that take place in May, I have had very varied work assignments this month.

Animation
I continued working on the standing jump animation and further segmenting jump animations for easier use in Unity. I hadn’t worked on them for a while and realized that I stopped mid way because of the annoying shoulder calculation problem. But it is more important to get it in game, so any calculation problems will for now be ignored so we can set up the system for the animations and then I’ll have to fix it manually later. Anyway, a funny thing I realized when working on the jumping animations was that I had followed my reference for standing jump a little too well. In that I mean that the jumping height for standing jump ended up being around 1.75 meters, which is insane. Very impressive for the person who was my reference, but not really a “normal” jump. So I lowered the height to be comparable with the running jump. Then just make sure that the different jump segments have the same amount of frames or at least proportionally similar in events along the timelines. This is so they can blend between each other smoothly if needed.

Level Of Detail
I have planned that the next export of animations should include LOD’s for the character. For those who don't know, LOD’s are variations of 3D meshes with lower and lower polygon count. These meshes replace the mesh when it gets a certain distance away from the camera and don’t need to render in full detail. Usually there are several levels of detail so that when the character or objects gets even further away, there will be even less polygons. The main thing to keep in mind with this is to keep the silhouette as unchanged as possible. So while the fingers might end up with barely any polygons it is okay as long as it won’t be visible at the distance that mesh is meant for.

A good example are the ears. While I did try to keep the roundness of the ear shape as long as I was able to, the lowest level of detail ended up as an elf as the ears will not be visible to that degree at that distance. Round shapes are the most difficult to keep the shape of when reducing edges.

The example above shows the highest and lowest LOD of the head. Do note that curvatures I normally would like and try to keep like the bridge of the nose gets removed at this level. And with that, when another character or player is way far away, you don’t need to render all 14 000 polygons and instead render just the 2 000 needed. (Only body and head mesh taken into account in this poly count example) There might be an even lower resolution mesh made in the future for when the character is extremely far away, but as of now this is the lowest as we might just stop rendering the character at that point. Though I still see some edge loops I should be able to remove on the lowest resolution one, mostly the one around the eyes.

Quest system
When taking a break from animating, I joined Maja in making quests, which made me realize we needed to look at how we define different horse traits and training levels. This is so that we can have it ready to be used for making quests in game, as soon as it is ready. Ideally the system will not only make it easier for us to set quests up, but also be used for generating random quests by exchanging the tags in more generic sounding quest text. The system still needs a lot of work though.

Client stories
Kind of in tandem with the quest system I worked on how quests could be written as examples, which ended up in a full quest line for a named client. Where the idea is that the client is recurring and will have a loose story that can be inferred if you pay attention. The one I made is a little more overt than I initially meant though.

World Streaming

By Ouroboros - Programmer

I finished with the UI after doing some profiling and got started on implementing stateful triggers. Unity DOTS only has stateless triggers and, while we have managed fine this far, having stateful ones will open up some possibilities. It will make it easy to have an event happen when the player enters or leaves an area, which can be useful for quests, competitions, NPCs, and to make the world feel more alive.

As the game world becomes larger, we need a way to keep the game running smoothly. The solution to this is world streaming, where only the immediate area around the player is loaded in and the areas in the distance use lowpoly meshes or billboards. While it sounds pretty straight forward, there is actually a lot that needs to be set up. The fact that Astride is multiplayer also further complicates it. I have spent a lot of time planning and trying to figure out how to handle the more complex parts of the world streaming. At the time of writing this, I am getting ready to do some preliminary testing to see what will and won’t work. Fingers crossed that everything will go smoothly and that I’ll have a version of world streaming up and running before long.

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