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Reign of Guilds roadmap - combines all development reports at one place.
And here's our Weekly report #11 (originally released 11/23/18)
Friday is on the air and we open the next ten reports.
Hello everyone and cut to the chase!
I 3D models
Light pants
This week we worked on the diversity of light pants. Modellers still have the freedom to design it.
II Updated character texture
New modular system of armour and clothes is already in the works. But we forgot about one more detail, perhaps, the most important detail - underwear that would hide a nakedness when pants fell after death)
If this model was a separate model we wouldn’t have any difficulties. But we needed to make this skin (read as texture) look worthy. In this, the borders of underwear are very strict and come from the modular system.
That’s how it will look like. Yes, we wanted to make it older and more ragged on purpose.
III Mobs
The quality issue of realistic mobs is significant. 2016-18 years have been marked by bears and wolves with the fur showed by the giants of industry. But technologies are still far from optimization. The realistic fur in the game about witch hunter brought to its knees many game systems.
We are working towards the studying of new technologies that are still to develop.
It’s time to introduce the work with NVIDIA Hairworks in ROG.
We are not sure that we will fall within the optimization of MMORPG genre but we will try. But either way, we will leave this “feature” in addition to ultra settings of graphic.
[By the way]
As usual the fur and hairs are created through addition to the character image the polygonal lines and invisible textures. It’s simple but very labour-intensive method. Fur and hairs look static and visually boring. Creating dynamic fur and hairs one can add hundreds of hairs each of which will respond to the movements of a character and external factors realistically.
This dynamic hairs provide more saturated colour gradient and also interact with the light and shadows more natural then it was earlier. Common and local lightning passes through every layer. Even the deepest layers get the natural shading that improves the image quality significantly.
***
IV Optimization
In the last report we mentioned that we got a new member of ROG team responsible only for optimization. His name is Dmitry. For the first week extensive work has been done. One report isn’t enough to tell about it so we will dedicate to it a separate report. Now we will tell only about a small part of the work done.
[By the way]
Optimization of our level design project we can divide into the main sections:
- Optimization of the main settings of the project;
- Optimization of the landscape material;
- Optimization of every mesh (3D models with textures) separately: its LOD’s, the rules of displaying of materials, simplification of materials at a distance, the rules and quality of casting the shadows depending on the same distance;
- flora (especially trees of SoeedTree);
- buildings and elements of building constructor;
- little details (log, lamp post, signboard, anvil etc.);
- An integration of identical meshes by certain rules in one big mesh or instance-group (fences, piles of stones or logs, etc.);
- Light and shadows in the open world, light and shadows in the instances;
- Rules and parameters of loading of world objects are located in particular area around a character but belong to the other level (i.e. the other submap). We remind that the continent consist of 64 parts (“submaps”), and each of them covers 6.25 sq km. A part of them is located underwater.
On the one hand, it’s basic set of methods to optimize the project. But every project is unique, there are no two similar projects. The difference between first-person and the third person, the difference in altitude on the continent etc.
We started with detail adjusting the tool for optimization. It makes an engine avoid the processing of objects (i. e. it doesn’t show the objects but reserve it) less than particular size. It bases on the distance from this object to the camera. The main thing is to pursue a middle ground, it will help to avoid the discomfort of houses, appeared in front of you, and it won’t “smother” with FPS. Even first attempt within this parameter produced some results.
We will show an example of a village.
Before the setting:
Cull Distance Volume Off, ~35ms, 10k+ DrawCalls
After setting:
Cull Distance Volume On, ~20ms, 4k+ DrawCalls
P.S. The above FPS is the FPS of the project, not of the integrated build. It’s always significantly lower.
***
V Conclusion
In conclusion we will traditionally talk about around-development:
- The best news for us is that the technical work on the site has almost done. On the next week we will start working on the design of the new site with our designer Tatyana.
- There is good news for the future streamers: Reign of Guilds appeared on Twitch. It will help the streamers and us to promote the game in the nearest future. It’s empty now, but you can already subscribe.
- Also we have finished the site of the studio Atlant Games.
- The new site, private IP network, servers etc will be talked in greater detail in the next report dedicated to “Around-development”.
That’s all for now, take care and have a nice weekend!
Join to the voting and discuss the report on our Forum.
It’s Friday’s evening - ROGgoms up!
Yours sincerely,
Reign of Guilds Team