Notice: We respect the desire of the Steam community to get familiar with the new projects within Steam, so we decided to publish regularly (every 2 days) previously released reports on our Steam page, until we catch up with the current ones. By the way, you can read all the reports on our website.
Reign of Guilds roadmap - combines all development reports at one place.
And here's our Weekly report #12 (originally released 11/30/18)
Another Friday is on the air. Unvarnished, just №12.
Hello everyone and get to the point.
I First-person animations with a book
No, the reading of the mantra book in ROG, moreover in a private setting, won’t add an intelligence to you. But the book will definitely make you stronger. You can keep the healing mantra, mana regeneration mantra, the good and the bad spells.
[By the way,]
You can’t use the spells without inscription in the mantra book. Writing the inscription is not always successful. Parameters that affect the success of the writing will remain a secret, as before.
After successful inscription of a mantra, the other similar mantra will always be written successfully.
The number of the same mantra in the book reduces the time of reading the spell (reload/preload).
An optimal number of the similar mantra is 4* (the level of mantra). It reduces RL/PL on 50%.
The mantra would be spent if you used it too much.
***
Here’s a part of first-person animations with the book.
Equip
Idle
Unequip
II 3D models
Scapulars
We went quite a standard way for us: we make the basics and use it to create a huge number of variations. The same way with the scapulars. We create one pad then compile both scapulars. There are three types:
- Symmetric;
- Asymmetric (one shoulder lighter, second harder, one protective, second for attack);
- One-sided.
III Optimization
Let’s imagine a situation - there is a pile of firewood. Every log is a separate 3D object (Static Mesh). In the pile there are 100 logs, for example. As you know, it is not very good.
There are 2 ways to optimize:
- Merge (merging) of these objects into the one common object (geometry) - until recently, only giant studios could afford such a thing, because it costs too much;
- Creating, configuring and using of the “instance” function will allow to “draw” with the objects. It automatically changes its scale, angle, turning and the most important - compiles it into the special groups. They are easier for CPU+GPU.
Today we will tell about the second way. Its main advantages are:
- It doesn’t create a new additional object. It affects the size of the client positively;
- It saves LODs for every separate object;
- Objects hidden from view stop being rendered;
- Attentive configuring of this function reduces the designer’s time of mapping these objects.
We will tell about the first way in the next reports.
1. The tests of a productivity on the one section of location, replacing all Static Mesh-borders on the instances.
Hierarchical Instanced Static Meshes Off ~ 16.6 ms, 3200+ DrawCalls
Hierarchical Instanced Static Meshes On ~ 15.8 ms, 2900+ DrawCalls
2. Another example of using procedurally generated content by instances instead of handwork with Static Meshes. Test on the gulf with lotuses in one of the locations. The dramatic difference in 20 FPS.
Hierarchical Instanced Static Meshes Off ~ 31.3 ms, 19k+ DrawCalls (!!!), about 2 thousands of copies of Static Meshes.
Hierarchical Instanced Static Meshes On ~ 19.8 ms, 6,8k+ DrawCalls, 5 Blueprints, about 2 thousands of instances.
3. Another example of using procedurally generated content in one location - model of SM_achillea on the patches.
Hierarchical Instanced Static Meshes Off ~ 26.8 ms, 8,7k DrawCalls, 1680 copies of SM_achillea model
Hierarchical Instanced Static Meshes On ~ 20.7 ms, 5,5k+ DrawCalls, 6 Blueprints, 2508 instances of SM_achillea model
IV Conclusion
As always, a little about around-development:
- To continue the around-development №2 we need to tell that the story with the own network of IPs turns into the own NS-servers. It becomes serious enough. We’ve already rented our first server hardware. It will be responsible for the site+forum, game database for Europe and the CIS, post servers, NS-servers etc. In addition to backup it provides reliability - not only raid1, but, closer to the early access, it would be a mirror to the reserve server.
- We listened to the views about Steam pictures and soon we would renew the №1 variant.
That’s all for now, take care and have a nice weekend!
It’s Friday evening - ROGgoms up, friends!
Yours sincerely,
Reign of Guilds team