[FILLED] Looking for artist(s) to develop new style for A Valley Without Wind.

[Jerebaldo1]

I'm strongly in support of articulated sprites if any change goes through; it's a refreshing change from the low-fi trend as of late, which is great to be sure but I still prefer something more sophisticated for this game.

[Bluddy]

@Nanashi

Unity doesn't have a 2D renderer (all modern engines actually don't) and the performance of 2D engines (Direct Draw....) is abysmal. It is always faster to render a 2D sprite in a 3D engine than it is to render it in a 2D engine.

AI War 1.0 was Direct Draw based and it ran pretty dang terribly compared to now Direct Draw is also end-of-life. Microsoft explicitly said not to use it anymore because broad compatibility is no longer a given. Microsoft says to render to polygons instead. With hardware acceleration this is up to 100 times faster too ;p

Anyhow, as a 3D engine unity doesn't care about what comes in, if it isn't DXT compressed it renders it to uncompressed image state with whatever bitrate the image had and then pushes it to the GPU wasting memory in the process (2 images are in memory, compressed and uncompressed which as you can imagine is a nightmare for ram usage). Lowering the colors to 256 works imo, as engines take it as it comes, so 512x512 * 256 colors would indeed use less ram and vram. That means even if you index it down to 3 colors, the image is loaded as a 256 color image and uses that much ram/vram the other 253 colors would then be considered black, still use the memory as if it was a full 256 color image ;p

Hence, converting what can be converted to 256 colors might be worth considering and it may be worth a test whether this lowers ram and vram usage or not, it is very well possible unity converts it to a specific color mode internally no matter what we put in.

Sorry guys. 256 colors doesn't work on modern GPUs. There's no support for 8-bit color -- 8-bit color by definition is always indexed since the color value itself can't describe an RGB triple. So you have to index into a palette of 256 colors, which are either 16, 24 or 32 bits. The PSP can do this (for example) for efficiency. Modern graphic cards don't bother supporting it, possibly because it complicates shader architecture. So you have to take that 16 or 32 bit palette and fill out the whole texture with those values, losing all the savings in the process.

2D game engines like ScummVM use SDL which on Windows translates to DirectDraw calls. These calls are slow, but for old games running at <20fps it's fine. Even ScummVM though is moving towards OpenGL (from a GSoC project a few years back), which is basically the same way of rendering 2d sprites in 3d. You get huge advantages from doing this, including rendering speed boosts, free bilinear filtering, free aspect correction, etc.

[x4000]

AI War 1.0 was Direct Draw based and it ran pretty dang terribly compared to now Direct Draw is also end-of-life. Microsoft explicitly said not to use it anymore because broad compatibility is no longer a given. Microsoft says to render to polygons instead. With hardware acceleration this is up to 100 times faster too ;p

AI War has always been Direct3D9; the various optimizations in that game have all been in our learning to better leverage that platform.  I have worked with DirectDraw in the past, however (all the way back with DirectX7, the last time that was even supported) and I can confirm what you say about terrible performance.  Not only that, but alpha transparency isn't even possible with it IIRC.  It's been since 2002 or so since I worked with DirectDraw, and after that it was all Direct3D (first Direct3D8, then Direct3D9 since then).

[TechSY730]

Wait, the topic was renamed to [FILLED]...

So, are you going to let us know who the "lucky winner" was, and your chosen direction about what to do with the art, or is that a "surprise" announcement for later.

[TechSY730]

We'll have more news on that front in early August, when we expect to start development on that one; that one is going to be pretty much Keith's show, which should be happy news to everyone since his have been the most popular features of the game since I laid down the core game itself.

Aw, don't sell your short.
Sure, Kieth has implemented some popular "wild and crazy" ideas lately, but you are the one who, as you mentioned, laid down the core of the game and helps to keep it "grounded" to it's design goals. So while you may have been spending less time in its code lately, but you still play a major role in it's development.

[x4000]

Wait, the topic was renamed to [FILLED]...

So, are you going to let us know who the "lucky winner" was, and your chosen direction about what to do with the art, or is that a "surprise" announcement for later.

It's filled in the sense that we have chosen three different studios to work on various prospective art styles as prototypes that will lead toward the kickstarter, as I noted a few posts back (easy to miss in all this, though).  Now it's up to their artists to work with their own art directors and me in order to make sure that we have three different sets of art that are each as awesome as they can be, and then it's time to choose one to go forward with for the kickstarter and so on, and then it will be time for the kickstarter.

I don't plan to reveal the names of the three studios, but rather will just be revealing whichever one we actually wind up going with.  I feel that's most fair to them, as I don't wish to create any sort of negative perception about another studio just because their style didn't mesh quite as well with my vision for this particular game as another studio did.

We'll have more news on that front in early August, when we expect to start development on that one; that one is going to be pretty much Keith's show, which should be happy news to everyone since his have been the most popular features of the game since I laid down the core game itself.

Aw, don't sell your short.
Sure, Kieth has implemented some popular "wild and crazy" ideas lately, but you are the one who, as you mentioned, laid down the core of the game and helps to keep it "grounded" to it's design goals. So while you may have been spending less time in its code lately, but you still play a major role in it's development.

What I mean is, he's the guy behind hybrid hives and fallen spire and such, and you'll be in good hands with him.  I only have so much attention to devote to everything that is going on, so I'll be helping in a support role with this particular expansion of AI War, and will be the primary on AVWW.  Trying to have me as the primary on both projects would be... not to the benefit of either project.

[mrhanman]

I know this is a bit early to be asking, but do you have a ballpark figure in mind for the Kickstarter?  Closer to $100,000, or $10,000?

[x4000]

I know this is a bit early to be asking, but do you have a ballpark figure in mind for the Kickstarter?  Closer to $100,000, or $10,000?

It really depends on the studio and what their costs wind up being for whatever the final selected style is.  There are over 4,000 pieces of art that need to be transitioned as it stands (though a lot of the particle effects and some other minor things like that can remain), not to mention we then need to also have a budget to continue to do art for new enemies and objects and such as we develop out the game further.  Arcen can cover a certain amount of that, but depending on the style we go with we're increasing our cost-per-enemy by quite a lot.  As it stands, for us to code you a new enemy and do all the art and such typically costs between $20 and $100.

It could be more like $400 per new enemy in the new system, depending on who we go with and what art style we choose; which is why we'd need extra money to carry us further with development of new content.  We don't want to hit a point where we simply can't proceed anymore because the code is willing but the art is just too darn expensive.

My gut tells me that $80k to $100k ought to be in the ballpark of what we'd need for this, but I could be undershooting it depending on the style chosen, etc.  For a bit of perspective, bear in mind that I've already personally invested more than $200k into this project, or even as high as $300k depending on how you do the accounting (depending on how you allocate various costs, you can make accounting numbers say all sorts of things, eh?).  The largest cost for this game has always been the essentially R&D efforts to come up with new ideas and gameplay mechanics, and because we're small that left no room for an art budget that could have easily made the project incomplete-able prior to this point.  Remember that we've been working on this project for 18 months straight at this point, with pretty much 3 people fulltime most of that time, and 5 people fulltime for about half that time at this point.  That costs.

Anyhow, the $80k to $100k is just my gut ballpark feeling -- this game has a lot of art already, and frankly it has far less art than I'd like it to in order for the sense of exploration to really be palpable as you go through each region, etc.  I'm investing probably between $1k and $3k on the prototypes for kickstarter alone (it depends on how far each prototype with each studio we really take this as to what final costs will be), and I look at that as basically art R&D costs since it's doing exploratory work on three different styles of art for the same scene.

[TechSY730]

My gut tells me that $80k to $100k ought to be in the ballpark of what we'd need for this, but I could be undershooting it depending on the style chosen, etc.  For a bit of perspective, bear in mind that I've already personally invested more than $200k into this project, or even as high as $300k depending on how you do the accounting

 

Good night, since when did game development get so expensive?

And this is an indie game. What kind of insane costs go into a AAA Studio Game!?

[x4000]

My gut tells me that $80k to $100k ought to be in the ballpark of what we'd need for this, but I could be undershooting it depending on the style chosen, etc.  For a bit of perspective, bear in mind that I've already personally invested more than $200k into this project, or even as high as $300k depending on how you do the accounting

 

Good night, since when did game development get so expensive?

And this is an indie game. What kind of insane costs go into a AAA Studio Game!?

Are you kidding me?  The marketing budget of the larger AAA games is $10 million.  How much do you think it costs to keep a staff of 300 people working away on a game for 1-3 years for those AAA studios?

EDIT: If you assume an average salary of $50k among those 300 people (which might be undershooting it, given the pay of top talent and executives, but then again is also being weighed against the QA folks making next to nothing in those companies), then that's $15 million per year.

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, indie vs AAA budgets is a matter of orders of magnitude.

[eRe4s3r]

AI War 1.0 was Direct Draw based and it ran pretty dang terribly compared to now Direct Draw is also end-of-life. Microsoft explicitly said not to use it anymore because broad compatibility is no longer a given. Microsoft says to render to polygons instead. With hardware acceleration this is up to 100 times faster too ;p

AI War has always been Direct3D9; the various optimizations in that game have all been in our learning to better leverage that platform.  I have worked with DirectDraw in the past, however (all the way back with DirectX7, the last time that was even supported) and I can confirm what you say about terrible performance.  Not only that, but alpha transparency isn't even possible with it IIRC.  It's been since 2002 or so since I worked with DirectDraw, and after that it was all Direct3D (first Direct3D8, then Direct3D9 since then).

Ah I was confusing this with something else then But I seem to recall something about D3D and AI War 1.0.. obviously wasn't Direct Draw, something else, GUI or how sprites were rendered? Mhh, bad memory ftw ;p

When do we get to see what style it could be? ;P


@Bluddy
I guess you are right I haven't really tried doing such sprites ever so I wasn't exactly sure... as you say it's got to be fit the 255,255,255 scheme so it can't be 256 colors. However I am not sure whether we couldn't load those images anyway and get away with huge RAM and HDD savings, just not VRAM savings. I never tried... maybe Unity converts it on load in which case we'd be wasting RAM. Anyhow..

[x4000]

AI War 1.0 was Direct Draw based and it ran pretty dang terribly compared to now Direct Draw is also end-of-life. Microsoft explicitly said not to use it anymore because broad compatibility is no longer a given. Microsoft says to render to polygons instead. With hardware acceleration this is up to 100 times faster too ;p

AI War has always been Direct3D9; the various optimizations in that game have all been in our learning to better leverage that platform.  I have worked with DirectDraw in the past, however (all the way back with DirectX7, the last time that was even supported) and I can confirm what you say about terrible performance.  Not only that, but alpha transparency isn't even possible with it IIRC.  It's been since 2002 or so since I worked with DirectDraw, and after that it was all Direct3D (first Direct3D8, then Direct3D9 since then).

Ah I was confusing this with something else then But I seem to recall something about D3D and AI War 1.0.. obviously wasn't Direct Draw, something else, GUI or how sprites were rendered? Mhh, bad memory ftw ;p

Not a worry.   We were using Direct3DXSprite, which was one thing that was really unhelpful back then.  That's part of the Direct3DX extensions, and not great.  We switched away from that when we switched away from SlimDX, but we could have switched away from that even staying with SlimDX.

When do we get to see what style it could be? ;P

I'm honestly not sure.  I think I'll be seeing the first samples tomorrow from at least one but probably two or three of the studios, and then starts my nitpicking with them, etc.  I'm not sure at what point they'll be comfortable having their work shown to the forumites here, but my intent is that you'll be able to see all three styles before we head to kickstarter.

[keith.lamothe]

Were the GDI+ parts of pre-Unity-AIW's drawing using DirectDraw under there somewhere?  My guess is it was that or something even worse

[Aklyon]

Well.

That was much more detail than I expected on the subject of game art. Like someone said before in the thread, keep going if you can, this is interesting.