Raptor Dev Diary #2: Thar Be Dinos Behind That Longwinded Man

[crazyroosterman]

Should have a t-rex option too.  And then it can't fit through the doors and just makes a plaintive whining sound as it keeps trying anyway.

that should be an enemy instead then you can run back through the nearest door and laugh at it.

[Pumpkin]

On the night vision topic, I quickly googled things and got the main (artistic, not technical) difference between night vision and infrared vision. And I never talked about

https://www.google.ae/search?q=infrared+vision&tbm=isch
https://www.google.ae/search?q=night+vision&tbm=isch

The night vision is green and gives a very military/technology feeling. The infrared vision makes colored gradations that, IMO, are much more organic and convey more a "predator vision". I think it could serve game's readability in dark places and also be used to spot enemies. Maybe the robots have an embedded reactor that emit heat and clearly stands out in the infrared vision. Of course it would be a toggle, maybe with a key/button that change the vision while pressed and revert to normal when released.

What do you think?

[chemical_art]

I hope scratching will still happen time to time, since Philosoraptor is a pretty common meme nowadays.

I will throw in support for this. You could make it an easter egg of sorts: Either it only happens in a specific room and/or you can do what was popular in the 90's which is alternative cosmetic displays a la big/small head mode etc that you can unlock. Some unlockable things like that are pretty cosmetic can be neat treasures to find.

[eRe4s3r]

When looking at the animations I have some things I wanna throw out there ;p

Animation seams, neck, tail-body connection are a big issue and need fixing imo ;P This is a mesh/bone weight issue more or less, but still needs mention.
When running / jumping, there is no kinetic movement or dynamic IK whatsoever (it looks very fake and "stock" because of that) when jumping there should be an obvious physical compression of the knee joints on impact with the tail acting as balancer. And when running, the tail should follow the kinetic motion of the body and not just "drag behind" with no animation. (hard to explain ,p)

Feathers though are whole different topic... since you can't do them with shaders you need to do them with polygons which complicates animations a thousandfold.

It would be nice if the tail IK were dynamic, so that collisions when turning can bend the tail (generally speaking, the tail should not act like a giant static mesh attached to a dinosaur ,p)

And finally, that bloom.. is too strong imo. But this is hopefully a configurable setting... more importantly, if you are using a proper HDR color grading shader then how exactly is there bloom to begin with? The color gradient control should allow you to limit overglow very effectively. Finally, rim light shader element could severely improve visual quality in certain areas.

Well, aside that it looks pretty good... I am not sold on using stock dinosaur mesh though, not just because of the feathers and the unrealism, but because I could have sworn I have seen that dino mesh before in some game...

[Draco18s]

When looking at the animations I have some things I wanna throw out there ;p

All of those animations are stock and Blue's redone pretty much all of them as I understand it.

[eRe4s3r]

When looking at the animations I have some things I wanna throw out there ;p

All of those animations are stock and Blue's redone pretty much all of them as I understand it.

obligatory "don't show outdated assets in videos" comment then. Since you know, those videos stick around forever and are the first thing a google video search pops up (since it's usually the most commented on)

Geeze, I wonder why my comments sounded so snarky? It wasn't meant like that at all ~.~ Must be the coffee

[Draco18s]

The video mentions several times that the animations are going to get replaced.
They just weren't done and hadn't been imported yet.

[Mánagarmr]

It's early alpha, I know. But I'm just going to assume those robotic animations are not final?

I mentioned in the video a couple of times that those are just stock ones and Blue's been doing vastly better ones.  I think I even mocked the kick animation at one point, IIRC.

But yeah, those are both stiff as well as cartoony.  She vastly improved the rig of the raptor, and made it possible for it to have things like breathing motions in its chest, flanks motion, etc, etc.  Proper IK for the legs, etc.  I'm actually in the process of integrating her walk/run/idle/jump animations at this very moment.  Holy smokes what a difference.

Amazing. I must've missed every instance of that XD I heard you talk a lot about sound effects and stuff not being final. But welp. Here goes to show one should not play Dwarf Fortress while listening to stuff xD

[eRe4s3r]

Same applies to me.. 1 hour is a lot to expect someone to pay attention to though, so there is that at least ;P

[crazyroosterman]

I still haven't got round to listening to it mainly because theres so much other stuff I need to watch/listen to but I will get round to it I promise you that even if it is by the time the next videos been put up. 

[x4000]

Cheers guys.

1. "Don't show videos with outdated assets" is how we wind up with "we never talked about this until the game came out, now marketing fail."  So I'm going the other way with this one.  It worked well for Valley 1, overall.

2. Noted on the various things with the raptor seams at the tail, etc.  That was just an artifact of the original rigging.

3. With the tail being something that uses an IK chain, I spent a good week trying to get that to work via both IK chains and puppet master, and the results were generally unintentionally hilarious in a bad way.  There are some things that I'd like to improve there, but a lot of that is just coming down to how Blue has animated it now, which is superior to what it used to be anyhow.  The tail is probably the trickiest part -- her other animations are freaking amazing in terms of what they add.

4. The bloom is configurable, and is something that is on top of the HDR effect for dramatic purposes.  It can be configured, although I'm not sure it's directly what was bothering you the most.  Most likely that was actually the color saturation artifacts (which were blurry and could easily be mistaken for bloom) from the Horizon Based Ambient Occlusion in use.  I've made a lot of adjustments to the HBAO, and it looks much better, too.  Things are crisper, particularly with shadows, etc.

5. Rim lighting is a good point, but rather expensive on the GPU to my knowledge.  I'm not sure if the main shaders support rim lighting, either.  I'd have to look into that more.  Where specifically are you thinking those would be most useful, though?

6. I'll have another video today showing various updated stuff, and in a much briefer fashion.  So hopefully that will be something people enjoy, and with videos coming out more regularly that ought to combat the "outdated assets are the first thing you see" issue.  Some, at least.

7. I have thought about having a t-rex option, and that could be quite fun.  We shall see if it's ever possible just for cost reasons on our end.  If this is a big hit, it sure would be fun to add.  And +100 karma for the Meet The Robinsons reference.  That movie is so good (and the soundtrack).

[x4000]

Next video will be tomorrow morning, not tonight.  I've gotten a bit more done than anticipated, though, which is pleasing.

[eRe4s3r]

Well yeah You are right with showing stuff, just not 1 hour long monologues since (apparently) many people overhear stuff... as I have to admit I did ;P

As for rim light shader... it usually is just a tool to make things stand out more. But it depends hugely on the mesh/level/engine how exactly that's gonna look. Generally speaking if it's an light source based shader it will look extremely neat.... but it could also look horrible in other scenes ;p Only thought of that because I saw the follower light, which isn't an optimal solution to make the dino appear rooted in the world (graphics wise) usually what happens is what I like to call the Dark Souls problem, when you have a character that glows in the dark that you can see from behind, it appears as if he is never actually standing on the ground due to how normal maps interact with this light ;p

[x4000]

Ah, interesting.

True enough on a number of those things, for sure.  I can see what you mean about a rim light for the raptor and so forth in particular, that could look pretty slick.  Before I wasn't really thinking of what I could use that sort of light for.

Anyhow, yeah, hour-long monologues are not the general plan.