Arcen Games

General Category => In Case Of Emergency, Release Raptor => : x4000 July 15, 2016, 01:35:36 AM

: Stealth! The 26th! Performance! Demo 7! Oh my.
: x4000 July 15, 2016, 01:35:36 AM
Original: http://arcengames.com/stealth-the-26th-performance-demo-7-oh-my/

Release notes!  The time has come for us to start putting those out, so there they are.

Ahem.  Now... two steps forward and one step back?  Well, the release is slipping again.

Explodey

This had better be the last time, I swear.  I said last time that I wasn't sure it would be possible, and it would depend on if any new things came up.  Well, a few things did:

  1. I figured out a much better way to have the level editor work (based around tiles), and spent the time needed to make that happen.  It took slightly longer than I thought it might, but MAN is it better.  We're creating rooms like crazy now.

  2. I ran into some performance issues in one corridor of mine and then wound up figuring out a huge chain of things that led to tons of performance improvements across the board.  The game now runs 2x-3x faster in most cases, no joke.  That is worth a few days' delay, I'd have to say!  It does also have an impact on how we design our level pieces, so it's good to have that done at the start.

  3. NOTE!  If you're stressed about the fact that some of the levels look darker now, please don't be.  It actually evens out, with less overall contrast most of the time.  And I may tune that more in general.  However, either way, along with the new lighting comes a new setting that allows you to get a beautiful range of lighting styles in the game depending on how your monitor is set up.  Much better than the older way of doing brightness/contrast in teh game, although that is also still there -- it's good for smaller tweaks.


TheSaviorCorridorThatFoundThePerfIssues

As a side effect of the lighting performance stuff, I had to do some detection to figure out when the raptor is in shadows.  That way the ambient light adjusts up and down so the raptor can see in the dark areas, which are now more pronounced otherwise (the choices were between having it wash out the bright areas or have the dark areas be super dark -- this adjustment of ambient light lets me have it both ways, and kind of simulates how your pupils would dilate and so forth in response to light.  It's not true adaptive lighting from tonemapping, I have that turned off because it causes more headaches than benefits in my opinion, but my thing is the little brother of that idea.)

Anyway, with that data in hand about whether or not the raptor is in shadows... I was able to go ahead and do a lot more with the stealth mechanics sooner than I had planned.  Destroying light fixtures now actually has a purpose aside from being fun.  I always wanted to do this, but I wasn't sure if I'd be able to do it from a technical standpoint.  Turns out very much yes!  You get a handy little icon telling you when you're in cover, and all that jazz.

DarkerButCanBeAdjusted

So what's left on the to-do list?

  1. Blue and Misery are working on room designs.

  2. I am actually out of the office for two business days, unfortunately, which is bad timing.

  3. But then I need to get in more robots.

  4. And Father Brain.

  5. And our first set of voice acting needs to be integrated; it has been recorded by myself and Ben, and then was helpfully split up and processed by Craig.

  6. I need to finish up the actual procedural level generation fixes.  It mostly works, but has some bugs.

  7. I'm sure there are various other bugs that will come to light that I need to take care of.

  8. There are hundreds more objects that will populate the levels, and I need to continue setting those up and getting them ready so that Blue and Misery -- and Brandon, actually! -- can use them.  And me, for that matter.  And any players who are interested in that side of things.


It's feeling a lot more manageable now that there's a bunch of content being created by Blue and crew, and I'm not the bottleneck preventing that from even happening at all.

BluesApartment

 

The wiki is also coming to life at the moment.  We have a section on the level editor basics.  We also have a design guide for level 2, the apartments.

Shootey

I'll mostly be AFK until Tuesday mid-day, so I'll talk to you then!
: Re: Stealth! The 26th! Performance! Demo 7! Oh my.
: Mánagarmr July 15, 2016, 07:02:22 AM
Cool. I'm assuming my services won't be needed for VO-work for this game then?
: Re: Stealth! The 26th! Performance! Demo 7! Oh my.
: x4000 July 15, 2016, 08:57:54 AM
Probably not, but it might be good as a counterpoint for some other robot types.
: Re: Stealth! The 26th! Performance! Demo 7! Oh my.
: Draco18s July 15, 2016, 10:23:55 AM
And Father Brain.

I read this as "Feather Brain."
: Re: Stealth! The 26th! Performance! Demo 7! Oh my.
: Mánagarmr July 15, 2016, 11:22:12 AM
Probably not, but it might be good as a counterpoint for some other robot types.

Alright. I'm heading on vacation for four weeks starting the 23rd though, so I probably wont' have time to record anything anyway before the game releases. But if you need me for future projects, you know where to find me ;)
: Re: Stealth! The 26th! Performance! Demo 7! Oh my.
: x4000 July 15, 2016, 02:45:59 PM
Sounds good! Maybe you can voice the humans in this project if it does well enough that it's going strong when you get back. I was thinking about that this morning.
: Re: Stealth! The 26th! Performance! Demo 7! Oh my.
: Krysle Quinsen July 20, 2016, 12:30:09 AM
I hope 'adjustment of ambient light' doesn't give blacked out/lighted out like HDR eye adaptation, also somehow I find Stealth against robot feels kinda weird for me.
: Re: Stealth! The 26th! Performance! Demo 7! Oh my.
: x4000 July 20, 2016, 09:06:15 AM
I hope 'adjustment of ambient light' doesn't give blacked out/lighted out like HDR eye adaptation

This is exactly why I rolled my own, yeah.  That sort of effect through tonemapping is annoying at the extreme ends of it, and even more annoying in the middle when things are just inexplicably dim for a while AFTER looking at a bright light.  Ugh.

Yeah, my solution is a lot more subtle in most respects, and can be tuned to taste, too.

also somehow I find Stealth against robot feels kinda weird for me.

Eh, it's not the first game to have it, but I see your point.
: Re: Stealth! The 26th! Performance! Demo 7! Oh my.
: Draco18s July 20, 2016, 12:23:44 PM
also somehow I find Stealth against robot feels kinda weird for me.

I've been working on a stealth against robots thing myself.
Well, technically they're VR autonomous agents, but that's basically the same thing, just less hardware.

My game's more of a "hacking" game, in that you're an intruder to the system trying to reach some objective and you're avoiding the various intrusion countermeasures the system is running.  But essentially it's still robots.

Point is: it can work.  Just because it's not alive doesn't mean it can't be a difficult opponent (along any given axis you wish to measure on).
: Re: Stealth! The 26th! Performance! Demo 7! Oh my.
: Timerlane July 20, 2016, 02:49:10 PM
I guess it depends, plot/lorewise; are the robots 'free' to shoot anything that moves(except each other), or do they need to positively identify who/what their target is before engaging?

Maybe some leftover safety protocols in their systems from when they were still 'working' for human factions?
: Re: Stealth! The 26th! Performance! Demo 7! Oh my.
: Draco18s July 20, 2016, 06:44:46 PM
I guess it depends, plot/lorewise; are the robots 'free' to shoot anything that moves(except each other), or do they need to positively identify who/what their target is before engaging?

Maybe some leftover safety protocols in their systems from when they were still 'working' for human factions?

Not sure about X's game, but in mine: they do have to positively identify intruders before engaging.  Which means if a 'bot is particularly "dumb," you can just walk right in front of it (you're presumed to have some kind of disguise on/spoofed data/whatever you want to call the SEP field).  "Dumb" can be various things, too.  E.g. if you're running around invisible/camouflaged, then it can't see you against the background.  Or maybe you're spoofing your credentials ("Why yes, I work here") and it fails to identify the forgery.  And then different bots would have different stats that would be high, leading to different strategies for slipping past.
: Re: Stealth! The 26th! Performance! Demo 7! Oh my.
: TheVampire100 July 20, 2016, 07:43:24 PM
I don't see a problem with stealth on robots. "Sir you are being hunted" is a very popular stealth robot game.
: Re: Stealth! The 26th! Performance! Demo 7! Oh my.
: Timerlane July 24, 2016, 09:58:18 PM
Just a heads-up: It's been bumped to the 2829th (http://store.steampowered.com/app/471770).

There was also a blog post (http://steamcommunity.com/games/471770/announcements/detail/844807119743361503) with some new development info, that only seems to be up on the Steam page.
: Re: Stealth! The 26th! Performance! Demo 7! Oh my.
: x4000 July 25, 2016, 07:01:10 AM
Yep, sorry for the lack of updates over here. There are a ton of cool things to show you very soon, but we're polishing away and really trying to make things shine, as well as all working overtime. Tough balancing act!