TehSplatt

This week we ran into some road blocks with the geometry that caps the open ends of items, it wasn’t doing it’s job as well as we originally hoped and the next best solution involves a bit of back tracking so while a good solution is in the works I moved on to a set of matching pants for the vest, they are still in the early stages but are looking decent at this point. A lot of different materials have been added to break up the the monotony that would occur in game had they just been a basic set of pants with a camo pattern on them. Adding in lots of different materials takes full advantage of our PBR set up and adds contrast to materials with dull specular reflections like fabric, this needs to be done due to the fact we can’t fully represent fabric with something like a knitted style pattern in the normal map as this would become far too noisy visually.

I also made a small start on some of the non-equippable items, due to these items being world items as well they need to make sense rolling around on the ground. They are also have a very low triangle count and will need to be very easily readable at small sizes, which will definitely create interesting challenges for some of the items that need to be done. From left to right: Tree Branch, Ingot, Magnet, Seeds.

Cow_Trix

Hey folks. This week I’ve been implementing multi slot items, which is coming along nicely. You might have seen multi-slot items in other games like Diablo. For us, they serve a two main purposes. They create a configurable cost of storage – similar to mechanism like encumbrance and item weight – which gives us an interesting design tool to play with. They also let us show off the new icon rendering a bit more and gives cool items like gear and weapons way more space to show themselves off in the inventory.

The extensions has been pretty simple, but there have been some interesting gotchas I’ve run into which I’m working on solution to. An item can now have a size, which is a whole number between 1 and whatever – although it will probably be an absolute maximum of 3 in practice. For instance, I’ve made the AR15 have a 3×1 icon. When in your hotbar, however, it’s smart enough to go back to a 1×1 icon.

I also added an item movement visualisation, that shows where you’re telling the game to put an item while you’re dragging it. This made it a lot easier to figure out what was going on, especially when you had started dragging the item from like the bottom right cell and it was offset.

I’m still figuring a few things out with design, and finding all the places in our code where we’ve assumed that items are handled a certain way. For instance, if you drop a multi-slot item over a bunch of smaller items, you would probably expect the one item to swap places with the many, but only if there’s room. Check out a cool gif of playing with the new inventory stuff below!

Mils

I had some holidays last week, so only worked a couple of days, but I managed to get an item finished and one halfway there. First up I made another Magazine for the AR15. This one is the cast plastic type that varies from the other folded sheet metal variety. Came out very nice.

Next up I got the Red Dot sight’s normals baked, and it came out right the first time. Now to add some normal details also known as greebles. I’ll add the detail work like screws, logo work, dents, scratches and other details. This will get finished tomorrow hopefully and then I’ll get onto the other Silencer.

Tom

Once again I’ve been working on improving our mesh baking/combining system by offloading its work onto background threads so it doesn’t block the main Unity process.

Unfortunately I’m a bit behind where I want to be again but making progress all the same. I’m now at the stage where I’ve got all our assets transferred over into the new format and all the in game systems have been switched over to the threaded baking although some bugs remain in the icon rendering system causing it to fall back to the default crate. The data is structured to support LODs but I still have to extend the priority system from vehicles to players, creatures and world items that choses the detail level based on how relevant they are (this can be more than just a distance based calculation, players aiming at you should have a higher priority just like occupied vehicles are higher priority). The other major job left in this system changeover is updating our model viewer. CowTrix has been doing some great work here while working on the item previews allowing you to load any mod’s asset bundle and preview any mesh attachment on any compatible skeleton. Converting over to the model viewer over to the new format has been pretty pain free so far, I’ve got a bug about custom colors not showing properly that I need to resolve as well as a bug with resolving dependencies across mods to find compatible skeletons and then it should all be functional. To finish the model viewer I’ll need to create some lighting snapshots from the live game so the model viewer will match the live game as closely as we can get.

Spencer

Is on Holidays this week, he will be back in action with more news for the next Dev Blog.