Ain’t No Party Like a Texture Party – Friday, September 13th, 2019

Folks,

Max here, bringing you this week’s update from the intrepid team at CSE! It was a really intense week for progress: Andrew called it “the best of weeks, and the worst of weeks”, because we landed so many big things, but also had to deal with the complex challenges that doing so brings with it! We’re really looking forward to ironing some of those things out and getting to see the fruits of all those labors next week. Bring it on!

We’ve got a bunch of great items in this week’s Top Tenish list, the collation of the highlights from the week’s progress, where you can check out all those big pieces coming together. Progress, progress, progress!

More details on all these items often emerge from our End-of-Week Wrap-Up streams, which this week featured Andrew and Tim! If you missed that rollicking good time and all the interesting additional information, you can catch that HERE.

No test this weekend, but we are definitely working toward next week. Keep an eye on our tentative testing schedule for more info on upcoming tests.

Let’s move to the week’s highlights below!

Top Tenish:

WIP – Tech – Support classes: This week, Anthony thought some music would do the world good, and reinvigorated the Minstrel class. It is mostly ready to go mechanically, and will be undergoing internal testing before it is ready for primetime. Also, the Dark Fool and the Skald are also in progress but a bit farther out. WIP – Tech – Textures: This week, Wylie landed code that lets us easily define new layouts for generated textures. Generated textures allow us to texture map models that are made up of several pieces. For instance, when you equip a new helmet, the helmet’s texture will be baked into the special area of a master texture sheet that is dedicated to helmets. By expanding this system to accept different layouts, we can use piecemeal model generation on things other than player characters, like weapons and creatures. Tech – Database hardware upgrades: We’ve been dealing with some database errors and lag happening behind the scenes recently. It turns out that some of our oldest hardware just wasn’t able to keep up with CSE & CU’s growth anymore. So, we’ve upgraded and deployed new hardware for several database members. Tech – Textures: George fixed a texture issue that caused artifacts, black spots and Missing or blown out reflections, on some materials. After the change Bull rebuilt all the textures in the game over the course of two days to take advantage of this. WIP – Tech – SFX: dB is working on a generic ability interrupt SFX sound. Once hooked up, this sound will be played when something interrupts one of your abilities. Tech – Unified Build Scripts: We had a couple different scripts that were used to turn code into clients, editors, and servers. Each of the scripts did similar, but very slightly different, things. This manner of organization has been a thorn in our side, because any time we add a new server, or upgrade visual studio, or change the build process in any way, we had to do it to all the scripts. We’ve unified them all into a single script, so that we can change them once and be done. Tech – Scenario Scripting: Spidey delivered new objective scripting tech for enabling objectives on a scenario and additional improvements for the scenario dev UI for debugging and tracking scripts and objectives in the scenario. This will allow designers to script enabling/disabling of objectives that are placed in the world for a scenario. WIP – UI – Patcher: AJ spent some time this week getting the support classes hooked up to the patcher. Once the classes have passed internal testing, they should be available there. WIP – Tools – Editor: Rob has added the missing transform mode to the transform gizmo in the editor. He also started to investigate what it would take to land terrain edit multiselect. This is something we would like to have in the editor to make world building easier. It would allow designers to edit multiple sections of terrain at the same time. This will make the overall terrain editing experience smoother. Tech – Prediction: Matt has landed the ability threading fix we mentioned in last week’s update. This issue was causing abilities to randomly fail. That should no longer happen. Tech – Crash Fix: Matt has also fixed a crash that was plaguing NuadaPrep, which was actually a client thread-safety problem. Tech – .Net Core: Continuing our server Linuxification, Colin did a lot of testing and bug fixing around the .NET core servers this week. He has gotten the servers to build and run on the cloud. WIP – Art – Support Items: Sandra is working on concept items for the support classes. She has created the bone reed pipes for the Dark Fool, frost axes for the Skald, and harpolyres for the Minstrel. WIP – Art – Mage Staves: This week we created some mage staves. We’ll add these weapons into the game later, when we finalize the crafting model for weapons and armor. Art – Pauldrons: We have finished a set of Viking pauldrons for medium armor wearers. These will also be added to the game later.