Thursday, January 18, 2018

Progress Since Last Time...

Added working pulse laser turrets, muzzle flashes, thrusters with engine trails, explosions, and several other effects (some ported from LTC++, some brand-new)

Ported & improved AI architecture from LTC++; implemented escort, formation flying, dogfighting, and a few other AI actions

Added AI squad management & hierarchical formation (WIP -- currently the squad disbands into individual units if the leader is destroyed, although this was actually a neat feature for the demo)

Added ownership and asset tracking; all relevant objects now belong to an ownership hierarchy (in the demo, assets are owned by either the human player or an AI player who is controlling the actions of enemy squads)

Added thruster overloading ('boosting'); added AI ability to use boost (still need to generalize to all ship hardpoints to have generic 'hardpoint overclocking')

Added energy grid / capacitor component for 'real' energy mechanics (like in LTP); note that we had infinite energy enabled in the demo for fun (hence why the left capacitor bar never depletes when firing or boosting)

Added basic manufacturing component; the home base station in the demo is actually capable of manufacturing ships using a build queue and pseudo-blueprints, although we ended up not using this functionality due to reasons given by Lindsey in the recap (complex game mechanics ended up being less approachable for a play-for-a-few-minutes demo)

Added basic HUD with working soft and hard target locking, forward reticles ('lead indicators'), capacitor and health meters, and optional auto-targetting (turned off for most of the demo)

Added disposition tracking to allow dynamic inter-person / inter-faction relations (the enemies in the demo are shown as enemies not because they are in any special 'enemy' list, but because the human player and the AI player controlling them are set to have maximally-hostile standing with one other)

Enabled & extended a proof-of-concept paint shader on metal assets to allow per-ship/per-station coloring

Added dust clouds (still need work to be more subtle at high velocities -- a problem numerous people pointed out in LTC++ ); improved dust flecks to be more subtle

); improved dust flecks to be more subtle Added several post-processing effects for use with alternative view modes like the ship editor / slow-time action camera

Added velocity-dependent radial blur (currently a bit too aggressive?)

Major optimizations to rendering architecture, especially with respect to supersampling -- we ran the demo at 100+ FPS with 2x supersampling on my laptop

Made everything work on gamepads + improved engine-level support for joysticks, gamepads, HOTAS, etc.

Partially-implemented an active deflector shield (for fun) that reflects energy weapons -- didn't finish in time for PAX, but may keep the idea of an 'active' shield mechanic on top of passive shields

Improved chase camera dynamics for more 'classic Freelancer' feeling (still perfecting it, but we're definitely getting somewhere!)

Takeaways from PAX

Going Forward

Greets everyone and Happy New Years / Merry Christmas (a bit late)!I had, as usual, intended to post before now, but the time since my last log has been absolutely jam-packed with pumping out work for our PAX Demo. Now that it's over, I'm excited to come back and add my own thoughts on how it went, as well as update you all on the progress that's been made leading up the the release.Of course, I recommend reading the official PAX recap posted by Lindsey earlier today for a general overview of the event.It's going to be difficult for me to remember everything. It's rather scary how quickly we're able to implement vast swaths of functionality now that we're sitting pretty with respect to our supporting engine & lower-level systems! You'll have to excuse the wall-of-bullet points and the scatterbrained parenthetical thoughts accompanying them.Indeed, quite a lot of quality functionality came about thanks to our PAX sprint! Note, in particular, how this list, in contrast to so many of my recent lists, is very much brimming with gameplay and immediately-related-to-gameplay featuresNaturally there was a lot to be gleaned from publicly demoing a slice of the game for the first time since last year, but I think, if I had to put my finger on something concrete (other than just 'people are really going to enjoy this labor of love'), it would be the comfort with which I walked away from the experience. Comfort that the tireless, seemingly-never-ending Royal Crusade Against the Excessive Usage of Milliseconds (aka 'performance optimization') has genuinely paid off. Perhaps even more broadly, comfort that the unspeakable hours that have been put into solving FPLT ever since the fall of LTC++ have truly been worth the pain that they all-to-frequently caused.If I were to boot up the old LTC++ and try to push it to do what our current setup did at the PAX, it would have been a spectacular display of tears and molten lava -- the former pouring from me, the latter pouring from my laptop. We are easily pushing 10x the amount of activity with extremely high, consistent framerate. We can push 100x the activity almost as easily, although there are a few choice places to which I must make small tweaks before 1000+ ship battles will be as buttery-smooth as the 100+ battles are currently. All the while, we're not only putting more entities in the world, but the amount of dynamism is starkly superior to LTC++. That demo is running full collision on all entities -- NPC ships collide with one another and with every asteroid in the scene; ramming small asteroids sends them flying off into the abyss; slowly pushing a large asteroid is even feasible with a large enough fleet. The AI is driving thousands of turrets accross hundreds of ships, each computing viable firing solutions. Friendly-fire is turned off for the demo, but projectiles still collide with everything in the scene. The collision is still slightly coarse (you will 'bounce' off of asteroids slightly sooner than expected), but this will be remedied with the help of Adam's InsaneBSPs. All those little details add up quickly into an experience that feels genuine, deep, and rich with opportunity.All-in-all, what we have going on is exactly what LT promised to provide, and what I've thrashed my neurons for so many years to make possible:. In the demo, that activity is a bit boring, what with the AI only thinking about shooting things. But imagine the same scale of activity applied to a diversity of gameplay mechanics -- trading, exploring, mining, patrolling, constructing, researching, so on and so forth -- and you are left with the vision of a vibrant, living universe that captured the enthusiasm of so many (including myself) at the outset of LT. A single player experience in which you are far from aloneWorking on the demo reinvigorated me in so many ways. Seeing even the simplest of gameplay mechanics come together to create moments of fun; having new gameplay ideas that required only an hour or two to bring to life; falling back in love with writing AI...it was all very therapeuticThe icing on the cake, of course, was player response. As mentioned by Lindsey in the PAX recap, we had numerous players express their amazement at the sheer amount of 'stuff' going on (especially those who spawned hundreds/thousands of AI escorts, expecting a crash but instead finding only a very gradual FPS degradation). We received plenty of compliments about the beautiful visual style, the smooth and responsive feeling of it all, the joy of being able to issue orders to a fleet, the quality of the procedural assets (Lindsey's ship generator amazed more than a few people, especially once she had made clear that the ships were procedural down to the very vertex, not simply lego-style recombinations of prefab assets). Even with such a small taste of the full Limit Theory experience, people responded really positively. Yet again, it brings me comfort and excitement -- for if just a tiny morsel of the cake is enjoyable, surely the full experience that awaits you all at launch will satisfyThe sprint to PAX functionality gave us a chance to see how our various systems and architectures performed not just with respect to runtime, but with respect to developer time -- the second half of FPLT is, after all, making this raw engine power easy to harness and sculpt into something that matters. For the most part, I'd say we succeeded there as well. However, as was to be expected, pushing content into the demo in such a short time gave us critical insights into where things are too complex or less-than-intuitive.Adam and I are going to spend the rest of the month doing a sort of PAX-postmortem, taking some time while we have it to deal with those hitches that affected our PAX demo development efficiency (and will, by extension, impact our dev efficiency going forward toward release.)On my side, perhaps the biggest challenge remaining is moving our PAX demo into mod format. As you may recall from my last log, the mod format was well-underway at the time. As it stands today, it's more-or-less complete, but yet again, moving over representative gameplay snippets like some of those developed for the demo will reveal the true efficacy of a system that looks fantastic on paper.I'm really looking forward to the next few weeks, as I think it's going to continue to be a lot of fun writing new gameplay, listening closely to see what the code is telling us about our architecture, and iterating until we're doing bigger and bigger things with less and less effort. The PAX demo marked the true start of the ramp-up into gameplay code. The rest of the month will be an outward spiral of ramp-up and ramping-up the ramp-up (you know, d2G/dt2, where G(t) is gameplay).Thanks for listeningI put together a small album of some of the screenshots I took during PAX (and a few after). Mostly of people doing absurd things :V Please note that the radial blur & horizontal screen effects were just a little PAX polish for making the camera modes look distinct. LT does not have the outer portion of the screen blurred out most of the time