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Disco Elysium Pre-Release Thread [GO TO NEW THREAD]
- Thread starter Infinitron
- Start date
- Joined
- Nov 17, 2015
- Messages
- 5,094
It's Codex way of embracing diversity.
Fenix
Arcane
Lol I just noticed my comment was moved without notification.
Nice thing bros.
Nice thing bros.
Space Insect
Arcane
It's just a prank, bro.
Fenix
Arcane
There was a nice text. Don't understand why it was considered unacceptable. Oh well...
gaussgunner
Arcane
Fenix
Arcane
I just talked about estimated future and various -philias in it. Harmless thing I was sure.
Prime Junta
Guest
Off-topic though. Just like this discussion about the discussion.
Lhynn
Arcane
- Joined
- Aug 28, 2013
- Messages
- 9,852
I never implied such a thing.
vonAchdorf
Arcane
- Joined
- Sep 20, 2014
- Messages
- 13,465
Cool interview and great song - I hope the soundtrack will have a similar mood & feel.
Aw, man, I can, like, copy and paste the dev blog´s posts straight to the forums. Sweet! And you see the author´s preferred avatar and everything. Man! 21st century rocks. This week´s first post just rolled off the shelf:
"Texturing in-game assets"
Mikk Metsniit
Environment Artist
Since we’re making an isometric game there’s always a constant struggle with readability of shapes and detail. Things get cluttered upon things upon things upon things and because isometric perspective lacks “lens depth” (the picture doesn’t get distorted) it’s bound to get chaotic. Thus we have to make sure that every model, silhouette, and texture of every in-game background and asset is clearly and immediately recognizable to the player.
There’s also the added bonus of in-game camera at play, which basically means that all of the detail has to “work” at all levels of zoom ie. a radio and it’s texture has to look the same in the close ups and long shots. Woo!
Now with the “Why?” out of the way let’s talk about the “How?”. Our game has this painterly or as Robert likes to call it “Paintshading” look to it. All of our backgrounds are modelled and textured in 3d, then rendered, then painted over by Aleksander to give it that handmade feel. In-game assets are real time models used within our game engine, thus the applied texture to the them has to look painterly from the get-go. This in turn means painting directly onto our unwrapped UV layouts while trying to be as artsy as possible about it.
Below you see a Villier Pepperbox, a complex gat for a complex man. Just to be clear – the model of the gun is the same throughout all three of the variations.
The first iteration had me painting a somewhat realistic version of the textures – the wood looks like wood, the metal looks like metal, and there’s a decent amount of added detail. As soon as I dropped it into the engine the problem became obvious – it didn’t fit with the visual style of our game. To add insult to injury, since the gun is such a small asset, it basically looked like a bunch overly detailed of noise in the grip of our main character.
The second iteration is a more stylized version of the previous – now the wood and metal feel like wood, instead of just looking like it. The texture is a lot more painterly and I also introduced a bold dab of green into the hand painted mix. Stylistically it wasn’t as much of an eye-sore in-game, but there were still some issues of readability.
The third iteration is a blend of both. Some of the details are exaggerated (ie. the finger rest and the grill) while others were removed entirely. Aleksander advised me to emphasize different parts of the gun by adding a stroke along the shorter axis. The firing mechanism and the round-barrel are a nice example of this while the long barrel received a painterly stroke along its longer axis to make it seem longer. I kept the dab of green and smoothed it out with some off-white milky blue to give the barrel a nice sheen.
This is now in-game and visible in one of our screenshots as well.
Mikk out.
"Texturing in-game assets"
Mikk Metsniit
Environment Artist
Since we’re making an isometric game there’s always a constant struggle with readability of shapes and detail. Things get cluttered upon things upon things upon things and because isometric perspective lacks “lens depth” (the picture doesn’t get distorted) it’s bound to get chaotic. Thus we have to make sure that every model, silhouette, and texture of every in-game background and asset is clearly and immediately recognizable to the player.
Aside: Texture Frequencies
Think of a dirty wrinkled face on a smiling old man. Up close it has small specks of dirt which, once you start moving farther, start to meld into the face since the receptors of your eye do not distinguish them any more. At some point in the distance also the wrinkles disappear. In computer graphics we usually get problems at distances on which these kinds of repeating details start to disappear into noisy weird patterns. You might want to look up Nyquist Frequency if you are interested in more theory about this. – Irve
Think of a dirty wrinkled face on a smiling old man. Up close it has small specks of dirt which, once you start moving farther, start to meld into the face since the receptors of your eye do not distinguish them any more. At some point in the distance also the wrinkles disappear. In computer graphics we usually get problems at distances on which these kinds of repeating details start to disappear into noisy weird patterns. You might want to look up Nyquist Frequency if you are interested in more theory about this. – Irve
There’s also the added bonus of in-game camera at play, which basically means that all of the detail has to “work” at all levels of zoom ie. a radio and it’s texture has to look the same in the close ups and long shots. Woo!
Now with the “Why?” out of the way let’s talk about the “How?”. Our game has this painterly or as Robert likes to call it “Paintshading” look to it. All of our backgrounds are modelled and textured in 3d, then rendered, then painted over by Aleksander to give it that handmade feel. In-game assets are real time models used within our game engine, thus the applied texture to the them has to look painterly from the get-go. This in turn means painting directly onto our unwrapped UV layouts while trying to be as artsy as possible about it.
Below you see a Villier Pepperbox, a complex gat for a complex man. Just to be clear – the model of the gun is the same throughout all three of the variations.
The first iteration had me painting a somewhat realistic version of the textures – the wood looks like wood, the metal looks like metal, and there’s a decent amount of added detail. As soon as I dropped it into the engine the problem became obvious – it didn’t fit with the visual style of our game. To add insult to injury, since the gun is such a small asset, it basically looked like a bunch overly detailed of noise in the grip of our main character.
The second iteration is a more stylized version of the previous – now the wood and metal feel like wood, instead of just looking like it. The texture is a lot more painterly and I also introduced a bold dab of green into the hand painted mix. Stylistically it wasn’t as much of an eye-sore in-game, but there were still some issues of readability.
The third iteration is a blend of both. Some of the details are exaggerated (ie. the finger rest and the grill) while others were removed entirely. Aleksander advised me to emphasize different parts of the gun by adding a stroke along the shorter axis. The firing mechanism and the round-barrel are a nice example of this while the long barrel received a painterly stroke along its longer axis to make it seem longer. I kept the dab of green and smoothed it out with some off-white milky blue to give the barrel a nice sheen.
This is now in-game and visible in one of our screenshots as well.
Mikk out.
Last edited:
Fenix
Arcane
The second iteration.
I like it more then third. Dunno how it looks in game, but those "a bold dab of green" on a barrel definitely did something good for my perception, I can discern ribs, while I can't in third.
Lyric Suite
Converting to Islam
- Joined
- Mar 23, 2006
- Messages
- 56,515
Lyric Suite
Converting to Islam
- Joined
- Mar 23, 2006
- Messages
- 56,515
I'm the complete opposite. I don't give a shit about different, i just want good.
Luckily, this game appears to be shaping up rather well, furries or not.
Hai. Again, I´m just a messenger. Enjoy your weekend!
"Hobo and a phonebooth"
Mikk Metsniit
Environment Artist
When our writers are tired of writing the “real game”, they write prank phone calls you can make in the game – because why not.
"Hobo and a phonebooth"
Mikk Metsniit
Environment Artist
When our writers are tired of writing the “real game”, they write prank phone calls you can make in the game – because why not.
Did someone call for a hobo?
This is not just any hobo. He's the everyhobo - we use him in level design for scale. Most maps were originally populated with umphteen hobos
- Joined
- Apr 24, 2015
- Messages
- 19,244
Since this is supposedly a RPG and not an adventure game.
Any info about character creation? What attributes are used? How about skills?
Too lazy (and drunk) to read whole thread.
Any info about character creation? What attributes are used? How about skills?
Too lazy (and drunk) to read whole thread.
It's a really hot Saturday and I can't seem to be bothered to actually look it up myself, but off the top of my head I believe there were like four attributes and a bunch of skills distributed between 'em. Then there's that elusive Inland Empire bit and the Electrochemistry bit. All of 'em combined should get any RPGer's antennae tingling.
Soon [-ish. Next week or the one after that (or the one after that)] there's going to be a post in the blog about attributes and skills.
Sometimes late at night I hear whispering in the walls. That usually means that the writers are on it.
Now I'm heading back into my trusty hammock for the rest of the evening. Cheerio!
That's the plan, alright
i hope it is. 2016 has been really lame so far in term of RPG release, and gaming in general compared to 2015.
best game that's released this year so far is absolutely fallout: resurrection and that's a free, 4 team mod to 17 years old game
best game that's released this year so far is absolutely fallout: resurrection and that's a free, 4 team mod to 17 years old game
This week our animator Kristjan Bobkov wrote about motion capture and how we´re not really using it 
"Using mocap"
by Kristjan
Hi! I am going to briefly talk about how we use motion capture in our development. Now our final playable game will not use motion capture data in-engine at all. Hurray! The reason for this is that it’s not fun to retime mocap and make it loopable if necessary. The animation curves on the mocap skeleton contain a keyframe on every single frame making it a lot less manageable. It is possible to optimize mocap data but the ending result is going to be unpredictable and jittery. So instead we use a custom rig to drive the skeleton, allowing the animator to put in keyposes, control the in-between frames by graph editing and achieve a completely predictable outcome. Also we can’t use mocap because at some point we could decide that we need motion that is really difficult for the mocap-actor to perfectly perform.
Like the title says we somehow actually still use it. Yes, but only as reference. It’s a lot better to see motion from every angle. We also use video as reference and sometimes it’s enough to just look at a coworker or some random people on the street acting stuff out.
When we started working on animation, we got an idea that maybe mocap could be a good way to really quickly get placeholder animations. Unfortunately it was too time consuming and we were not sure if we should invest in proper mocap equipment. The cheapest and fastest way for us was to use two kinects and they did a pretty good job as seen below. :D
"Using mocap"
by Kristjan
Hi! I am going to briefly talk about how we use motion capture in our development. Now our final playable game will not use motion capture data in-engine at all. Hurray! The reason for this is that it’s not fun to retime mocap and make it loopable if necessary. The animation curves on the mocap skeleton contain a keyframe on every single frame making it a lot less manageable. It is possible to optimize mocap data but the ending result is going to be unpredictable and jittery. So instead we use a custom rig to drive the skeleton, allowing the animator to put in keyposes, control the in-between frames by graph editing and achieve a completely predictable outcome. Also we can’t use mocap because at some point we could decide that we need motion that is really difficult for the mocap-actor to perfectly perform.
Like the title says we somehow actually still use it. Yes, but only as reference. It’s a lot better to see motion from every angle. We also use video as reference and sometimes it’s enough to just look at a coworker or some random people on the street acting stuff out.
When we started working on animation, we got an idea that maybe mocap could be a good way to really quickly get placeholder animations. Unfortunately it was too time consuming and we were not sure if we should invest in proper mocap equipment. The cheapest and fastest way for us was to use two kinects and they did a pretty good job as seen below. :D
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