Wasteland Wasteland 2 moving from Unity 4 to Unity 5, PBR, better modding tools, balancing

[Perkel]

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inxile/wasteland-2/posts/1149061

Howdy Rangers,

It’s still early in the New Year and we’re coming out of the gates hot!

We recently released the sixth major patch for Wasteland 2, which added Steam achievements for Mac and Linux, cleaned up some issues that were sitting on our lists, and included another pass on text and localization to make sure even the finest details are polished as best they can be. You can read the full patch notes here.

Part of the newfound freedom we’ve gained from being an exclusively crowdfunded company is that it allows us to offer a high level of post-release support. While this is normal practice for an active multiplayer game, we believe that the ongoing improvements to the single player experience in Wasteland 2 are worth the time and money. The game truly continues to be a passion project for the team here at inXile.

And we’re not done yet…

If you've been keeping a close eye on things, you might have heard tell that we're looking at doing some more balancing and improvements of Wasteland 2 in the future. We have expanded our original plan and decided that this is going to be a part of something much larger for all our fans.

In pursuit of this goal, one task we're working on right now is migrating the Wasteland 2 codebase from the Unity 4.5 engine to Unity 5, which will enable some new possibilities for us. A major benefit of moving to Unity 5 is that 5 will include many of the tools from Unity 4.x Pro. We relied on many of these tools during our development (like creating and building navigation meshes), and they will be available to modders without having to pay thousands of dollars for a Pro Unity license. There is no doubt that this migration will allow us to release better tools for modding to our community in the future.

So what’s the “something bigger” that I teased earlier? Let’s just say that the Orange County lifestyle might be getting to us as the game will be receiving a facelift. Unity 5 offers physically based shading, which is already starting to look amazing in the scenes we’ve touched up.

As well as visual improvements, we have quite a few quirky tricks up our sleeves. The character system is getting perked up and will include some new elements to modify gameplay. Of course, more details will be released in the future so stay tuned!

Basically they will move from ugly looking renderer to hot new and shiny PBR one + modding tools + they will do somethign with character generator + balancing.
Good stuff.

edit:

wasteland "to" fuck mistake.
And wasteland 2

 

[Athelas]

Basically they will move from ugly looking renderer to hot new and shiny PBR one

Graphicswhore detected.

Also, this has already been made a news post.

 

[Zeronet]

Basically they will move from ugly looking renderer to hot new and shiny PBR one

Graphicswhore detected.

Also, this has already been made a news post.

Does prefering Fallout's graphics to Wasteland 2's made me a graphics whore, or just somebody who likes good art direction and style?

 

[tuluse]

I'm trying to understand what Pabst Blue Ribbon has to do with WL2.

 

[I'm Big Into Anal]

PERKS

 

[taxalot]

And I just started playing the game.

Oh well, I guess it'll be worth a replay if they make some good enough mods. IF.

 

[Bester]

from ugly looking renderer to hot new and shiny PBR one

Unity's PBR is still ugly looking, cause it's Unity... At first inXile will probably make two materials - metal and not metal, and find some good gloss and speck values for those, then assign them to everything in game. Maybe later they'll make a few other materials. Anyway, it won't be anything revolutionary.

modding tools

Interestingly enough, UE4 became free yesterday. Unity will have to react, one way would be to make Unity free as well. If they make it free, Fargo will have spent half a year making modding tools that wouldn't be needed anymore. I asked him to comment on this on twitter, but he hasn't written anything since, probably trying to find his jaw somewhere under the table right now.

 

[Gord]

Personally I think the biggest issues Wasteland 2 had in terms of graphics*, didn't stem from the engine they used but from the art direction and assets.
The switch to Unity 5 might give them the possibility to include some fancy effects and stuff, but I doubt it will change much about the looks of WL2 (I'll still gladly take it).


* Not that I think it looks bad, it's just not great, either

 

[Blackguard]

Interestingly enough, UE4 became free yesterday.

It's hardly free when they demand 5% of your profits now. For small game developers and pure hobbyists it will obviously be a nice change, but for others it will actually be more expensive to use UE now.

 

[Bester]

Interestingly enough, UE4 became free yesterday.

It's hardly free when they demand 5% of your profits now. For small game developers and pure hobbyists it will obviously be a nice change, but for others it will actually be more expensive to use UE now.

It's actually 5% of your gross revenue, which is much more than just 5% of your profits.

 

[Bester]

Alright, Unity responded by making itself free as well, most of its features anyway.

The only things that are still only in the Pro is the dark skin, the profiler and the splash screen.

So... Yeah...

 

[AngryKobold]

Basically they will move from ugly looking renderer to hot new and shiny PBR one

The game looks bad. Ugly. Awful. And the reason is NOT an ugly looking renderer. It's ugly looking asset base. No renderer upgrade will help at this field. Turd may be polished (mythbusters succesfully proved it in laboratory), yet it still remains a turd.

But it's all merely nitpicking, considering the worst downside of graphics in W2: it's unpractical.

 

[tuluse]

One thing i have to say about this game - TOO MUCH TEXT. Yes, you read it right. It's nice to have a lot of reading material, when the plot is thrilling and writing top notch like Torment, Bloodlines or Deus Ex, but here in WL2 most of it is wiki like blurbs much like in Morrowind, but instead of Morrowind, where NPC would have copy pasted articles under the same keyword, which makes it easy to skip already known info, here we have a huge amount of redundantly similar texts about the same thing. Good example all the Titan wally, where everyone has to say something about ''tribute'', ''Titan'', ''mad monks'' etc. It annoying to wade through all that shit just not to miss some valuable hint in the heap of rubbish.

You're right. Much of the dialog is too verbose for what it's communicating.

 

[Gnidrologist]

edit:
Damn, why did i post this here instead of general opinion thread? Wasn't even drunk yesterday...

 

[prodigydancer]

The game looks bad. Ugly. Awful.

Grittiness fits the post-apocalyptic setting. And if you think WL2 looks awful, you've never seen awful.

But it's all merely nitpicking, considering the worst downside of graphics in W2: it's unpractical.

For unpractical see D:OS. Larian's take on eye candy in a cartoony graphics game - the oversaturated color palette - nearly makes your eyes bleed. In WL2 graphics doesn't annoy me and doesn't get in the way. That's practical in my book.

 

[Jackalope]

There's hardly any art direction in what I've seen. If I recall correctly they had 3D art contests, so they'd skip on making some of the ingame assets. That's not how you make exciting game art.
The prettiest thing in this game are the character portraits I think, everything else looks pretty generic and forgettable. I'm saying this based mostly on screenshots and youtube videos, so I might be completely wrong.

I doubt some new shaders and lights are going to magically mask the mediocre look of this game's art and it's lack of direction.

 

[Bester]

There's hardly any art direction in what I've seen. If I recall correctly they had 3D art contests, so they'd skip on making some of the ingame assets. That's not how you make exciting game art.
The prettiest thing in this game are the character portraits I think, everything else looks pretty generic and forgettable. I'm saying this based mostly on screenshots and youtube videos, so I might be completely wrong.

I doubt some new shaders and lights are going to magically mask the mediocre look of this game's art and it's lack of direction.

Wasn't it an experiment? I think they ended up using like 10 to 16 assets made by fans at most. An experiment that didn't exactly yield awesome results, but was interesting to undertake at least once. Dota2 uses fan produced assets all the time, so the idea is valid in itself, but the game's audience has to be at millions to produce a fair amount of quality work, as it turns out.

I wouldn't say there's an apparent lack of art direction though. Played it for 50 hours, nothing stood out. I do dislike the whole post-apocalyptic jungle idea though, to me post-apocalypse is always a desert. But that's not how W1 was as far as I understand, hence this art direction...

 

[Athelas]

Wasn't it an experiment? I think they ended up using like 10 to 16 assets made by fans at most. An experiment that didn't exactly yield awesome results, but was interesting to undertake at least once.

Was an experiment really needed to find that out? A quick glance at a site like DeviantArt should alert you to the perils of community-made artwork.

Dota2 (...) quality (art) work

Oh, never mind.

I wouldn't say there's an apparent lack of art direction though. Played it for 50 hours, nothing stood out.

These two sentences appear to contradict each other.

 

[Cadmus]

There's hardly any art direction in what I've seen. If I recall correctly they had 3D art contests, so they'd skip on making some of the ingame assets. That's not how you make exciting game art.
The prettiest thing in this game are the character portraits I think, everything else looks pretty generic and forgettable. I'm saying this based mostly on screenshots and youtube videos, so I might be completely wrong.

I doubt some new shaders and lights are going to magically mask the mediocre look of this game's art and it's lack of direction.

It's exactly like that.
The game looks like shit, like really bad and it's all caused by the lack of art direction. New effects and Unity 5 won't change that, imo.

 

[sea]

For the GOTY Edition we are redoing large portions of our environment art and character models, in addition to stuff like lighting and shaders. This means things like new trees and foliage, new environment textures (almost everything has been redrawn or up-rezzed), and so on. While we are not redoing the graphics entirely from scratch, there are huge differences when you look side-by-side.

A lot of this is in part due to Unity 5, which is capable of handling much, much higher-res assets. Our texture size has doubled in some scenes, for instance, yet in some of our internal test cases the game is actually running more smoothly and using less memory than Unity 4.

You can see some of these changes (in a still early state) at the PlayStation Blog PS4 announcement post.

 

[prodigydancer]

I seriously think that WL2 has perfect art direction and I found the visuals aesthetically pleasing. Hopefully the transition to Unity 5 won't ruin it. Sometimes more eye candy != better overall impression.

 

[Gord]

Any ETA on the GOTY edition for PC?
Will it be free for owners of W2?

 

[Curious_Tongue]

Will it be free for owners of W2?

They've given away too many free copies of WL2 as it is.

 

[Kem0sabe]

It's still unity, but now with higher poly models and higher resolution textures and new graphical effects... I bet performance will be just as bad if not worse than it is now.

 

[Gord]

They've given away too many free copies of WL2 as it is.

I'm talking about a patch for people that already own WL2 on PC. Offering it for free in that case seems like the sensible thing to do.
Otherwise no reason to buy WL2 anymore in the next couple of months, imho.