Splintered Core Official Thread - Design Update 8/10/10

[soggie]

How about finishing up your roguelike, eh?

Don't worry, it's about done. Releasing on a friday end of this month.

 

[soggie]

Teaser concept art:

 

[JarlFrank]

IS THAT THE VAULT DWELLER WITH DOGMEAT?

 

[soggie]

IS THAT THE VAULT DWELLER WITH DOGMEAT?

Fuck, you just had to spoil it, didn't you? No, it's the lone wanderer from Fallout 3 with Dogmeat 2.0 *wandering* into south east asia and building a new community from the ashes of the tribals who lived in the trees.

Dogmeat seems to have gained some pounds though.

 

[shihonage]

Actually in this game you control the rusty car on the right, and it barely missed them.

 

[soggie]

Actually in this game you control the rusty car on the right, and it barely missed them.

Who gave you the permission to read my design documents?

 

[JarlFrank]

THIS GAME IS GONNA BE SO AWESOME ITS LIEK ROADWAR 2000 MEETS FALLOUT

Also you can play either a male (blue) or a female (red) car and you have different stats like acceleration, max speed, handling etc. You also can make biofuel from killed enemies.

 

[soggie]

THIS GAME IS GONNA BE SO AWESOME ITS LIEK ROADWAR 2000 MEETS FALLOUT

Also you can play either a male (blue) or a female (red) car and you have different stats like acceleration, max speed, handling etc. You also can make biofuel from killed enemies.

ITZ HEAVEN! SO AWESOME CAN?

It's like Rage meets Fallout, literally. You get about 6.5 million cars (same model, different color) and about 6.5 million weapons too (same model, different color)!

Oh and while the story is linear, you get like 2 million endings! Fuck, this shit will blow Fuckout 3 and New Faggas out of the sperm ocean for good!

 

[Durwyn]

Looks and sounds nice. Update frequently and don't loose your spirit.You have my early stamp of approval

 

[soggie]

Looks and sounds nice. Update frequently and don't loose your spirit.You have my early stamp of approval

Thanks.

Anyway, I've decided to release the concept artwork for the Codex to rage upon. Here it is:

 

[soggie]

Here's an extract from my most recent blog post about the UI design philosophies:

Avernum Turn-off, Lessons Learnt

This is partly an Avernum post, and partly a post on the lessons I learnt from playing the demo. First off, I must say that Jeff Vogel is somewhat of a role model to me. I enjoyed Geneforge, but not enough for me to buy it. I tried Avernum 6, and decided that the setting and story was well worth the money, but the interface leaves much to be desired.

In fact, the only thing holding me back seemed to be the extremely clunky interface.

I’ll explain. Avernum 6 is a primarily mouse-driven game, with keyboard helpers to give you quick access to various UI panels. But this is where it all falls apart, at least from my point of view. First off, item management...

Avernum Turn-off, lessons learnt

 

[Mastermind]

Re: Splintered Core Official Thread - Updated Mechanics 24/9

Those who left the Combine traveled north and eventually settled down in Oasis. They eventually merged with the Lorekeepers whose sole objective in life is to rediscover pre-desertion knowledge, forming a semi-religious order known as the Awakened Order.

y halo thar plagiarism lawsuit

 

[shihonage]

Avernum Turn-off, lessons learnt

I read your blog, and agree. UI doesn't have to be fancy but there's a certain minimum that it has to do, and Vogel's games, somehow, managed to omit a number of axiomic accessibility requirements.

 

[zeitgeist]

I read your blog, and agree. UI doesn't have to be fancy but there's a certain minimum that it has to do, and Vogel's games, somehow, managed to omit a number of axiomic accessibility requirements.

A lot of games seem to be developed in some kind of a strange design vacuum where they don't even consider the UI/usability advances from the past 20+ years.

Example: adventure games where your character can't run or skip to screen exits by doubleclicking the exit, forcing the player to just watch the character slowly walk to an item they know is six screens ahead, pick it up, and then watch them walk six screens back.

It's hard to determine when this is caused by the designers simply not having played enough games themselves, or when it's some kind of a misguided reactionary reflex caused by the "streamlining" (i.e. dumbing down) of gameplay features in modern games, where the designers, and more importantly the players/fanbase, think complexity, obscurity, and difficulty are one and the same.

 

[Jaesun]

Re: Splintered Core Official Thread - Updated Mechanics 24/9

Those who left the Combine traveled north and eventually settled down in Oasis. They eventually merged with the Lorekeepers whose sole objective in life is to rediscover pre-desertion knowledge, forming a semi-religious order known as the Awakened Order.

y halo thar plagiarism lawsuit

Yeah. Are you sure you can use Combine? I knida doubt it, but never really looked into it.

 

[shihonage]

some kind of a misguided reactionary reflex caused by the "streamlining" (i.e. dumbing down) of gameplay features in modern games, where the designers, and more importantly the players/fanbase, think complexity, obscurity, and difficulty are one and the same.

Well said. I am fucking tired of being sold games on the selling point of being "old-school" and "hardcore", which somehow ends up being translated to "menial", "inane", "frustrating".

 

[soggie]

@Mastermind

I'd prefer the term homage if you are referring to the Awakened.

@shihonage, zeitgeist

I think the main issue here is less resources spent on fine tuning the UI. UI work is pretty boring and sometimes can seem unnecessary in the high-level view, and I guess in an environment that's short on resources, bad UI are often overlooked.

@Jaesun

I'm pretty sure there's no way to copyright the term "Combine", since it's a common word.

-----------------------
Two more scheduled posts on combat models:

Splintered Core Ranged Combat

In the past, melee and ranged pretty much operated differently, making it difficult to memorize the details of each without going back to long winded design documents. So we decided to turn it into something more intuitive and easy to understand.

Firstly, we have ditched turn-based combat for tic-based combat. In tic-based combat, a round is defined in a number of tics. Let’s say for now 1 tic = 100 milliseconds. This means that there are 10 tics in a second, and assuming a round is 10 seconds long, you’d have 100 tics per round...

Splintered Core Melee Combat, Striking

For those not familiar with martial art jargons, the term striking arts refer to techniques that have you on your feet, at a comfortable distance, using your elbow, forehead, fists, knees, legs, etc to land hits on your opponent. The goal is to cause enough damage through striking impact.

Taking a cue from our unified combat model discussed earlier, we have 5 major categories of actions: Maneuver Modes, Stances, Weapon Positions, Attack Modes, and Attack Stances. The same applies to striking too...

 

[Mastermind]

Re: Splintered Core Official Thread - Updated Mechanics 24/9

Those who left the Combine traveled north and eventually settled down in Oasis. They eventually merged with the Lorekeepers whose sole objective in life is to rediscover pre-desertion knowledge, forming a semi-religious order known as the Awakened Order.

y halo thar plagiarism lawsuit

Yeah. Are you sure you can use Combine? I knida doubt it, but never really looked into it.

I was referring to the BoS under another name. Blizzard has the Kel-Morian Combine in the Starcraft Universe and there's been no clash between them and valve AFAIK.

 

[soggie]

Re: Splintered Core Official Thread - Updated Mechanics 24/9

Those who left the Combine traveled north and eventually settled down in Oasis. They eventually merged with the Lorekeepers whose sole objective in life is to rediscover pre-desertion knowledge, forming a semi-religious order known as the Awakened Order.

y halo thar plagiarism lawsuit

Yeah. Are you sure you can use Combine? I knida doubt it, but never really looked into it.

I was referring to the BoS under another name. Blizzard has the Kel-Morian Combine in the Starcraft Universe and there's been no clash between them and valve AFAIK.

Well think about it. It IS kind of preposterous to think that after an apocalyptic event nobody would realize that somebody ought to stockpile those scientific journal just in case it'll be needed in the future. BoS, Lorekeepers, Loremasters (AoD), the villain in Book of Eli's, etc, somebody ought to realize that after such an event information would be one of the more valuable commodities, just like that somebody who decide that stockpiling plant seeds and canned food would be good when you're planning to survive in a resource-strapped world.

Also, while the premise sounds the same, BoS and the Awakened Order are fundamentally different in the sense that the former are a bunch of anal technologists who believe no other than them are fit to wield high tech toys. The Order on the other hand, are more like Bene Gesserits of the Dune universe, who work behind the scenes with a goal to manipulate all factions into true unity. Hoarding of knowledge and technology is only a method to achieve political power.

I'm pretty sure you are not familiar with my setting, so I'm going to add in more details. There are 3 major factions in the lands: the Saberions, the Combine and the Awakened. All 3 believe themselves to be doing humanity a favor by actively uniting what's left of mankind, but each have their own idea of how to achieve this.

The Combine believes in brute force and totalitarian control. This is not absurd considering that the lands is resource strapped at best and a little more control over the distribution of resources would do everybody good, at least until they manage to grow to a more self-sustainable stage.

The Saberions believe in total freedom, which is just another word for complete anarchy. They believe that humanity's survival hinges on expansion, and in order to achieve that people need to resist all forms of control (which they believe to be enlightening).

The Awakened on the other hand believes in spiritual awakening. They have a pretty narrow view of what's right and wrong morally, and believe that everybody would benefit from following their morality structure. If humanity were to survive, they would have to "enlighten" the race itself to share resources rather than kill each other for it.

 

[soggie]

Latest post - Visual mockups

I just received some textures and props from my contract artist, and decided to do some screen mockups in Photoshop to figure out the exact settings for everything. Right now, since per-pixel lighting and shadows are but “nice-to-have” features, I’ve decided to use a colored overlay to show different times of the day.

 

[soggie]

Latest update: Wasted a whole day trying to shoehorn Irrlicht into drawing something that I want, and ended up with this:

Using this scene construction method:

Compared to my photoshop mockup:

I can safely say it's a long way off. It's pretty confusing to figure out how to do multitexturing without shaders with Irrlicht, let alone texture splatting. After fiddling for a bit, I finally decided that despite Ogre3D's bulk and somewhat questionable love for singletons, it is still my best bet. Heck, the materials script alone makes it worthwhile, and the scene manager seems much easier to extend than Irrlicht's.

Well, I'm back to Ogre now, hoping that this would be a correct decision.

EDIT:

New plan involves doing this:

Let me explain. First the camera is pointed down the Z-axis, and locked to the X and Y-axis. After that, an orthographic projection is used, with a orthographic-like projection matrix on standby in case I want to do parallax effects in the future.

The ground tiles are rendered in conventional 2d isometric method: start from the top left tile (which should be the north edge of the diamond-shaped map), and renders down the southwest vector (as logical Y-axis).

After that, 3D characters and wall/object sprites in 2D quads are rendered onto a different render target, with a custom depth sorting algorithm using a custom scene tree with explicit z-order variables for all entities. The important factor here is to use a strategy pattern to make it easy to swap different draw order strategies.

Assuming that this actually works, the next step would be to use a full-screen pixel shader to simulate day and night cycles. Then a real-time editable alpha mask would be included in the built-in editor to enable real-time editing of the ground tile's texture splatting, which would then be compiled into a release version for the artists to refine the textures and map objects.

All these would probably happen in the course of a week or so, according to my ever optimistic schedules.

 

[shihonage]

Unfortunately for me, I cannot use shaders to simulate anything. Microsoft screwed the pooch on the d3dsprite interface, making it conflict with shaders, and results are horrendous.

I had the framework ready and everything, too. But can't just go and rewrite my base rendering routines to avoid using d3dsprite interface altogether. Not at this stage.

So, my day-night cycles will involve good-old "blitting while changing color" method. The upside, I guess, is that I won't have to worry how to use fullscreen shaders to draw part of outdoor area you can see from indoors or vice versa, at NIGHT.

The downside... I really wanted to have gritty screen post-processing like in Left 4 Dead.

 

[soggie]

Hmm, you're using directX? Is it possible to access low level hardware? I'm guessing day/night cycle can be achieved by doing pixel work yourself, although that'd be crazy expensive.

Can the sprites be alpha blended? Not the all-or-nothing kind of blending but using a true alpha channel?

 

[shihonage]

Yeah like I said, I can change color (i.e. lowering R G B at the same rate lowers brightness as well)...(and alpha, though alpha is not relevant to day-night cycle.

 

[soggie]

So this means you can do pixel math? If it is not that expensive you probably can achieve the effect of the day/night shader with just a simple math function. Shift the hue, reduce saturation and brightness, and then apply it to all pixels on the screen.