Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games
  • Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.

    "This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.

Pathfinder Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous Pre-Release Thread [GAME RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

Xamenos

Magister
Patron
Joined
Feb 4, 2020
Messages
1,256
Pathfinder: Wrath
Also that one is clearly possible in pathfinder as a tiefling

Not just possible, but in the game. As twins. And you can bang them both. I really don't understand the complaints about Kingmaker romances when taking the DLC into account. (I totally do understand them for just the base game, Valerie, Octavia and the Broccoli all sucked for different reasons)
iu83jqc.png

[/spoiler[
 

jungl

Augur
Joined
Mar 30, 2016
Messages
1,420
Winter Witch isn't actually required for the prestige class. The two are seperate routes to the same goal.

My hopes/predictions for missing archetypes

Barbarian: Mooncursed. Trade normal rage bonuses for turning into an animal.
Bard: Dawnflower Dervish. Make Bardic Music only effect you in return for double strength and getting free dex to hit and damage with scimitar. They've got a pair of variant class features that could be implemented (replacing what the game replaces with bard talents), though they're picked at the level the feature is gained.
Bloodrager: Prowler at Earth's End is supposed to be Catfolk exclusive, but really could have that ditched.
Cavalier: Luring Cavalier. Cavalier, but ranged. I'm pretty confident on this one since it's so basic yet important.
Cleric: Evangalist (Replace a domain and medium armor with the important bardic music and replace trading spells for cure spells with converting stuff to mind control options in the same manner. Second part could safely be dropped.)
Druid: Golaith Druid. Replaces a lot of the random features with a focus on making yourself and animal companion HUGE.
Paladin: Oath of Vengence. Trade Lay on Hands uses for extra smite uses as you desire in exchange for changing Aura of Justice to a version that actually works better if they're the only one with extant charisma. Often paired with Sacred Servant, but Planar Ally isn't exactly something for a video game.
Rogue: Sylvan Trickster. Gain hexes in place of talents.
Sorcerer: Primal Dragon and Pit-Touched are the only other wild blood options anyone cares about (more-so the first). I'd say Primal Dragon and Crossblooded.
Magus: Hexcrafter. Gain all cruse spells on list (though so few are in Kingmaker and the most important one isn't needed with Kingmaker's adding Touch of Fatigue to Magus list) and more importantly trade spell recall for the ability to take Witch hexes as arcana.
Inquisitor: Sanctified Slayer. Trade judgement for slayer's studied strike and sneak attack.

As for Kineticist, I really would like them to use OGL and grab the third party Elemental Avatar (get all four classic elements at start, but less versatile within them) and Elemental Scion (only get one element, but good at it. There's an official option for this but it's complete crap)

Mooncursed? The hybrid form would require more effort and labor then all the goals so far combined. Good luck with that one bud.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,228
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Tech update: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/owlcatgames/pathfinder-wrath-of-the-righteous/posts/2765209

The Wrath of Graphics

Dear Pathfinders,

My name is Alexander Chernyakov and I’m the Lead Graphics Engineer at Owlcat Games. In this update, we’re diving headfirst into the technical Abyss that is our graphics and content creation. We’re going to talk about everything that makes Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous such a rich, vibrant world, including lighting, our approach to creating locations, how we cover the terrain with grass and fill it with water, and how we’ve updated our spell FX. In short, we’ll be taking you on a whistle-stop tour of our new graphics engine and our content creation pipeline. So let’s go!

Seeing things in a new light
Just like for Pathfinder: Kingmaker, this time around we started by analyzing the market and identifying which target hardware we wanted to develop the game for. Since Kingmaker, the performance threshold and available graphics features have increased far enough that it made sense to overhaul our game’s graphics, and in particular, its lighting system. We implemented a new API from Unity called the Scriptable Render Pipeline (SRP), which allowed us to realize our most daring ambitions for our graphics and lighting system.

For Kingmaker we chose forward rendering, though only after reworking it heavily for our own needs. We talked about our reasons for choosing this option during the last Kickstarter campaign (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/owlcatgames/pathfinder-kingmaker/posts/2077236). That decision was driven primarily by hardware limitations.

But now for Wrath of the Righteous, technical limitations are less of an issue. Thanks to the SRP, we can control virtually the entire frame data collection process and in what order all this data will be rendered onto the screen. As a result of this, we decided to build a light culling system that works entirely on the GPU, settling on an approach known as clustered shading.

Clustered shading is used in games such as Just Cause, Call of Duty, and many other AAA titles. You could say that this technology and all its varieties is the current industry standard.

But what does this grab bag of technical terms mean for our game? The answer is simple: more light sources in the frame and (more importantly) fewer restrictions for our artists.

Clustered shading
Here’s a quick rundown on how clustered shading works: the camera’s view frustum is divided into clusters; a list of all the light sources that intersect with each cluster in 3D space is calculated by the GPU; then, when a specific pixel is being rendered on the screen, we determine which cluster the pixel belongs to and calculate the lighting for all the light sources in this cluster.

aeda3c5f49db4c9da303217ac74b8498_original.png

Clustered light culling

You can see in the image that the red-shaded clusters will contain a list of one light source. This information will later be used in the lighting shader. We have also added a new graphics debug tool that allows us to analyze our clustered light culling in real time:

39fa955cc0991751c2cac27021942fa8_original.png

In-game debug: the figures signify the number of lights intersecting with one cluster

When we used forward rendering, we had to create lists of all the light sources lighting each object. This entailed a huge number of combinations and a heavy load on the CPU. In the case of deferred rendering, every light source has to be read from the G-Buffer memory each time, which puts a lot of pressure on the GPU’s memory. Clustered shading solves these problems. In clustered forward rendering, all light sources are available on the GPU and we can compute the lighting in a single pass. In clustered deferred rendering, we can read the data from the G-Buffer once and calculate the lighting from all light sources in a single pass, which significantly reduces the memory load.

This also means that we can harness the advantages of both approaches and create a hybrid rendering pipeline by combining the deferred and forward approaches, or even switching between them in real time.

In addition, we also incorporated Unity’s built-in dynamic global illumination into our graphics pipeline. In Kingmaker, we had to bake static lightmaps for different times of day, which meant a total of four sets of textures for each location. Baking one set could take anywhere from 20 minutes to 5 hours. Now we can bake all the data for dynamic GI in a single map, which significantly reduces the time it takes to create locations.

4e4d7798d7284e8667b9b8600f01896b_original.png

One of the new locations in Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous
Terrain
In video games, rendering terrains is normally achieved using splat map technology and various modified techniques for building terrain meshes that support level of detail (LOD). LOD is crucial in games with a free-roaming camera, because it significantly improves performance. This isn’t relevant to our game, as our game is set at a fixed angle and we are always seeing the same LOD. Splat mapping makes it possible to blend several textures in layers: the splat map stores the weights of the various textures, while the terrain shader blends specific textures (e.g., dirt, sand, grass) based on these weights.

In Kingmaker, our terrain was atypical from a game dev perspective. This was because we wanted the world to look hand-painted. To achieve this, our artists added hand-painted details on top of the splat map terrains. The ground in open locations and the flooring in dungeons were the standard models created by our artists in Maya. The process of importing them into our engine was a real experiment on our part. We had to cut them up into small sections in order to optimize culling. We developed a special tool to do this, which took over 180 hours of work, and then another few weeks for tweaking and debugging.

3aa8466836ad4bc73c0eee8644599551_original.png

Terrain in Pathfinder: Kingmaker

Besides this, the textures for these terrains had to be large in order to preserve as much detail as possible from our artists’ work. They were sent to the engine in their final form, as we couldn’t slice them into the layers that they really should have been composed of.

In Wrath of the Righteous, we switched to a new terrain pipeline. Our artists now create terrain meshes inside the game engine. Instead of huge baked textures, we now use splat maps and a set of small layered textures. And whenever we need to add extra detail, we use decals (we’ll get on to those later). This saves our artists time when working on terrains and textures in Maya, and also eliminates the need to slice up meshes and textures during import.

1929d6e122c47d5edf315fe6f0290c0f_original.png

Terrain in Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous

Foliage
Grass and the process for creating it is a separate, interesting topic. When grass is animated well, it brings game locations to life, transforming them from a pile of static models into a naturalistic landscape. I talked previously about how grass worked in Kingmaker and how it interacts with characters (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/owlcatgames/pathfinder-kingmaker/posts/2077236). But what I didn’t reveal was how our artists create grass and how our grass animation works.

In Kingmaker, we copied the mesh for a single blade of grass multiple times to create a patch (approx. 2x2 meters). A location such as the Ruined Watchtower could contain several hundred of these patches. We also created different grass sets for different graphics settings, significantly increasing the memory capacity required for loading locations, as well as the overall build size. In terms of CPU–GPU interaction, this looked like normal mesh rendering, where one patch of grass = one draw call. In other words, rendering grass meant generating hundreds of draw calls, placing this burden on the CPU and the culling system.

4e42252efe17e4f87af15648b67faf99_original.png

Ruined Watchtower location: grass highlighted in green

In Wrath of the Righteous, we’ve developed an Indirect Rendering System to handle grass. This system was designed to shift most of the load onto the GPU. Essentially, we send a single blade of grass to the GPU along with the data specifying where this blade needs to be rendered. The GPU uses this data to carry out culling and renders only the grass that is visible in the frame. The whole process on the CPU side consists of calling a compute shader for culling and a single draw call. On top of this, now we don’t need to save copies of meshes, only their positions in a given location, which has cut the amount of memory required for grass by 6–8 times!

a9c1444097f7d2d776b51b5397fded70_original.gif

GPU culling debug

Our grass animation also got a major update, and this was driven by something that happened during the development of Kingmaker. On that project, we created our grass animation using animation curves that were sent to a vertex shader. Everything worked as it was supposed to and we adopted this technology into our dev pipeline. We even finished a few dozen scenes. But then we realized that there was an error in the system, and fixing this error forced us to redo our content. This was a big problem. While I was working on a fix, I started thinking about how to modify the system so we could avoid similar errors in the future.

During preproduction on Wrath of the Righteous, I researched grass animation technologies and developed a simplified physics engine based on a Verlet solver for simulating real springs. Now we won’t have to configure any more animation curves. The grass simulation runs in a compute shader on the GPU and doesn’t impact the CPU.

7bb9950709b8121adeab71b85da51518_original.gif


Foliage physics debug

Water
We’ve continued to work on our water rendering since the release of Kingmaker. We were pleased with what we achieved on that game, but there’s always room for improvement. In Wrath of the Righteous, we’ve been paying attention to a few things in particular. The first and most noticeable issue is stutter. Before, our flowing water animation was based on looping 2 textures that alternated from one to the other. The changeover between the textures was noticeable, however, and we struggled to solve the issue. Our second problem flowed (no pun intended) from the first one: disguising the stuttering caused the textures to stretch.

Another problem was that waves on the water didn’t change with the direction of flow.

bd482b24d76883dd7adc163a576a31dd_original.gif


Stutter, stretched textures, waves not turning in direction of flow

Once again, preproduction for WotR gave me a chance to research possible solutions for these problems. At the time of writing, our complete water shader is still in development, but the majority of our animated textures are already working:

e5e684d38b7b8da0b56d04bb6995a4a1_original.gif


Waves correctly oriented in direction of flow, no stutter or stretching

FX
Another area that we’re continuing to improve and develop is our FX system.

For Kingmaker, we developed a technology called ParticleSnap, which allowed us to stick particles to the bones of characters. Because ParticleSnap was designed as a universal tool, our artists were able to stick particles not just to characters, but to other objects or areas. This is how we created our new-style AoE effects. In these effects, ParticleSnap doesn’t work on creatures, but on space, with particles sticking to specific points. This also allows us to create an AoE that follows dips and curves in the terrain. All this is underpinned by the same particle system, so rendering relatively complex effects still doesn’t cost much in terms of performance.

041bf8a3cf58ae2c7da825a9d9dac5ab_original.gif


AoE made using ParticleSnap: Thorny Entanglement

One of the unresolved issues in Kingmaker was distortion for effects. We were able to refract an image, but we couldn’t create several layers of that refraction. To make things worse, our refraction effects wiped out all other effects. To give an example, we weren’t able to create a hot air effect, because all the effects behind it would have simply disappeared. This meant that our artists were extremely constrained in how they could use distortion in effects. Our new renderer based on the SRP allowed us to customize our frame pipeline so that we could mix a variety of refracting layers together and lift these restrictions on our artists:

2c9886055b6bcf2292a0e2e5269fff3c_original.gif


Full-screen multi-layer distortion: Death Realm effect

Another new development was been created by our Lead FX Artist Victor Demishev. He created a fire constructor that enables us to “set fire” to an entire location in a couple of hours, without having to produce new FX content.

d51e5fdf0a045c9b36da1cd6206d19d4_original.gif


Fire constructor

Decals
Decals are another important addition to our updated graphics, and I previously described how they worked in Kingmaker. The main problem was the mipmapping. When a decal is projected onto the screen, the decal’s UVs are calculated based on texture depth. Variations in depth (especially at the edge of objects) produces variations in the UVs. And if there is a variation in the UVs, the graphics card thinks that it needs to use a less detailed mipmap. The more variations, the less detailed the mipmap will be in this pixel.

38758f474c1a3367bf2fbc14e9240581_original.png

Decal artifacts

I did some in-depth research into this topic, enough to fill a whole article of its own, but I don’t want to overwhelm you with technical details. The gist is that I managed to correct this problem in a way that avoided any significant impact on performance.

38efebdfa80b3c9d79a1b26be7a98115_original.png

Fixed decal shader

We’ve still got a lot of work ahead of us! But we can already see how much simpler our content creation pipeline has become. You can really sense the change within our team, too. We don’t have to spend days redoing a location if we decide to move a single tree. We don’t have to wrack our brains trying to place effects so that distortion doesn’t intersect on screen. We don’t have to check every terrain to make sure it was sliced correctly during import. We now have a new graphics debug system, which makes it much easier to understand what’s going on in a specific pixel. And we have also integrated a new system for shadows, post-processing, HBAO, SMAA—and a whole load of other acronyms—into our new renderer. Let us know in the comments if you want to see more news and details from the technical side of Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous.

To arms!

Owlcats.

a2c1517a9007f74c818899c4d89a9213_original.png
 

Pink Eye

Monk
Patron
Joined
Oct 10, 2019
Messages
5,793
Location
Space Refrigerator
I'm very into cock and ball torture
Sweet! I LOVE water in my video games! Kingmaker had some NICE water! Very awesome to see they are working on improving the water! With the modifications they are doing, waves should now orient in the right direction. Also, I hope blood trailing in the water carries over to Wrath of the Righteous. It was always awesome to see blood get swept away in a river.
 

deuxhero

Arcane
Joined
Jul 30, 2007
Messages
11,324
Location
Flowery Land
Winter Witch isn't actually required for the prestige class. The two are seperate routes to the same goal.

My hopes/predictions for missing archetypes

Barbarian: Mooncursed. Trade normal rage bonuses for turning into an animal.
Bard: Dawnflower Dervish. Make Bardic Music only effect you in return for double strength and getting free dex to hit and damage with scimitar. They've got a pair of variant class features that could be implemented (replacing what the game replaces with bard talents), though they're picked at the level the feature is gained.
Bloodrager: Prowler at Earth's End is supposed to be Catfolk exclusive, but really could have that ditched.
Cavalier: Luring Cavalier. Cavalier, but ranged. I'm pretty confident on this one since it's so basic yet important.
Cleric: Evangalist (Replace a domain and medium armor with the important bardic music and replace trading spells for cure spells with converting stuff to mind control options in the same manner. Second part could safely be dropped.)
Druid: Golaith Druid. Replaces a lot of the random features with a focus on making yourself and animal companion HUGE.
Paladin: Oath of Vengence. Trade Lay on Hands uses for extra smite uses as you desire in exchange for changing Aura of Justice to a version that actually works better if they're the only one with extant charisma. Often paired with Sacred Servant, but Planar Ally isn't exactly something for a video game.
Rogue: Sylvan Trickster. Gain hexes in place of talents.
Sorcerer: Primal Dragon and Pit-Touched are the only other wild blood options anyone cares about (more-so the first). I'd say Primal Dragon and Crossblooded.
Magus: Hexcrafter. Gain all cruse spells on list (though so few are in Kingmaker and the most important one isn't needed with Kingmaker's adding Touch of Fatigue to Magus list) and more importantly trade spell recall for the ability to take Witch hexes as arcana.
Inquisitor: Sanctified Slayer. Trade judgement for slayer's studied strike and sneak attack.

As for Kineticist, I really would like them to use OGL and grab the third party Elemental Avatar (get all four classic elements at start, but less versatile within them) and Elemental Scion (only get one element, but good at it. There's an official option for this but it's complete crap)

Mooncursed? The hybrid form would require more effort and labor then all the goals so far combined. Good luck with that one bud.

Not really. At Kingmaker's max zoom, cosmetics could be accomplished by a headswap and changing the skin color to match. Even then a mod could get away with not even bothering with the cosmetic part. It's mildly more work
 

mediocrepoet

Philosoraptor in Residence
Patron
Joined
Sep 30, 2009
Messages
11,468
Location
Combatfag: Gold box / Pathfinder
Codex 2012 Codex+ Now Streaming! MCA Project: Eternity Divinity: Original Sin 2
:deathclaw:
Why do people take Pink Eye seriously? God i do miss @space nugget ,he was really funny PR dude.

Are you actually confused why a business might want to throw a bone to some crazy fan who's unabashedly enthusiastic about their products to the point that they're spamming everywhere they can 24/7?
Besides, his enthusiasm is endearing which is more than I can say about most of the dumbasses online.
 

fantadomat

Arcane
Edgy Vatnik Wumao
Joined
Jun 2, 2017
Messages
37,083
Location
Bulgaria
:deathclaw:
Why do people take Pink Eye seriously? God i do miss @space nugget ,he was really funny PR dude.

Are you actually confused why a business might want to throw a bone to some crazy fan who's unabashedly enthusiastic about their products to the point that they're spamming everywhere they can 24/7?
Besides, his enthusiasm is endearing which is more than I can say about most of the dumbasses online.
Ahhh no,i mean that hshe is a pr guy for kingmaker,it is fucking obvious lol.
 

Pink Eye

Monk
Patron
Joined
Oct 10, 2019
Messages
5,793
Location
Space Refrigerator
I'm very into cock and ball torture
:deathclaw:
Why do people take Pink Eye seriously? God i do miss @space nugget ,he was really funny PR dude.

Are you actually confused why a business might want to throw a bone to some crazy fan who's unabashedly enthusiastic about their products to the point that they're spamming everywhere they can 24/7?
Besides, his enthusiasm is endearing which is more than I can say about most of the dumbasses online.
Ahhh no,i mean that hshe is a pr guy for kingmaker,it is fucking obvious lol.
If I was PR, then Infinitron would know. I'm just a channer who likes talking about Pathfinder. Apparently, to you cynical lot. That's a difficult concept to grasp. Which is huge coming from me. As I have been using 4chan for close to two decades now, and have been exposed to all manner of cynicism over the years. Nonetheless, do try harder. This place is a fooking hugbox compared to the degeneracy of the chan. I won't let you hamper my enthusiasm or love for Pathfinder. Unless the people who moderate this forum kick me out. I will always be here talking about Monks and Pathfinder; if worse comes to shove, I'll just head back to the chan, from where I originally came from.
 

fantadomat

Arcane
Edgy Vatnik Wumao
Joined
Jun 2, 2017
Messages
37,083
Location
Bulgaria
:deathclaw:
Why do people take Pink Eye seriously? God i do miss @space nugget ,he was really funny PR dude.

Are you actually confused why a business might want to throw a bone to some crazy fan who's unabashedly enthusiastic about their products to the point that they're spamming everywhere they can 24/7?
Besides, his enthusiasm is endearing which is more than I can say about most of the dumbasses online.
Ahhh no,i mean that hshe is a pr guy for kingmaker,it is fucking obvious lol.
If I was PR, then Infinitron would know. I'm just a channer who likes talking about Pathfinder. Apparently, to you cynical lot. That's a difficult concept to grasp. Which is huge coming from me. As I have been using 4chan for close to two decades now, and have been exposed to all manner of cynicism over the years. Nonetheless, do try harder. This place is a fooking hugbox compared to the degeneracy of the chan. I won't let you hamper my enthusiasm or love for Pathfinder. Unless the people who moderate this forum kick me out. I will always be here talking about Monks and Pathfinder; if worse comes to shove, I'll just head back to the chan, from where I originally came from.
:hmmm:
Ahhh i see no problem in liking the game,being a channer,posting here and on top being a PR dude. LoL it is not like i dislike you or want you to be banner or something like that mate. Post whatever you feel like mate,it is a free neo nazi forum after all. Oh and i do agree with you about the hugbox thing,too much liberals this days....:decline:.
 

The_Mask

Just like Yves, I chase tales.
Patron
Joined
May 3, 2018
Messages
5,898
Location
The land of ice and snow.
Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I helped put crap in Monomyth
Unless the people who moderate this forum kick me out. I will always be here talking about Monks and Pathfinder;
You've kind of mentioned this before, in this thread, and before this devolves into something worse, I'd like you to know something: I equate my experience here to The Smoldering Corpse Bar from P:T.
You can be anything from a Deva to Devil, if you talk about RPGs, you have nothing to fear here. Which is very heartwarming, I too (much like quite a few people here) were banned from other forum-like websites simply for talking about RPGs and what we truly think of them. Tough love is not hate.

And since I like monks too, (and being in a horrible minority) it's nice to have someone (else other than me) being enthusiastic about them - although after you're done, no one wants to hear anyone else being keen about monks - but that's ok!

So keep talking about RPGs. And stop mentioning the administration. In fact, mentioning the administration is prolly the shortest way to get into poop.



:greatjob:
 

As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.
Back
Top Bottom