Vapourware Sui Generis + Exanima Early Access

[AdolfSatan]

(...) and you'll be able to clean dirty items if you have the necessary cleaning items.

Aw fuck yisss man finally someone steps up to tackle the lack of housemaid mechanics in fantasy games, awesome!

 

[Technomancer]

Aw fuck yisss man finally someone steps up to tackle the lack of housemaid mechanics in fantasy games, awesome!

Madoc talked about it some more and is currently unknown if dirt overtime will be added to arena, same with NPCs who would do that for you.

 

[Mr. Magniloquent]

Aw fuck yisss man finally someone steps up to tackle the lack of housemaid mechanics in fantasy games, awesome!

Madoc talked about it some more and is currently unknown if dirt overtime will be added to arena, same with NPCs who would do that for you.

 

[Decado]

Man I remember checking out Sui Generis years ago and thinking it was on the way to being something. What the fuck happened?

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Man I remember checking out Sui Generis years ago and thinking it was on the way to being something. What the fuck happened?

It's on its way to being something, alright.

 

[Decado]

YES BUT WHAT

 

[Technomancer]

Man I remember checking out Sui Generis years ago and thinking it was on the way to being something. What the fuck happened?

Check my post on page 29, it will give you the best idea. Short version after Kickstarter people started to criticize the game hard because of the level of jank, everything was supposed to be better. It became clear that the original indie-like SG game would be disappointing everybody because people expected A quality from them for some reason. That is what happened. They are building a game of such quality without a budget to do one so without making other compromises everything takes a lot of time because of that. As part of that shift in scope (which was huge, even the setting was changed), it was decided that Exanima will be a good system to build and test out the tools, systems and assets for the greater game. Over time the scope of Exanima grew too and at this point, it became big enough to test most of SG systems in it. The next update after arena will move us to final missing piece - the fabled AI role system that is the core of Sui Generis innovative approach to RPG design.

 

[agris]

Yes but what about procedural dirt, how does that fit in?

 

[Technomancer]

Yes but what about procedural dirt, how does that fit in?

One of them countless things Madoc decided to add along the way.

 

[Technomancer]

23/11/20

This week we've been putting some final touches on the remastered assets, implementing the new itemisation systems we discussed last week and just patching our entire asset library for release. We also tackled the last few procedural materials that were missing, namely suede, silk and velvet which are quite tricky.

We were going to do a "final texture pass" on the new early tileset for the release, which ended up being quite significant, we spent a little more time on it, but we're very happy with the results. A lot more assets ended up being completely remastered, like doors, floors and various environment features. We're also introducing some new assets for arenas, and still making some brand new arenas too. It's a very exhaustive visual overhaul that should make the game feel quite fresh, but it's also a process of establishing our new workflow for various things, as when we make an asset once using these new tools it means 90% of the work is already done the next time we make something similar.

Updating assets is an ongoing process that we'll tackle gradually, but in terms of actual feature development for the update it's basically just about completing the new itemisation features and making existing items compatible with it. It's a much more complex system than what we had previously, and we are relying on doing a full save wipe soon to remove deprecated assets and items, but we won't be wiping saves until the full arena update. We still had a few things to figure out as we fleshed this system out, including how procedurally generated descriptions would be handled now that many more items will have randomised properties and there are many more properties to randomise, or change dynamically. The new system is just about complete, but we still need to handle various conversion cases for legacy items as the two systems are very different.

We are also making progress on the arena overhaul, and this is also largely part of it. The arena mode is getting its own unique environment assets, along with new unique arenas. The new itemisation system is quite important here too, besides providing more options and customisation, it is designed to create more varied and appropriate outfits for arena NPCs. You will no longer be fighting randomly generated characters each match, all NPCs and their items will be persistent and detailed and appropriate to their status. These items might also be traded between NPCs and players.

That's it for this week, we'll try to stop tweaking things (for now!) and just get it out when save game compatibility is fully resolved.

Have a great week!
-the BM team

 

[Technomancer]

30/11/20

Nothing really new this week as we've just been wrapping everything up for a release. We got just about all the new environment assets game ready, and updated terrain assets to match them too.

Mostly it has been the new itemisation systems holding us back as it's gotten very complicated and we want to be thorough and make sure we get it right. There's a lot of potential to be taken advantage of here for gameplay, replayability, customisation and importantly world and character design. We also absolutely want this to be future proof, so that as we add new materials, traits, item types and improve things, all existing content (and saved games) will still work and take advantage of new features. This is also something that we want extend to more item and object types, we want a solid shared system for everything.

In typical Bare Mettle fashion, these features might seem a bit on the overkill side things, but this is exactly the sort of thing that we think is really important to making the game feel unique and interesting, and will massively pay off for the initial time investment. We are strong believers that it's the details that matter most.
We know you're all anxious to get your hands on some kind of update, and we're super close so we'll just get back to work now.

Have a great week!
-the BM team

 

[Technomancer]

7/12/20

This week we managed to get legacy items correctly converted to the new systems, put in the last few minor features to get all the various game screens and game modes working properly and solved the inevitable various new issues that crept up during this last stretch of development and feature completion. We also made a new visual tool for configuring various environment-specific settings that previously had to be mostly hard coded or automatic.

We wanted to maintain save game compatibility until we release the arena overhaul, so when you start fresh it will be for good reason. This got pretty complicated with maintaining many deprecated assets and converting items. When we finally do a full wipe we'll be able to purge all the legacy props and start fresh with items, which will allow us to better take advantage of all the new features.

Now we're just consolidating all the updated assets into release libraries etc. and we expect we'll be able to do a test release some time this week. We're excited to finally get the whole visually updated game out there and see what people think.

Have a great week!
-the BM team

 

[Technomancer]

we expect we'll be able to do a test release some time this week

To no one's surprise, this did not happen

 

[Technomancer]

14/12/20

We just about got a release ready this past week, but of course we ran into a few issues, and realised a couple of things weren't quite ready yet, or should probably be finalised properly. It wasn't all problems though, we also made progress on various fronts and some nice additions.

Last week we talked about a new tool we added for configuring various environment parameters. The settings we create will also affect save games in future, so we decided it was better to get it right and avoid more compatibility overhead in the future. We added a lot of stuff here, which while not used yet, will be useful for future environment features such as water and weather effects. One thing we explored in particular detail is sound, as we plan to do quite a lot to improve how sound changes based on the environment. We prototyped a lot of different sound environments and tried to figure out what should be automated and what should be authored, with some really promising results. We think this will do a lot to make locations feel more unique and immersive.

This also led us to completing some GI features that we were going to leave until later. We were going to use these environment settings to configure some aspects of how the GI functions with different types of environments, hidden ceilings etc. We ended up doing this all properly instead, part of which was a big optimisation which analyses the environment and figures out which regions of 3D space need GI calculations and which remain hidden. The GI is well optimised and runs well either way, but large scale optimisations like this is something we still want to do and become more important in larger environments.

We also realised that while we managed to convert legacy items to the new itemisation system, we hadn't quite finished with how the game uses the new systems to generate new items and characters outfits and apply randomisation which wasn't really taking advantage of new features. There's also some old issues we had with items losing some properties or changing when loading save games or moving to different maps that we finally wanted to solve.

We're often tempted to release something because it's in a playable state and get a bit optimistic about when we'll actually do it. Of course there's always more to do, but we do at least want a smooth release that doesn't create even more work and problems. Nothing you haven't head before, your patience is commendable!

Have a great week!
-the BM team

 

[Technomancer]

21/12/20

This week we went very deep into the new randomisation systems, as there are many important additions and improvements we wanted to make. We really want to get this right, as making late additions or changes to itemisation can be very problematic.

Items will be much more varied than before, with various implications. The same item can now be made with a variety of different materials, but these aren't just "random", for every small part of an item we can define what range of materials might be used, how luxurious or cosmetically important each of those can be, and various other parameters. For example a brigandine might now be covered with various leathers or fabrics, and other elements of the item will have their own range of materials and finishes, with the number of individual materials per item now being as high as 8, up from the previous 4. The choice of materials importantly depends on external factors such as the wealth of its owner. Materials aren't just cosmetic, they can also modify the properties of the item and what traits it can acquire.

Colours are also important here, with the introduction of a dye system, where dyes have different values and can be a sign of wealth and status. These must be chosen accordingly, and can also follow rules for matching themes (e.g. an arena company's colours) or colours favoured by the wearer. This introduced various complications, and we wanted something that kept the items in the world consistent with what the player could do, but we came up with some nice solutions.

All this serves several purposes. Combined with the other itemisation changes, it means much more varied and more detailed items. Items won't just be "the brigandine in x quality", but something that feels much more unique. We can make outfits reflect the status of their wearer, important in the updated arena. All items in the new arena will be persistent, NPCs will own items that befit status, and also trade them between each other and the player. When you join an inept match with high ranking fighters, this will be obvious from their expensive items and colourful outfits. It also allows us to rapidly design or generate suitable outfits for various characters. This is something we'd like to use in the story too, with more special encounters having clearly recognisable themes and yet having different items on each playthrough. This is important as they currently provide very static item progression paths for the player.

All that aside, we've updated more assets for the new renderer, including the ogres, which led to some improvements to our subsurface scattering, which can now be better adjusted for different creatures and materials. We added some very nice silk to our procedural items, and made various improvements to all cloth materials, which now look more realistic and also generally more vibrantly coloured.

We did also have another go at solving performance issues on AMD, but with the current status of their Windows drivers there doesn't seem to be a quick fix. There are some things we can still try, and we will be in touch with AMD about it, but this will be quite time consuming and it will have to wait until we're less busy with just getting this release ready.

Itemisation changes was really the last thing to do here, and we'll be glad later that we're being thorough. We're at the stage where we've started writing release notes, and we'll continue to work through christmas.

Have a great week!
-the BM team

 

[Technomancer]

28/12/20

We've kept at it during the holidays, but we've also been kind of taking it easy rather than crunching to get a release out. It was nice to just take a breath and carefully consider some important decisions rather than trying to rush to get what we had out.

For the most part we've been carefully testing and tweaking the new item randomisation systems. This gets surprisingly complicated, as we now have a lot of fine grained control over what's randomised and how. There's a lot of diversity, and it's really not at all "random". We want some fairly strict rules about what materials, what level of quality, condition and dirt etc. are appropriate in many different contexts, and yet still have a lot of variety. Basically things like a high end shop would never stock cheap, slightly worn or dirty clothes, a peasant would never wear a silk shirt, an undead would never wear a clean pristine shirt, or this type of clothing or part of an item would never use certain types of fabrics and so on. There's a lot of potential rules to navigate here.

The problem is complex because we need to coordinate many randomisation parameters that must interact in a logical way, and because we want both very detailed and simple control for content design. Most importantly we need to very easily get the results we want without having to tweak a bunch of obscure parameters, which leads to indecision and error. This means a high level layer of control that is simple, intuitive and clever, but also the ability to get very specific results when needed. Another part of this we've been trying to solve is keeping items in saved games up-to-date by automatically patching themselves from master copies as we tweak these systems in future.

This might all seem a bit over-engineered, but it's the nature of this game to have such details and consistency, and for these things to be quite dynamic, rather than a result of statically designed content. A lot of work needs to go into a system like this that can match what a human might make by hand.

The other thing we've been trying to get fully implemented this week is the procedural item descriptions. These are quite important now, they tell you things about an item that you might not understand by simply looking at it. Where previously you would find two "rusted helmets" that were identical in all but minor visual differences, they might now be in similar condition but have different traits, build and material quality, making one of them potentially quite valuable and useful if restored. For the story in particular, this means some of the best items in a playthrough might be ones that you find very early on. For the descriptions we've been solving some minor grammatical hiccups, but we've also refined the system from our original design to more accurately describe items.

Besides that we've finally managed to do a passable procedural velvet material, which was the last one we were missing. We've made some good progress and some important refinements, the itemisation features seemed like a small thing after getting the all new renderer and assets ready, but they are pretty big in their own way and very important. All of this also carries over exactly to the upcoming procedural weapons, as we've basically ended up adopting the biggest part of those systems for other items too.

Have a great week!
-the BM team

 

[Technomancer]

4/1/21

This week we managed to navigate through the final mechanics and implementation details of the new itemisation and outfit generation systems. We can easily define a fine grained level of wealth and elegance, a theme of colours and some other parameters from which to generate a complete outfit, and by extension a character's "wardrobe". This determines what garments might be worn, their relative quality, the combination of materials and fabrics they might be made from, the grade of those materials and so on. There is also a component of context for the outfit, purpose and social convention.

This will create characters that are distinct and recognisable for their level of wealth, role and situation, allowing for subtle differences even at similar stations. It has a lot of future applications, but also some immediate ones for persistent arena NPCs and meaningful differences within the same tiers, and new randomisation features for more important encounters in story.

Expanding on that context, this touches on various aspects of how we define objects within the game. Objects have attached origins, manufacturing processes, components with their own origins and so forth. Even in the revised arena, caravans and traders will arrive from different regions bringing appropriate goods for sale. It's a process, and it will over time require a growth of content, but we need to finalise how all this data is defined to support all applications and functionality.

Anyway, we've figured out the last details of how all this works, and we've also implemented the automatic patching system we discussed, which will automatically keep content and save games up-to-date if and when we modify the parameters of any object. We've also completed our new item design tool, in which we can configure an item's randomisation parameters in detail, preview the results of randomisation or also design specific items in detail. It's very cool to see, but hard to describe, so we're thinking of doing a little stream or video of it in action once the update is out.

We're confident enough with how this is all set up now to go ahead and permanently convert everything to the new formats, including save games, so we're just about to do that and see how it all comes together.

Happy New Year, and have a great week!
-the BM team

 

[kreight]

Is this thing on still?

 

[Technomancer]

Is this thing on still?

Yep, still going forward. Like a snail with tank treads.

 

[Mr. Magniloquent]

I'm glad they decided to put so much effort into the coloring of cloths so as to better simulate perceived wealth and social rank. This will no doubt play a large part in their dialogue AI, and NPC reputation subroutines. Thus far, zombie derelicts in the dungeon haven't been deferring to their betters when I try to diplomacy my way through its depths. Furthermore, arena combatants haven't been genuflecting or suffering doubt when they see my resplendent armament, due to lacking sufficiently regal color coordination. It's also nice that they have the ability to extensively and meticulously parameter "randomly generated" items so that nothing will be out of place. Instead of placing a high quality item on someone or somewhere it would be rational to expect one or using templates, they just need to train their algorithm to do all of them for them--so they don't have to bother tweaking all of the extensive parameters they've chosen to code in.

I went on a walk with these devs a few weeks ago. I pointed over to a forest that I thought would be pleasant to hike, but they couldn't see it due to all of the trees obstructing their view. Ultimately we just decided to talk about our accessories and do nothing else. We spent days discussing where they are from, what they're made of, which colors looked best, etc. They were really interested.

 

[Technomancer]

Easy to see all that effort on seemingly trivial things as pointless and excessive but it is clear they are created as fundament for Sui Generis open world.

 

[Jinn]

It's too bad they're not planning on doing hand-placed loot in Sui Generis. I thought it disappointing that they decided to go this route for Exanima, but now that you mention it, yeah, it's probably for Sui Generis too.


Too bad they spent like half a year on this as well.

 

[Technomancer]

It's too bad they're not planning on doing hand-placed loot in Sui Generis. I thought it disappointing that they decided to go this route for Exanima, but now that you mention it, yeah, it's probably for Sui Generis too.

Not the case, there will be unique weapons and armor sets both in Exanima and SG. Their 3D artist is making and streaming one such set for example.

 

[Technomancer]

Some extra insight from yesterday stream where Madoc explains in less formal tone why the update took so damn long (originally it was supposed to be out a few months after 8.0 during Summer, instead we only got that one update during 2020 while usually there are at least 2 minor ones more per year.

Most of what we do is geared towards SG, Exanima just reaps the benefits along the way. This "update" was ridiculous, basically remade the rendering engine from scratch and developed lots of new tech. I really tried to avoid doing it, we knew it would take a long time, but at some point it just didn't seem practical to continue without it. Definitely a lot of stuff is much easier to do, especially to do it right, and there was also a lot of work on tools to get through the massive graphics overhaul and streamline a lot of stuff and a bunch of smart content design stuff that fell in with the itemisation and character changes. Most of work in last months was the itemisation stuff really. Turned out to be really complicated once we got into it ofc, but we're always thinking with big future applications in mind. I really want to do a video after we get this out to show just how crazy it is, this stuff is way, way beyond what games normally do.

Besides that we've finally managed to do a passable procedural velvet material, which was the last one we were missing.

Update on velvet material:

I settled for a reasonable result, it's far from perfect, but it will have to do. The alternative is to add a huge overhead to character assets just for velvet. The velvet is okay, all the other materials are really good.

Materials on items now are randomised (but in a clever way), so the same shirt could be made from various fabrics. We're working on an updated character model that's more detailed and solves various technical issues that have accumulated over time. There's some problem areas where item layers interact, and the whole system just got overcomplicated as we added more and more items, we've improved various techs that we're not taking advantage of etc. Considering that some items are made of over 500 separate meshes to account for all the interactions with other items it will be a process, we've started working on it, but we have other priorities right now. We're trying to do it so we can do it in parallel without having to stop everything until it's done so we just need to streamline it all a bit and improve it.

And finally something extra, first time ever in video game history, behold -

Spoiler

the codpiece!

What a time to be alive

Spoiler

 

[ERYFKRAD]

This level of velvet is simply unacceptable.