Ready or Not News

Welcome to the 49th edition of our mostly biweekly newsletter!

This week we will be showing an in-depth first look at the facelift of one of our classic maps, “Dealership”. Developers and artists have been working very hard towards this update and are excited to showcase exciting changes and additions!

This is only one of the planned refreshes of classic Ready or Not maps coming down the pipeline to utilize advances in our team's capabilities better, as well as our improved lighting systems. All of the techniques we have learned will be applied to our legacy levels in the coming updates.

A New Classic

A noticeable upgrade that should come as a welcome addition to veteran players is the refurbished internal layout of the dealership to make it less confusing as a whole and flow much better. The improved layout allows the expansions to blend much better with the more familiar architecture, such as the new street access that goes around the dealership and some of the surrounding buildings.

Above: The renovated ‘front’ of the dealership features a much more dense and dangerous landscape.

Above: The new garage is much more populated with little greeblies and signs of life, something that the rest of the level will also share.

The new corners of the map will hold more lore for both the immediate situation and the city of Los Suenos itself as we strive to make everything seem more alive. The decay running through the city will be much more visible, and the crimes of the Traffickers will be much more evident.

Above: The rot that fills the city becomes more evident by the day.

We hope that with the refresh of one of our classic maps that our players will be more excited for both what is coming and what sort of improvements that we will be implementing going forward.


Conclusion

This concludes our 49th briefing. Be sure to tune in next time for more development news!

Just a heads up, we’re partnering with the CoBE Institute at Coastal Carolina University to gather some of your feedback on Ready or Not. If you’ve got 5 mins to participate in this survey, we’ll put your name in a drawing for two free games keys so you can invite your friends on a mission!

https://u006xa2grj9.typeform.com/to/O9z0rMPJ

If you’d like to help us test new content during playtesting periods on the Supporter exclusive experimental branch, provide us with your game feedback, and keep up with the Supporter community; you can become a supporter at www.voidinteractive.net or at our Steam store page.

Are you a content creator on youtube or twitch looking for new games? We got you covered; Ready or Not has partnered with Lurkit to elevate gameplay! Make sure to follow us here.

https://www.lurkit.com/games/ready-or-not

Keep your feet on the ground.
VOID Interactive

Attention Officers!

In accordance with station protocol, with the changing of seasons in Los Suenos all active field units are required to retire their winter patrol gear and requisition new sets of fair-weather patrol gear.

With the start of the spring season, we will also be re-opening recruitment via our storefront on Steam. For the Spring Sale, Ready or Not will go on sale, temporarily reducing its price by 15%!

If you had been waiting to recruit the rest of your squad, then now is the chance.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1144200?utm_source=steam&utm_campaign=steamspringsale23

Keep your feet on the ground and shovel in the shed.
Ready or Not Team

Attention Officers,

Welcome to our 48th Newsletter! This week we’re going to be taking a look at some of the work that makes the suspects, civilians, and your fellow officers feel more alive. It’s a subject that is unfortunately not talked about very often in comparison to its cousins AI, effects, and textures, despite being just as important or more depending on who you talk to.

This week we’ll be talking about how we bring specifically our officers, suspects, and citizens to life! Our artists don’t just sculpt the clothing and equipment that our characters sport. We take direct scans of gear to ensure greater authenticity as we outfit all of our NPC and player models to make our world feel more alive.
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Gerard - Technical Character Artist

Gerard, known to some members of the community as Mery. G, is a veteran of modeling for more tactically minded shooters. Some of his claims to fame are his contributions to a monstrous set of ArmA 3 mods called RHS and a large uniform pack called USP, both of which should be familiar to even the casual ArmA modder.

The method that VOID uses to translate real world equipment into the world of Los Suenos is known as Photogrammetry, using his personal collection of tactical gear as well as acquisitions from other sources and insight from connections within the armed forces community, Gerard crafts the scans into usable equipment to outfit officers and suspects alike.


Above: A full materialized mesh, albedo texture, black and white map, and normal map. The result of a Photogrammetry session and post-processing.

According to Gerard, Photogrammetry vs. traditional methods (modeling & sculpting) is less settled on the artist's interpretation of a given item and provides realistic proportions details that are very hard for an artist to replicate, not to mention how fast we’re able to produce usable models. Though it is faster, translating the output of Photogrammetry into the aforementioned models still requires capable artists to clean up the scan and make the mesh come to life.

Above: A version of the Photogrammetry setup.

Above: Photogrammetry output after some cleanup

We want to show love to our characters by making them look as close to the real deal as we can, since our vision for RoN is formed along the lines of how gritty the job of swat officers can be, it only makes sense to pay the equivalent attention and detail to the tools and equipments our players will be using.
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Conclusion

This concludes our 48th briefing. Be sure to tune in next time for more development news!

If you’d like to help us test new content during playtesting periods on the Supporter exclusive experimental branch, provide us with your game feedback, and keep up with the Supporter community; you can become a supporter at www.voidinteractive.net or at our Steam store page.

Are you a content creator on youtube or twitch looking for new games? We got you covered; Ready or Not has partnered with Lurkit to elevate gameplay! Make sure to follow us here.

https://www.lurkit.com/games/ready-or-not

Keep your feet on the ground.
VOID Interactive

Attention Officers,

Welcome to our 47th Newsletter! This week we’re going to be taking a look at some of the work that makes the suspects, civilians, and your fellow officers feel more alive. It’s a subject that is unfortunately not talked about very often in comparison to its cousins AI, effects, and textures despite being just as important or more depending on who you talk to.

The animations of both the player character and the AI in Ready or Not help contribute to the feeling of unease as you approach a suspect that hasn’t either surrendered or revealed their intentions. The shifting of their feet, the way they look around the room, even how they reach into their jacket or pants to retrieve something all contribute to these feelings.

For today's newsletter we consulted with Raihaku, one of VOID Interactive's animators, whose background and skill lend very well to the atmosphere of Ready or Not being one of the architects around many of the recent and incredibly well made trailers.
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Animations by Raihaku

Part of the reason why animation doesn’t get much discussion is because there is nothing really mind-blowing to discuss, it’s unique in a sense because gameplay animation can get weirdly specific and a lot of stuff feels invisible to the player until it’s not there, and it’s really obvious that it isn’t there. It isn’t like AI or Levels where there’s amazing videos of their navigation and behaviors or pretty screenshots and images to show off.

Animating is, mostly, “We’re figuring out the time we spent blending the character between two poses and how they turn in place if they’re looking around or while they’re standing still and doing a neat shuffling animation.”

Above: Demonstration of various NPC states, instead of walking everywhere with their weapons up, they can take it slow with their weapons down as they investigate.

This is a preview of the movement system that we currently have in-game, this was a solution to the lack of momentum the NPCs have when they move around as they used to not build up any acceleration an actual person would need to start moving quickly, making them frustrating to fight against and hard to read. This is our method to interpret that into the game by blending between multiple types of animations, which is a walk, run, and sprint as demonstrated in the first section of the video followed by a walk and a jog in the second section of the video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWPONOc1zaM&ab_channel=VOIDInteractive

The way the speeds are interpreted in the actual game is simple: We increment from a 0 to 1 value, 0 being a full-stop and 1 being at full-speed, and the numbers in between 0 and 1 serve as the acceleration. This also gives us a wider range of motion as the strafes were initially only 8-directional, being able to blend between these directions means that they look more precise during navigation.

It's not a very technologically groundbreaking method and it has been around since the early 2000s. Valve uses this for all their game animations in the Source engine since Half-Life 2 and it helps their game animations achieve a very natural look with such a simple system.
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Under the hood

There are many aspects of game design and development that the general public doesn’t see, along with our newsletters that show off the inspiration behind our levels, we will also be producing more newsletters that go more into detail about all of the things that make Ready or Not tick!
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Conclusion

This concludes our 47th briefing. Be sure to tune in next time for more development news!

If you’d like to help us test new content during playtesting periods on the Supporter exclusive experimental branch, provide us with your game feedback, and keep up with the Supporter community; you can become a supporter at www.voidinteractive.net or at our Steam store page.

Are you a content creator on youtube or twitch looking for new games? We got you covered; Ready or Not has partnered with Lurkit to elevate gameplay! Make sure to follow us here.
https://www.lurkit.com/games/ready-or-not

Make sure you follow Ready or Not on Steam here.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1144200/Ready_or_Not/

Keep your feet on the ground.
VOID Interactive