Spring Devblog
Heavy Gunner Fan art by VireynHey everyone!
Since the next update is on the large side (well which one wasn't..) we want to give you some infos about what is coming up next. As we are getting slowly towards the 1.0 version, and are now finally tackling some of our long desired elements. This is a more technical blog with not too many spoilers, so you can safely read.
[h2]Base of Operations[/h2]
The Elephant in the room is the new base of operations. The old main-menu is completely replaced by the new base. This is a big operation and includes larger reworks of menu structure and the lobby structure.
Gameplay wise you can walk around the base and interact with different buildings and npcs.
Throughout your play time, you can unlock new buildings and the base will look more impressive over time. We also take this opportunity to add long missing elements to the franchise, such as NPCs, story elements, voice acting and more outgame progress.
Pic: Armory Building / DatabaseSince this is a lot of work, we gotta see how much we can really get done for the next update, but it is critial to take the next step, leap outside of our comfort zone and take things to the next level.
We don't want to talk or promise too much about it yet so we are keeping it short, but this is the main priority for Update 15.
[h2]Structural Changes[/h2]
We planned for a longer time to do some overhauls related to the handling of the UI and general technical structure of the menus. Before, all menus were basically attached together, but we are now changing things to be "atomic" (independent) and more flexible in structure. This is much healthier to develop, debug and add new features down the road, as they are completely detached from the rest, and you do not have any complexity from intertwining features.
Pic: WIP of a world map menuThis also allows adding new menus much easier or do any other tweaks. A similar thing is being done for the HUD. Eventually it might even be possible to mod or expand some of the menus in the menu with this improved structure, although no promises.
[h2]Story Elements & Voice Acting[/h2]
While you shouldn't expect huge questlines or heavy story elements, we are trying to get a basic structure and more worldbuilding with characters and more overall flair.
Voice acting might not be in the first version but we are planning to add voice overs for the NPCs in the base and also the events while playing, to add more flair and make things more immersive.
All our NPCs are being done with a intricate character sheet and a logical background. This not only lets us understand the characters better and create better dialog but also helps the voice actors to understand the characters. Maybe this might even be useful to create chat bots eventually. We also noticed that this helps fill in gaps in the story and logic behind the surroundings.
Character Sheet:
- Name
Surname
Job / Role
Current Title
Previous Job
Age
Gender
Ethnicity
Language Primary
Language Secondary
Occupation
Previous Occupation
Born
Affiliation
Family
Height
Weight
Likes
Dislikes
Background
Personality Keywords
Strengths
Weakness
Lie / Belief / Want
Need / Absolving
Speaking Style
Taboo Theme
[h2]Human Character Models & Animations[/h2]
Since we never really made humans before, we are also getting more in touch with making characters, animations and pipelines around such elements. It was only a matter of time until we needed human characters and now is the time to dig into these topics. This leads also into more questions about how clothing is setup, how it could or could not be switched, how hair and eyes are being done and such things.
[h2]Zir Chat[/h2]
We did a quick test out of curiosity with a chat AI based on GPT3.5, letting people chat with Zir on our Discord. This turned out to be very fun and working way better than expected, however the provider of the bot did not allow a lot of background story and it was very easy to change its behaviour by asking it to change itself, which allowed "hacking" it very easily. As a cause we removed it again, but we will definitely make Zir and more return as chat bots, hopefully with enough context to also give you in-depth info about game elements if possible.
[h2]Rocks & Vegetation[/h2]
The new base is also an opportunity and starting point for our future workflows relating to terrain, vegetation and rocks. We never have worked much with vegetation before and were digging into the pipelines and workflows. It turns out that our prior experience suits this very well and we were getting some great results in short time, however there is still much to learn.
This is a mixture of existing scans but some of the vegetation was also hand modelled by us, sometimes down to the very leaf, sometimes based on textures, sometimes procedually placed, sometimes manually cut out. There is really a wide variety of workflows in such vegetation assets possible.
Here is a hand modeled plant leaf:
And a handmade palm as example, which turned out quite nice.
Rocks are traditionally sculpted or hand modelled, but we did a procedual generation of the big rock set, which is based on a voxel volume system, using a mixture of shaders and displacers in 3D space.
Here you can see the input shape and the final rock highpoly model:
[h2]Improved Future Pipelines[/h2]
A bunch of work has been done on next-gening our asset creation pipelines. Our end goal is that you can just make a 3D model and have it automatically be UV mapped, pivot corrected, grouped, baked, textured and exported, while having an extreme reduction in textures used.
We are doing some solid progress on a pipeline using "Houdini", a 3D software which is often used to create such automations, and has already been helpful in creating some of the new assets, such as the huge rock formation seen below. This would require a lot of work to unwrap and optimize manually but the tedious steps could now be done in a couple clicks as example.
For the rocks, we created moss by scattering cubes, voxelizing them, and melting them together to form a moss on top of the rocks. Then in the end, a mixture of highly optimized plants are scattered on top of the rock, using around 20 different types, all using the same single texture.
[h2]3D Libraries? Times have changed[/h2]
We are now in the times of "Megascans" and freely available asset libraries (and soon AI generated 3D art), however most people make the massive mistake of just loading a trillion of redundant different assets and bloating their project.
Generally we do hand create all our assets ourselves, but for something like vegetation that might be out of our league, so we have to work with third party assets at least partially for the first time.
Often you do see videos where people just throw in 100 different megascans assets in their scene and it looks all great. Behind the curtains this is a disaster. Often importing a single assetstore asset is in the hundreds of megabytes on import. A single construction worker we bought was larger than the entirety of Synthetik 1. Such things need to be treated with extreme care.
Plant example from a popular library. Looks good at glance, however there is 90% redundancy in there. And these would be 16 different textures just for one flower. Combined there are like 50 pieces, but realistically you would need around 6. Such things can go exponentially wrong if unchecked. The same counts for textures. Libraries lull you with 100 of variations of rock, while in reality you need to find and make the 1 perfect one.
We think assets are the same as lets say classes. Each needs a defined role and has to be carefully selected and optimized. We very carefully hand pick everything and often pack similar things together in texture atlases. All assets are also highly packed, so we reduce the texture count from 5 to just 2 per asset. For the vegetation on top of the rocks we packed 10 different ones together, so this uses 2 textures, while the Naive approach would have 50 textures in the project just for this. In the time of AI and huge free libraries, being able to pick well is going to be more important than ever.
[h2]Unified, Next generation shader pipeline[/h2]
We always had a history with using custom shader pipelines within Unity, and the past 7-8 years of making custom shaders in engine does really pay off. We started Synthetik 2 with a flexible master shader, which allows us to recolor and damage everything on the fly, however it still required some tranditional painting in softwares like Substance Painter and didn't look as detailed as it could, sometimes looking maybe too juicy or plastic looking.
It took many hours and iterations, we now have all the components of a great texturing job formalized and replicated in real-time in engine, so we now get amazing quality results, without having to do any texture painting at all. We are also able to fully change all colors or damage or material properties in real-time. Here is an example of the new next gen shader:
[previewyoutube]
[/previewyoutube]
(Random video from latest discord stream)
We also employ new texture packing and made node groups which are resuable within shaders, so the new terrain shader, the new prop shader and the remade Unit shader all use the same textures, variables and nodes, making them a very unified pipeline. The rocks as seem before can use the same special texture from the ground layers to create new visual combinations as example. The best thing is that the new shaders require very few textures.
All in all, these new improved workflows make things easier to create, on much higher quality, with better performance and are easier to maintain and scale up.
[h2]Weapons [/h2]
We do not have a big focus on weapons right now as we have a quite huge arsenal already, however the next upcoming weapon is our rendition of the prototype G11, in resistance style. The image is not the latest version but you get an impression of it. It will likely get a feature where active reload enables fully-automatic, while non active reload keeps it in burst mode.
We have also designed resistance faction units for the new base, such as a Osprey inspired aircraft, replacing the old helicopter, a main battle tank and a smaller utility vehicle.
[h2]Networking Infrastructure Changes[/h2]
There are many networking changes in the works, we cannot talk too much about it, but it is a larger endeavor. In the end it should be easier to control and maintain, cost less and have better loading performance.
[h2]Lobby Changes[/h2]
We are also taking the opportunity to change the Lobby behavior. We are adding something similar to a "party" where you will first join the party, then queue for the game, and you will also return to the party after the game, making the matchmaking experience much more streamlined.
You will see people in your party in your UI while inside the base of operations.
The class selection menu is also changed so you can see your party while changing your load-out.
[h2]Divine Loop Blessings[/h2]
You asked for some reward from the Last Defender, and of course something was missing.
In the future, you will gain a choice of 2 divine blessings, similar to how a class evolution would work.
With the new blessings you can start more powerful into loop. There are 8 different blessings, all with simple but useful effects. Some offensive, some defensive, helping certain builds, or in this case, give you a new chance with a new weapon to switch things up.
[h2]Loop Challenges[/h2]
This hasn't been started yet, but the plan is that every map in loop (after the first one) has a cycling challenge modifier. This modifier is always single effect with a very strong implication, so if you want to get far into loop, you need to beat different scenarios. These do not stack but rotate.
One map might have very weak shields, one have no possible healing, or extreme jamming, things that will challenge your entire load-out and build over the duration of the loop.
That's it!
Stay tuned for Update 16 and have fun!
Team FFG
Cinematic Artwork from Happygull
