Means: graphic engine new faces and changes to the booster

[Chrisax]

Friday with Means - March 13th, 2009

Friday the 13th...Oh noes!

It was an unusual Friday in that there were no disasters today. Normally I can count on some kind of explosion at about 3pm every Friday...but silence...only the tapping keys of artists and devs weaving magical notum dreams for the future.

Soon:

I'm glad we didn't put out the perk reset npc last week as it would have broken all your characters. It is now working correctly and should be getting it on TestLive early next week together with the 12 man instance for testing...along with another raft small changes like:

• New "team" specific chat channels for the Battlestations.
  Battlestations working correctly again without CS help.
  New PVP fears working again.
  Orbital Strikes only hitting ONCE inside a period of time...no more stacking.
  Various small adjustments to the booster ie: more convenience adjustments to the alien snare towers.
  Some more new exploit fixes.

The Engine:

I haven't spoken about the engine for awhile...as it is difficult to make code optimization interesting...I only listen in those meeting because I have to. The coders are working hard at optimizing the new engine..as currently it is an "all features on full" affair that provides all features...but poor framerate. Optimizations that were missing from "old" AO are being looked into..like mesh instancing (load that tree once with a single call...and populate it out at no real framerate loss) was one aspect of the coder work this week. They were very excited to have 500 Turbine mesh's on the screen at once without significant issues. I'm going to assume this is a good thing...I sometimes don't always get those "coder moments". At any rate, an effect system is now working and we can begin to start producing some new effects, everything is being rendered...now optimization and the grunt work of producing a great number of effects can begin. Both these are going to take time...but we'll keep at it.

There will of course be some graphical updates with the new engine...the full extent of which isn't fully decided. New trees to freshen up the outdoor environments are definitely coming. Character bodies are going to be "smoothed" and better optimized for animation to lose some of the nasty poly issues. One test in progress at the moment is new character heads...AO has a huge number of these...so we are currently working on a "work in progress" opifex female head as a test case for possible production of new heads.

(Click for full size pictures)

FIRST SHOT


Edit: A FEW HOURS LATER

(Work in progress...)

Edit: LIKE TWO DAYS LATER

Edit: A FEW DAYS LATER

(Click for full size pictures)

I imagine it is unlikely we will simply replace all the heads in game as all of us have some attachment to these...but more likely offer a choice to move to a "new" head if we want...and remove the old ones from character creation so all new characters will get new heads. Like I said...this is in the early phases...and not final yet...but exciting so I wanted to share an image with you for this week.

Have a great weekend!

Colin "Means" Cragg

[Chrisax]

Updates the post with a new version of the face. It's really a work in progress. A few hours between them.

[Rulzern]

I'd hit it!

[Mrfreeman]

you'd hit anything in a thong rulz ;P

[Elrojo]

i cant believe it took a few hours to turn the head slightly to the left. hope the game runs faster

[Chrisax]

A few hours is the time between the pictures. I can't say how long changes took and what else they did during this time by the way.

Anyhow, if you look well, you'll see many changes were made. And subtle adjustments are the longer ones to perform.

The face is less round. Hair is not implemented the same way. Nose is a bit thinner. Ears are more pointy. Eyes are smaller and the look of her eyes is smarter. The inferior lip is thinner, and the upper one more visible and better shaped. (TBH, the character looks less "stupid" now.)

Anyhow, this is a work in progress and the final result will be different.

[faros1978]

, gimmie asap pls

[noobas]

I hope they make buffs and healing nano effects les graphics intensive.

The buffs totally obscure vision.

If they were 10% the size on the sreen I'd be happy. As it stands I don't play with nano effects enabled since they take up WAY too much vision space. If they were smaller I could enable them, and use them to duel better.

nano effects of dof or moonmist, etc.

[Alphacenta]

I hope they make buffs and healing nano effects les graphics intensive.

The buffs totally obscure vision.

If they were 10% the size on the sreen I'd be happy. As it stands I don't play with nano effects enabled since they take up WAY too much vision space. If they were smaller I could enable them, and use them to duel better.

nano effects of dof or moonmist, etc.

No offense but how do you time ANYTHING at all in pvp? o.O I have no idea how I could come even close to surviving alphas and doing alphas, without having visual effects on.

[Chrisax]

Visual nano effects have always been a concern. Put it simple:

- without them, you can't always know what is happening, like seeing if a mob (or a player) is rooted or not. This can simply kills you sometimes.

- with them, sometimes, you really don't see what happens because they are too many (and some of them are too similar to each other, and possible the same) and they mask the scene around you.

When AI was released, all the aliens used to cast nanos when rushing to cities defenders. This was removed short after as everyone complained they couldn't see anything. (That was true.) Now you have no idea of what an alien is doing or not or if it is buffed or not. It doesn't matter a lot in this case. But in other situation, it's more annoying.

There is no perfect answer to this concern, except figuring out the "perfect" animations... but do they only exist?!

[noobas]

yea, like I said, I think the "perfect nano effect would be similar to what we have, but occupy only 10% of the space (on screen) as it does now.

lups: if I knew what all the effects were and what they looked like, my win rate would double.
It's very hard to time anything. so, a tactic I use sometimes is to make myself unkillable until I can find a weakness, then, I try to exploit that.

Often, there isn't time to do that, so I attempt to anticipate what my opponent is doing. for example, when I fight an advy, I know that they cycle dof/ limber, so I try to guess if they will pop limber first in order to fool me (advy ma always pop dof at start of fight, so when my dof is about to run out, I pop moonmist, to try to get the advantage)

against other profs it's sometimes harder, particularly trox keeper, enf, sold, MA.

The plan is usually against enf to watch my NCU, and as soon as I see slowdown, I spam stuns and fear and all evade perks. sometimes though, slowdown never comes, and I'm dead because I didn't pop my evade perks but they used MR without slowdown.

Against sold is easy. macro timers for TMS, and hit em with everythingat 1:18.

Trox MA is tough, but the perks are slow, which is usually why I can survive an MR alpha.

trox keeper is tricky. I need more practice, not enough of them around who are good pvper's right now. I used to fight healaura, and the general method was to just cycle SA, AS, heal, dof, limber. But, I've realized that keeper static AR plus MR = dead MA if they can get all their attacks off. so I dunno about that.

[Chrisax]

Edited the first post with the last version of the face. Much closer to the final aspect wanted.


Note: some of you that played with or used 3D modeling and rendering software may wonder why it is so long to improve a new face.

First, if you really worked with such software, you know that faces models are always a difficult job that requires a lot of attempts and tweaks before getting to what you want.

Second, but most important: here, we are not dealing with "a face in a modeling software"... this face must look nice and work well in a graphic engine in a 3D real-time game... This is a totally different work than "just" making a nice model. 8)



Side note: if you want to play with modeling, rendering, etc 3D software, and, for some obscure reason, don't have a 4 000 US $ Autodesk 3ds Max 2009 (without options), or a 6 500 US $ Autodesk Maya with all options (really guys, I don't understand why you didn't buy them already!), you can use Blender, a free and well-done piece of software: http://www.blender.org/