Tag Archives: unity3D

Coverage Thus Far and Upcoming Interview

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We’re live-streaming an interview with Action Soup Studios this Tuesday at 1 PM Pacific (that’s 2 PM Mountain), here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yc7lIsiOUP4

Here is a compilation of the coverage of Momentum thus far:

RockLeeSmile:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waOzLqj85nE

Cliqist:
http://cliqist.com/2014/11/04/momentum-sphere-lovers/

Gamers Hell:
http://www.gamershell.com/news_171099.html

Gaming Cypher:
http://www.gamingcypher.com/physics-based-platformer-momentum-now-kickstarter/

Dark Side of Gaming:
http://www.dsogaming.com/news/physics-based-platformer-momentum-gets-kickstarter-campaign-public-demo-available-for-download/

Gamasutra:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/pressreleases/229520/Manipulate_3D_Labyrinths__Master_Gravity_in_MomentumPC_Mac__Linux.php

MPOGD:
http://www.mpogd.com/news/?ID=13989

GameTrailers:
http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/a7h8bo/momentum-kickstarter-trailer

ResetMX:
http://www.resetmx.com/videojuegos/momentum-necesita-tu-apoyo-en-kickstarter/

Alpha Beta Gamer:
http://www.alphabetagamer.com/momentum-alpha-demo/

Games Nosh
http://gamesnosh.com/momentum-balances-its-balls/

Gamer Headlines
http://www.gamerheadlines.com/2014/11/get-free-demo-momentum-kickstater/
If you have covered Momentum, and you’re not on this list, let me know and I’ll correct it.

Salt Lake Comic Con

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A reminder: We’re going to be at salt lake comic con today through saturday, so if you’re going, look for us there.
We’ll be at booth 521 in hall C. Right next to artist alley and on the main path. Can’t miss us.
We’ll be there as part of the Utah Games Guild, with these other guys.
Also, heads up, we’ll be launching a Kickstarter and Greenlight in a couple of weeks here, so keep an eye out for that as well.

Tracks

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So the next major hurdle was the tracks. When I made the first set of track pieces, I had little idea of where I was going with it, both stylistically, and technically. With the second track set, I nailed down what I wanted the first world’s tracks to look like, but it left much to be desired in terms of performance. Where I had gone wrong, primarily, was having separate materials for different parts of each piece: The concrete bits had a concrete material, the metal bits had a metal material, etc. While that makes total sense, it’s far more efficient for the engine if you shove all of that into a single material, and have different zones on the texture maps for each different sub-material. That way, it can batch all of that in a single draw call, instead of drawing each material separately. In fact, it cut my draw calls by 6 to 8-fold. Unfortunately, that meant the end result was effectively a brand new track set, even though it looked the same as the last, and therefore I had to re-create every single level I had made prior to then, hence the reason I hadn’t made many in the first place. I knew eventually I had to replace them.

But that’s not the only optimization I did. I also wrote a script that merges the meshes of each track upon level load. So, before the merge, it’s set up as a hierarchy. The rails are children of the bumpers, and the bumpers are children of the road piece. That means that every time I made a change to the transform of the road piece or its parent, (I.E., moved or rotated anything, which is the entire point of the game) that change had to propagate up to 6 more times, which, needless to say, created an unnecessary bottleneck.

So now it’s as efficient as I can think of how to make it presently, without sacrificing the quality of the physics.

First up: environment

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Wall of text incoming.

Holy crap. It took a long time but I’m done with it. So to recap, I had the original background, (the one in the trailer) totally sucked, both stylistically and functionally, so I determined I needed to replace it, but I knew it would take a while, so I made a temporary one, which was in the build at Game Wars. it was mostly functional, but utterly bland, and had entirely too much contrast, to boot.

What I ended up doing was this: In maya, I made about 20 buildings in 3 parts each: A base, a ‘floor’ and a top. I also made 2 special buildings that stand out from the others and aren’t at all copied, particularly, a government-type building and a clock tower. (in-game, the time on that clock is accurate to system time. subtle, but totally awesome) While I was doing that, I also wrote a mel script to take those buildings, and some road pieces and randomly generate from that a city, which I won’t delve into because it was actually a lengthy script. I actually had to generate it in 17 zones because not only was my script inefficient, my buildings prioritized fidelity over performance, given their end-use. Even had they been, though, the total area was about 200×200, (1 square being 1 building, road, or part of a multi-cell building) and 40,000-ish buildings is still a lot of buildings. So once I had the city, I needed to generate a cube map from that, so I rendered out the whole thing one piece at a time, so I could composite them later. Each piece needed multiple passes. Altogether there was about 150 renders that went into the final composite.

Then in Photoshop, I combined and composited all of those renders with a photographic sky, a panorama of the rocky mountains that I took from a hill close to home, and a public domain panorama of New York that I found. Most of the work there was in color correcting everything together and in masking by hand all of the lights in the windows. After all that was done, I could then export it as a cube map to Unity.

Once in Unity, I had to set it up all of the dynamic stuff. Separate from all the other renders, I had rendered a couple images of just a white cube, using the same lighting as the others. This allowed me to easily set up lighting that didn’t match, but closely resembled the background. I couldn’t entirely match it because I’m limited, in Unity, to a single directional light and an ambient term, for performance reasons, but it’s close. Then there’s the clock. Since I have the files that were rendered, I could determine precisely the position of the center of the clock relative to the camera. Since that vector is still valid post-render, I could simply make a little clock out of a couple of quads and a particle material, and place it there, and it’d appear to be on the clock.
After that, there’s the ocean. The ocean itself is just a quad with a pseudo-reflective material on it, then I took an animate tiled texture script, (just increments the offset of the texture by some vector every so often) re-tooled it to work with any given texture property, and applied it to the bump property, to simulate waves. Back when I exported the cube map, (as 6 separate .png files) I gave it an alpha, which doesn’t matter as far as the actual sky-box material is concerned, but it allowed me to make a cube that sits in front of the ocean and acts as a mask for it. A pretty neat, if totally ghetto solution.
Then I just needed to optimize the rain I had in the original environment, and I was done.

A quick update before a barrage of more

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So I haven’t posted in a while. A lot of stuff has happened since then. I’ll split the progress into `smaller` dev-blog-type posts. Otherwise, though we demoed at the Indie game night this past weekend, which was great. You can read others’ write up of that night here and here. If you don’t know, Utah Indie Games is a community of local independent developers, and meet up about every other month or so.

Next up, we’re going to Salt Lake Comic Con! we’ll be there all 3 days. (September 4 – 6) Be sure to check us out there. We’ll be in the Utah Games Guild booth, along with a bunch of other local devs. We’ve got a bunch more stuff in the works to talk about in the future, but more on that later.