Rampant Gaming!

[Coyote]

Just crossed a major technical milestone this week. One I wanted to cross quite a while ago, but Day Job Extended Crunch and a number of false starts and failed experiments prevented me from doing so.

Switching from Torque to Unity, pretty much out whole pipeline for content generation for Frayed Knights has had to change. This isn't a bad thing - honestly, FK1 had a very frustration, horrible pipeline that made it very slow and painful to do things like... build a fully working dungeon.

So my big goal with this switch was to clean up the tools path in all kinds of problem areas and build tools & automated processes (yeah, boring, I know...) to make things a lot easier this next time around. You know, spending a bit more time up-front to sharpen the axe, that kind of thing.

The big trick was the dungeons. Making big dungeons that rendered fast. With lots of detail. And I wanted a tool to allow me to do it quickly - so that not only could we get work done in less time than it took for Frayed Knights 1, but so that we could spend some of that time-savings to improve the quality and coolness of things.

As of last night - we're not exactly there, yet, but after lots of failed experiments (even trying a Minecraft-style approach at one point), we've got the core of the tools and content generation operational! While we still have the power to 'swap in' custom geometry for more complex and detailed areas from a modeling tool, we've got our own editor that can create dungeons with all the complexity (and MORE) of an Ultima Underworld type dungeon really easily. We're talking slopes, ledges, diagonal walls, even areas that pass over each other - of arbitrary size and depth. And it's rendering (so far) really well, in spite of very little effort done to optimize things.

While there's a lot of work still to be done, the "core" of the world-building tool is now fully functional and it works well. All our high-risk items with this move to Unity are now resolved. We've got an architecture that will work (and looks cool!), and a tool that can literally allow me to do what used to be WEEKS of tedious work building dungeons for Frayed Knights, and do it in a single evening! I get to spend the rest of the time doing the "cool stuff" that will make the sequels awesome.

Anyway, it's probably meaningless to most people reading this ("What? You made a tool and got your content pipeline functional? WTF?") as it's "black triangle" stuff. But I'm pretty excited on my end. I've got worlds to build...
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Rampant Games
Games With Personality!

[Darklord]

Awesome news, I'm still really excited for the sequel, I must replay FK1 at some point.

Daniel.

[Coyote]

Yeah, the decision to switch to Unity was a hard one. I'd always intended to basically keep right on rolling with the same code base & everything for FK2 and FK3. But between the engine-level bugs and obsolescence of the engine we've had to deal with, the technical limitations, and the frustration of getting what was supposed to be an "easy" Mac port done... I decided it was for the best, even though I knew it was going to be a serious impact.

I keep waiting for the honeymoon to end with Unity - it always does with any new technology, when you have to deal with its limitations and failures. But *so far* (knock on wood) it's been up to the task of everything I've thrown at it... and what I need that wasn't in the core Unity package has been available as a third-party plugin.

It's not exactly starting from scratch, but it feels like it sometimes. But this little internal milestone makes me feel a lot better about the decision. Frayed Knights 2 will be a lot better than Frayed Knights 1 in hopefully every way.
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Rampant Games
Games With Personality!

[Bad Sector]

This "room builder" tool you describe sounds interesting. I think that the approach used by Tomb Raider games is slightly better than Underworld's though (basically, you design 2D rooms like in UW, with slopes, corner and such - and cell corner offsets in later versions - but you can also stack them together by connecting floors with ceilings to make "3D" environments) and still faster than modelling by hand.

I toyed a bit with a room editor a while ago and it was interesting. I think that once i have plugins in Runtime World that can specify new entity types (technically Runtime World can handle different geometry types, it is just that i've only implemented brushes and -lately- static meshes/user entities) to make a TR-like "grid room" entity for making squarish rooms. It'll help with making fast layouts and detailing them with brushes and meshes (and lightmaps).

How many things do you have to rewrite/remake with switch to Unity? Does this room editor of yours export to some standard mesh (like OBJ, FBX, 3DS or whatever) or is loaded from some custom C# script? I always say that at some point i want to make a Unity importer for Runtime World, but in reality i haven't even seen how that might be possible (i just assume that in the worst case, i'll simply make a FBX or 3DS with a nice polygon soup ).
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~bs~

[Darklord]

Anything that makes you enjoy your work more has to be a good thing, you've shown you have some really great ideas where RPG's are concerned, I look forward to whatever comes next.

Daniel.