Vapourware Sui Generis + Exanima Early Access

[Yaar Podshipnik]

You know, this is _almost_ like reverse of Star Citizen. They release just as slow, but they release. Promises they make are kept (eventually), and the delivered results are really, really awesome. The scope creep is very similar, but most of the things I saw already added make the game better, as opposed to crap designed to milk whales. And, most importantly, they don't ask for money all the fucking time.

 

[Erikkolai]

I've finished clearing the Archives (sans Sir), the Crossroads, and the Foundry. Is there any significant story-related content beyond this point?

Considering whether it's worth proceeding, or if I should put the game on the shelf for now and revisit when it's closer to completion.

 

[Technomancer]

I've finished clearing the Archives (sans Sir), the Crossroads, and the Foundry. Is there any significant story-related content beyond this point?

Considering whether it's worth proceeding, or if I should put the game on the shelf for now and revisit when it's closer to completion.

Explore Market maybe? Though if you skipped the demon you should probably beware...

 

[Technomancer]

22/6/20

This week Madoc focused on getting the new renderer more complete so that we could show you some screenshots like we promised. The updated renderer improves on many things, better shadows, reflections, shading, an updated material system that's more efficient and easier to use, greatly improved procedural materials for characters and items, better performance and it's fully programmable in real-time, which is great for development.

But the biggest improvement is the new GI (Global Illumination) system. To us GI is less about fancy graphics and more of a requirement, which is why we always had at least a crude version of it. It solves the important problem of what to do when part of a scene is in shadow, without it things would either be completely black, or inexplicably lit, with ugly flat light showing even where there should be none at all.

AO (ambient occlusion) can help somewhat with things looking flat when not directly lit, but it doesn't solve the problem of darkness not existing, or ambient light passing straight through even walls. Games often used baked GI, but this means hours of baking lighting every time you make even a small change to content, making development and maintaining content a nightmare. Importantly, it also can't deal with dynamic lights or objects, and would require a huge amount of data for a large game world.

Our existing GI couldn't deal with more open or larger environments, and it still looked quite flat, and often too dark. In the arena hub we're showing you screenshots of today, we previously used a combination of baked AO and hand placed secondary "ambient lights" to brighten up the areas that were too dark. This is the only content in the game to use these things, as it's quite brightly lit it just looked quite bad without these additions. But this was only an experiment, it is not a practical solution.

The new GI doesn't suffer from any of these limitations. It simulates light bouncing around the environment and adds lots of depth and detail in shadowed areas and makes things realistically bright without adding light where there shouldn't be any. Most importantly it's 100% dynamic and real-time.

Here's a basic example of what the GI does alone, the light coming through the door is reflected on the nearby environment:


GI Basics
Indirect light coming through a doorway.


And here is a screenshot using the new renderer. There's still a couple of things missing, though not much now, and we still need to update various assets for it.


New Renderer and GI
New renderer and GI system. Still a few bits to do and assets to update, but almost there!


For comparison, here is the same scene with the GI replaced with a fixed ambient term:


GI off comparison
The same scene rendered with just a fixed ambient term instead of the new GI system.


There's lots more cool stuff to show, but it would be better to do it in a video, so we'll try to get one up when things are a bit further along.


Have a great week!
-the BM team

 

[Technomancer]

29/6/20

This week has been mostly about making the new renderer feature complete and fully functional. We have a new workflow for materials, particularly metals, and we've been tuning and balancing everything for the most correct results and intuitive workflow, while also not breaking legacy content. We've got other important features like subsurface scattering and displacement mapping in, and our complete solution for reflections. The dreaded aliasing and rendering artefacts that pushed us to do this in the first place are happily completely gone.


A simple screenshot this week, it's an older asset and not one of our best, but the tarnished brass presents a perfect case for the difficulties with metals. We're really happy with the results, and there's clearly a huge visual improvement over the current rendering. In the screenshot you can also see the improved shadow quality and the new local reflections.



New Metal Rendering
Updated metal on the new renderer. Just using this old armour as a test case because tarnished brass is one of most technically challenging cases.


This complete renderer overhaul wasn't exactly on our roadmap, but it includes many things that we knew we had to do at some point, it solves a bunch of problems and really improves our workflow. Now we're back on completing our new procedural material system, which not only supports the new weapons and other items, but will improve all character graphics and also performance.

Renderer work aside, we're continuing work on various fronts, now focusing a bit more on the upcoming arena update. We're integrating new gameplay features and improving and redesigning various things like the user interface. Additionally, new items and new arenas are on the way. Work also continues on the story, a big new level is actively being worked on, a lot of early game assets have received a big update and lots of improvements are still being made.

Have a great week!
-the BM team

 

[Technomancer]

6/7/20

This week we've been porting our procedural material system to the new renderer, updating the systems and tools behind it as well our regular non procedural texturing tools. We're redeveloping our character texturing on the new systems. With all this back-end stuff updated now we've got an amazing workflow where we can work on the assets, the procedural systems and the renderer all at once with real-time results. We already have metals working well, so we've been doing other materials like skin and cloth which have their own challenges. The results so far look great, a huge improvement over what we currently have in game.

Updating character materials is something we thought we would do at a later date, but as we ended up completely overhauling the renderer to deal with various issues, it's just easier to update this stuff now than maintain the old. There's also a number of graphical updates for early story content that were not supposed to show up until the following (more story focused) update, but they're close to completion now so they'll be coming in this one too.

Everything else proceeds as normal, there's a bunch of arena and story content being developed in parallel, Zeth is working on the 3rd tournament armour and Bethain is making some new and updated music.

Have a great week!
-the BM team

 

[Technomancer]

13/7/20

This week Madoc's been ironing out the last kinks in the new renderer, testing many materials, tuning how light sources work etc. There is still some work to do in general, but the point was to get everything where visually nothing will change. This means the art guys can make and finalise assets, materials and textures etc. without worrying about Madoc making one more tweak and changing how their work looks. Basically we're making the switch and we can get on with properly producing complete content again.

Rendering quality is even more improved, everything looks so much better than it did, we're super excited to see it all come together. This did turn out to be a bigger effort than intended, but when we do something we like to do it properly. It's easy to think that graphics don't matter all that much, but when everything looks much more realistic and true to life it can have a big effect on immersion, and that's something we care about very much. We really think this will have a huge impact on the game.

Our procedural item system has been mostly ported over now. The new procedural weapons look really great, we're not quite there with all the character stuff but it's close and it looks amazing so far. We're also expanding the system with more material layers and types which allows us to introduce some new items, and a new very thoroughly researched colouring system that is much more versatile and designed to support dyes.

Next week we'll hopefully have some juicy screenshots of updated character graphics for you.

Have a great week!
-the BM team

 

[Technomancer]

20/7/20

Work continues on updating our procedural materials and systems. Between the renderer update, updating assets and the new procedural material systems and workflow, we're able to get some amazing results. When we first did our procedural materials we were basically working blind, but now we can create very detailed and complex procedural materials interactively and then port the results directly into the real-time system. We also came up with some processing tricks that hugely improved overall image quality, reducing aliasing while giving better definition and sharpness to the result.

Here's an example of a top condition, top quality piece of armour. The character asset itself is untouched and the texture resolution is exactly the same, this is just how much better everything looks with the new system. It's a simple screenshot of the in game asset, no tricks.


New Procedural Steel
This is what a top-quality and condition armour looks like with the renderer and procedural material update. Same in-game asset as before, same amount of textures at the same resolution, no tricks.


For comparison here is the same armour in the most damaged condition:


Procedural Steel Damaged
New procedural steel material for items, this time in the lowest condition level.


Lacquered and painted metals are also looking really good, we've got some really nice colourful glossy paints that chip and scratch and fade with damage.

We've completely remastered our chain too, making some proper authentic-looking riveted chain out of 15 thousand high poly rings using our tools, which we've been improving along the way. Once again the results are clearly in a different league to what we currently have in-game:


Updated Chain Armour
New chain, we tried to get that authentic riveted chain look. We used our tools to generate the chain using 15'000 high poly rings.


We started updating our terrain assets too, as we'll be increasing terrain resolution (also procedurally textured) and adding displacement mapping to it. We're remastering the most crucial and difficult core assets like rocks, most more recent assets were done with our tools anyway and will be easy to update.

Have a great week!
-the BM team

 

[agris]

Do they have old renderer / material pipeline comparison shots of that plate, or any of them?

 

[Technomancer]

Do they have old renderer / material pipeline comparison shots of that plate, or any of them?

Nope. Just launch the game.

 

[agris]

I don’t own it. Is the difference significant?

 

[Technomancer]

Pirate it then for a ride. Not my place to judge the difference because I'm playing on minimal settings. Looks a bit better, since many models are straight from 2014.

That whole updated render stuff is an unplanned delay. It really is not about graphics, they just decided to do it along the way. It started as an initiative to fix some long-standing issues that always accumulate during development and optimize the game even further.

 

[agris]

That’s fair. I would like to buy the game, but given the impressions posted so far I know I won’t be able to dig into it in a satisfactory manner. Too infrequent continuous slugs of free time. I won’t be able to enjoy it in 10 - 40 min segments.

 

[Technomancer]

I won’t be able to enjoy it in 10 - 40 min segments.

That's like the purpose of the arena. Next update will overhaul it into a complete game mode.

 

[Technomancer]

27/7/20

Now that the core renderer functionality is in place and we're very happy with it, we're gradually turning back from this rather larger detour and returning to our original goals. With procedural materials becoming much more prominent, now being used not just for apparel, but also weapons, and in the future, possibly more items, one of our goals was to make the system much more efficient so that it can handle the huge amounts of items and characters that are uniquely textured.

This large amount of unique materials can have a big impact on performance, resource consumption and loading times. The new system we're developing is much more tightly integrated with the core engine for faster rendering; it recycles and caches resources, and creates procedural items on demand rather than at load time. This means we can support massive amounts of items and characters in a streaming way and with generally better performance.

The new procedural system is not only more efficient and produces better results visually, but can support more complex items with more materials and more detailed modifiers. Whereas previously for armor we only had one modifier that included quality and condition, we now have build quality, condition and other specific traits that function independently. This supports some important future mechanics and adds more depth and variety to itemization. This also comes with a procedural description system that can combine hundreds of phrases to describe items more meaningfully than the boring and brief "A sword" type descriptions that are common in the game now.

Last week we showed you a screenshot of some material development for this new procedural system. Now we have these new systems mostly up and running so we can show you an in-game character. There's quite a lot of rendering quality improvement to be seen here, including our new subsurface scattering shader for human skin and other fleshy things.

Have a great week!
-the BM team

 

[Mr. Magniloquent]

Looks nice. I recently upgraded my computer significantly, so I look forward to loading this up and seeing how it performs. My old rig could run everything smoothly until late 2017--then I basically went down the lowest settings. Hopefully I can get this running on Linux.

 

[Artyoan]

Bought this for $12 a couple weeks ago. Had not even heard of it til I saw it on sale and did a quick search. For as cheap as it is, its hard not to recommend. The Arena mode was great and while combat takes quite a while to feel right, its worth it. The dungeon possesses the tone and tension as a modern Diablo should have, but the checkpoint save system is weak. Still, as a sort of testing ground game, I got my money's worth. I'll likely be bringing it up as a flawed gem in future recommendations.

 

[Yaar Podshipnik]

27/7/20

Now that the core renderer functionality is in place and we're very happy with it, we're gradually turning back from this rather larger detour and returning to our original goals. With procedural materials becoming much more prominent, now being used not just for apparel, but also weapons, and in the future, possibly more items, one of our goals was to make the system much more efficient so that it can handle the huge amounts of items and characters that are uniquely textured.

This large amount of unique materials can have a big impact on performance, resource consumption and loading times. The new system we're developing is much more tightly integrated with the core engine for faster rendering; it recycles and caches resources, and creates procedural items on demand rather than at load time. This means we can support massive amounts of items and characters in a streaming way and with generally better performance.

The new procedural system is not only more efficient and produces better results visually, but can support more complex items with more materials and more detailed modifiers. Whereas previously for armor we only had one modifier that included quality and condition, we now have build quality, condition and other specific traits that function independently. This supports some important future mechanics and adds more depth and variety to itemization. This also comes with a procedural description system that can combine hundreds of phrases to describe items more meaningfully than the boring and brief "A sword" type descriptions that are common in the game now.

Last week we showed you a screenshot of some material development for this new procedural system. Now we have these new systems mostly up and running so we can show you an in-game character. There's quite a lot of rendering quality improvement to be seen here, including our new subsurface scattering shader for human skin and other fleshy things.

Have a great week!
-the BM team

Love the armor in this game so much! No BS bikini/titty armor.

 

[Technomancer]

3/8/20

This week we've been optimising and cleaning up the new renderer, trying to fill the gaps and adding some new features too. We have to provide various quality levels for different hardware, and we've done a lot of optimisations for everything from integrated graphics to the best GPUs.

One thing in particular that needed attention was sampling for shadows and GI, which have varying quality requirements at different times. We came up with a very elegant and efficient solution which we're very happy with. Before the new renderer, we were adding a new higher quality setting for people who were put off by the sometimes grainy shadows, now we have much better results and it's faster. The new "low" setting is comparable in quality to the current "high".

One of the new arenas is to feature vegetation, so that's one of the new features we've been working on. Here's a screenshot of a tree in the new renderer:


Vegetation Rendering
We just put features for vegetation in the new renderer. We're working on lots of vegetation assets, and we've established some good methods for dense vegetation with good performance.


We're working on many vegetation models, and something like this still needs a little work, but a lot of thought and care has been put into making dense looking vegetation without breaking the performance bank. The view from below is to show the back-scattering in the lighting. Placed in an environment, we'll also be taking advantage of our new GI, which will make it look even better.


In the meantime work continues on new arenas, many new items, some future content for the story and also updating our core character assets to streamline further development, solve many issues and support new items. As part of this effort we just improved our skinning, which not only produces better results but is almost completely automatic. This will be a huge help going forward.


Have a great week!
-the BM team

 

[4249]

Wowee, low is the new high! No more grainy shadows (sometimes)! Motherfucking vegetation up your ass!

Oh and maybe some content if we have time from all the optimizations.

 

[Technomancer]

Yeah, this is getting old. The funny thing is this arena update was supposed to be out fast but then the whole tech update happened. But it needed to be done, no other way to escape from many of the issues without major system update.

 

[Lyre Mors]

Seriously, why can't they just complete the level designs and make the campaign finishable, then fiddle with all this other shit later? Totally absurd and very frustrating as someone who got this waaaay back when it first hit early access. It's damn near insulting at this point.

 

[4249]

I mean I could kind of understand it if the project is purely a labor-of-love kind of thing completely on their own money. But they got 160k£ on the kickstarter campaign and are what, 6 years behind on schedule? A sane person (or if they had someone giving them hard restraints on this shit) would finish at least something, be it the "prelude" or whatever, with something that is good enough and then think of optimizing, but I guess in this case it's just pure unrestrained autism at work.

 

[Technomancer]

I mean I could kind of understand it if the project is purely a labor-of-love kind of thing completely on their own money. But they got 160k£ on the kickstarter campaign and are what, 6 years behind on schedule?

The original game was high fantasy and was severely downscaled in scope and quality. Once they realized they won't make it in time anyway, a year later they asked the backers what would they want to be done with the game. To continue working on original SG idea and release a lesser game sooner or make a prelude first and test systems in Exanima while raising the production quality to unreasonable heights for an indie game. Most backers voted the second. So they are not behind anything. Original SG is dead and they are free to make SG mark II for however long they wish.

 

[Strange Fellow]

And we can expect a similar poll for Exanima any day now.