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Saturday, May 31, 2014

Danger Zone

Well maybe not as dangerous as annoying.

Recently Skyride has been dealing with a lot of changes.  Cryengine has updated to a subscription program where you can pay $9 a month and get greater access to their game engine.  This also gives the developers using it a deal where crytek (makers of cryengine) won't take any royality (money) away from you once you sell your game.  I think with the old free version of the game engine they take 20% of your royality which IS HUGE for little indie developers like us.  So I coughed up the cash and am so far 90% happy with the outcome.

With this new version crytek has changed a lot of the way their engine worked on the past which, to keep this rant short, has caused me to go back to what I had already done and fix a lot of what was working in the old engine but not in the new one.  Here's a example or two:

The first issue that I recognized with the engine were shadows.

 The top picture is the old game engine and the bottom on is new game engine.



The engine seemed to re-calibrate the way it processes light and made everything super dark.  After a little forum Q and A I got it fixed and then came the next issue; lights:


None of my lights were....well....lighting anything.  Again, after some Q and A found the reason why and fixed that as well.  Now everything is pretty much back up and running.  A few bugs here and there but with time, Crytek has said they are working hard at fixing them and should have a new patch in about a week.

Apparently this new lighting system is next gen stuff and better than the last so we will see.  Much more control over lighting than before so that's good.

So my life lately has been fixing things that were already fixed.  That's fine though.  Now that I have main street lit up a bit I will start working on the ground/road for the street along with lamps, props, vending carts, store signs, etc.  Hopefully in a few weeks/end of june I should have something to show you all.

Texturing has become more streamlined and I think I've found a way to get high res textures on my buildings without sacraficing frame rates.  I might have to re-do some of the rundown buildings I previously did for frame rate issues but other than that, things are going as planned.

I've also added glossiness to the buildings to make them look wet.  Here's a shot from the new game engine showing one of the buildings looking glossy:


Luis, the games composer, has also been making some KICK BUTT music lately. We have finish 8 tracks so far and plan to have 40-60 tracks in total for the game.  Here's a new song work in progress that I love.  It's a battle song for when you start winning in a fight as a character:



So there you have it.  We keep chugging away and even though I've been slacking on my end for progress, I'm gonna kick it up into overdrive this month and get as much as I can done.  Hope all of you are doing well.  See you later ScreenSlavers.



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