TaleSpire

A slice of TaleSpire
over 4 years ago – Mon, Nov 18, 2019 at 06:18:37 AM

Update time!

This week Ree did more coding on the  atmosphere system and then turned his hand to the GM Layer. The GM Layer  is a view a GM can switch to see notes, hidden assets and other goodies  that make running a campaign easier whilst also making sure it doesn't  get in the way of gameplay.

Whilst there is a lot to do and it's just the start, here is a gif of the experiments with that overlay.

Right  now it's only showing names but the other features are already in the  works and there will be a writeup on those once it's a bit more fleshed  out.

I've kept grinding away on the data side of things  and the building is now working well at the data layer. I rewrote the  tile & prop asset loading so that zones of the board can request  loading of multiple assets as a single job and spread the instantiation  of the tile visuals over multiple frames.

The reason for this  is that there is a limit to how many tiles we can spawn per frame  without slowing everything down to unacceptable levels. However, as  board changes are going to be arriving from up to 16 people at any given  moment we want to be able to apply all these changes to the local  representation of the board without those delays.

To do this we  have a data representation of the board we can update very quickly (even  when the changes are very large) and then the game manifests those  changes at its leisure. This isn't to say it will appear laggy, 'at its  leisure' is still very fast for humans, but a slightly more leisurely  pace for your laptop.

Ree and I also took another look at  the tile cutaway effect. This one is super important not just to reveal  the part of the building you are looking into, but also to cut down  walls that would get in the way of controlling your creatures.

We  found an issue in the approach we had chosen (and had seen other use)  when the tiles have intersecting meshes. It's a simple problem but will  make this post quite long so check out the dev post  here.

Regardless here is a gif of a working approach (NOTE: this is not TaleSpire, it'll look good when we remake this for Unity and get real assets in there!)

Cool!  Well, that's all for now. Thanks again to all of you who've been  reaching out here and on our Discord channel, it's really fun to  natter about this stuff with you all.

Until the next one,

Ciao.

The scarecrow is settling in
over 4 years ago – Mon, Nov 18, 2019 at 06:18:26 AM

The vegetables are safe. Of course, nothing else is.

End of week update and a natter about Mini screenshots
over 4 years ago – Mon, Nov 18, 2019 at 06:18:01 AM

Allo folks!

Work went well this week.

I'm currently setting up code so we validate the network building is giving the same results on each player's machine. Jonny has been back working on camera and input management code, along with new work on the asset pipeline. On the asset production side of things, we have a new Norse-style warrior and a whole new set of tiles for making ruins in the works (pics coming soon).

Actually, I wanted to talk about assets a little this time too.

We will be making asset packs both during the Early Access and after release. We aim to get to the point where you can rely on them coming out at fixed increments of time (for example, every 3 weeks).

We have a fun balance to find here as we want to show you WIP stuff but we don't want to confuse people into thinking that, just because the asset looks ready, that it is coming in the next update.

In short, an asset might be from a pack that's for multiple months away or the pack that would be coming out the next week. Where possible we'll keep you in the loop of which is which :) If there is confusion around a particular asset or you need some info do feel free to reach out to us, we'll definitely try to help clear stuff up where we can.

We've got a pretty hefty task ahead when it comes to proving that we can make this work from the asset front. It's one of the areas where valid concerns have been raised in other parts of the VTT ecosystem. To us, given the skill composition of the team and the contacts we have outside of it, it's not been the part of the project we have ever been worried about being able to deliver, however, we still need to show that it can be done!

Early access is going to give us lots of time to find a fine-tune what is going to work best and we are glad to have you along for the ride.

In totally unrelated news, Unity has uploaded a huge pile of videos from their most recent conferences and so now I've got about 11 hours of content queued up to absorb. Thank goodness for playback speed controls on youtube :D

All right folks, back in a few days with more.

Ciao

Manticore: Noun (plural manticores)
over 4 years ago – Mon, Nov 18, 2019 at 06:17:52 AM

Hello, again folks!

We are still hard at work on TaleSpire and so it's that time again that we talk a bit about what we are up to.

First off, as some of this will be technical, let's start with some bits from the art side of the project

First, we have a warrior from a future Norseman set. He is no doubt going to have to deal with that frost giant from a previous update!

We also have two shots of the manticore mini. First is the WIP version:

... and then the final version in-game.

Great stuff as always from Jason there.

On the technical side, Jonny has kept working on input and the emote system. The emote system is what allows things like the little animations like this...

...which we call active emotes. However, it's also will be what lets you have passive emotes. These are emotes which play continuously and can 'stack', by which we mean you can have multiple playing at the same time. This allows for things like poison or blindness indicators should your game call for that. If you like the classic RPG look you might really like this feature. For those not as familiar here is an old screenshot of some effect indicators from Final Fantasy 9.

Regarding input, the main focus has been solidifying a first version that we can then iterate upon. We have moved to the new Unity's new input system and so some of the time has been finding the best approaches to using that in its current state.

I've carried on with work on fundamental board behavior. I've been writing tests to prove that the network sync of the build actions does indeed result in the same data layout on each machine. This allows us to send only the instruction of what to do across the internet (e.g. copy these 5000 tiles) rather than having to send all the tile info itself.

With all those changes landing I've been able to look into serialization (writing board info to files and/or the format to send it to the server). Because of all the data changes behind the scenes, this was far easier than it was in the Beta.

My focus for the next week is rewriting the code that handles tiles and props which have state (For example, doors and chests need to remember if they are open or closed). The first task is just working out how the data will be stored and then I'll be looking into how to hook it into the board synchronizing code.

I've also been aiming the little grey cells at the issue of 3D fog of war. We need to change this to be line-of-sight based but this has the potential to be pretty expensive both memory and computation wise. During the last week, I think I have come up with a simple way to handle this which will also work well on older machines but it needs some prototyping. To that end, I'm going to be streaming some very basic experiments around the idea this Wednesday. If you'd like to tune in you can find the event here.

Caveats:

• It's going to be a coding stream
• I won't be using TaleSpire or Unity for the tests as I'm faster in my own tools
• All the visuals will be VERY different when ported to TaleSpire

If all that sounds good to you then feel free to stop by :)

That's all for today. To play us out Jason has recorded a halloween'y version of the 'Tavern (Somber)' and 'Blood Harvest' tracks from the soundtrack. 

Seeya next time

TaleSpire Update - Lighting the way
over 4 years ago – Tue, Nov 12, 2019 at 02:12:01 PM

Heya folks, 

It feels like a good time for a little update so let's get cracking!

First off Ree has been making great progress on a bunch of systems but especially those around lighting. Here is a little gif where you can see some experiments in controlling the new day/night cycle.

Those in the alpha will be happy to know that this fixes the long-standing lighting issues we have had that we kept saying we would fix 'soon' :p. You will also notice that the last two images in this post are not yet on this build of the engine and so aren't yet benefiting from these changes.

Next, the work on the camera controller has continued. Exploring how to best navigate around in our new system has been an interesting and iterative process and in this next gif, you can see the introduction of tilt control which is something people have asked for for a long time. It will offer a limited range of motion but it should be there. We still need to nail a version of vertical navigation that feels just right, but that too is on the way.

I've been continuing my work on the data side of the game. Undo/redo has solidified and so I took a couple of days to write tests and fix the bugs they exposed. My next tasks are all still around this theme. I'm looking at compact means of expressing selections of tiles at points in the history, the code that guarantees the order of applied changes for all connected players, and lastly on tile and prop loading.

On the asset side, progress is very good too. I'd like to show off a couple of really cool creatures entering the fray.

First off a mighty frost giant...

...and next this glorious monk

I hope this little update finds you all well, and we look forward to giving you more news as it happens.

Goodnight