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offgridthegame · 8 years ago

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Sprint Update - 27.01.17 - Voron-Oi-Oi-Oi

Hello folks! We hope you have had a good start to 2017 and are fully recovered from the post holiday slump! It has been a pretty busy start to the year for us. We have built a whole new system for mission selection, added new characters and missions, and all the while been busing doing release planning and following up on biz dev.

Rigi.py

We rigged up a new character and have been working up some new content.

There is a fantastic python script available to take the standard Rigify add-on in blender. It gives you the ability to to switch between the tools needed for animating in Blender and alternatively stripping the export down to just what is needed for importing into Mecanim for setting up with Unity’s humanoid system. We won’t say any more but if you use Rigify and Unity this will make your life sooo much easier!

You can grab the script from here:

https://github.com/trynyty/Rigify_DeformBones/blob/master/Rigify4Mecanim.py

LevelKit

The LevelKit has had a bunch more time put into in this sprint and is becoming more and more user-friendly.

The LevelKit tools are more aware about which level is currently being worked on which provide lots of user friendly interactions.

Some examples of new features/fixes are:

Creating new levels from a template

Building asset bundles no longer requires pointing to the correct folder each time

The game now support’s (in the editor) the ability to scan the LevelKit folder for levels, this means that updates to levels in LevelKit are now immediately testable

New levels

We've been working on two new levels recently, the first is the workplace of the protagonist and the second is a shipping yard / harbour. Both contain some really interesting hacking interactions that we're looking forward to showing off.

Setting up these levels has required adding some new props into the LevelKit that you'll be able to play around with including:

Mesh fencing

Flood lights

Security barriers

A water tower

Rubbish Bins!

AI Activity Action

We've started work on a new type of AI behavior for NPCs, called the activity action, it allows the user to set up a series of actions that an NPC can do in a given scene. For example we're working on a secretary NPC that has actions for working at their desk, using the phone, organising files and checking the fax machine.

These actions can be setup in the level editor and then marked up in the levels Lua script. We're planning on providing lots of animations for characters to use at activity points, so hopefully modders should be able to create activities that match the character they want to create.

Mission progression

This one's bit of an obvious feature for a game, but because of the way how we want to support modding and user-made content, and having them fully integrate with the content we are making, it still took a bit of thinking to figure out how to actually build a progression from mission to the next one, and how to set that up on the technical side with our mission definition files and everything else.

Drawing some inspiration from our Goal-Oriented Action Planning - based AI setup, we ended with the idea of each mission having a list of preconditions that need to be fulfilled for that level to become playable, and a list of effects that completing the mission will have (which can then fill the preconditions for the next mission to unlock). We then start by loading all available mission definition files from the disc and compare their preconditions with the game progress state from your game save file to figure out which missions are available to play a the moment.

This should give us a flexible enough way to determine both linear progressions from one mission to next, and also as complicated branching mission progressions anyone might want to create. Even better, it allows any user-made content to easily define when the custom missions happen in relation to our main story line.

For consistency's sake, we also decided to convert our mission definition files from JSON to Lua syntax. And at the same time added support for all kinds of extra information, including when and where in the game world each mission should take place.

Designing a City Designer

Talking about game worlds, that's actually something we've been missing this far, apart from the individual game levels of course. We've always had a plan to create a city for the game to happen in, and with the mission system sorted out we felt now is the right time to deal with this as well. The only complication is of course that our mission system and modding support pretty much means we don't really know how many cities we actually need to fit all the missions in...

That kind of threw out the option of just building a city beforehand, since we didn't really feel like just hoping that nobody tries to add more missions than we can fit in the existing city. Which means we needed a way for the city to grow dynamically based on the missions added to the game. Instead of creating a city, we needed something that can create new cities for us as needed!

We came up with a fairly simple plan; we'll create a point for each mission/city district we need, then some points for ocean (if there's harbour district, we need there to be ocean and coastline as well...), and finally some extra points to fill the map around our city with some countryside. Then we'll just divide the map into regions based on those points, and turn it into a 3D object for the player to look at.

Well, some complications there. First, we needed a nice way to create the map regions based on those points. To do this we decided to create Voronoi diagram from the points. It defines areas closest to each point, and just happens to work really well for the kind of map tiles we wanted to have. Definitely worth looking at for all kinds of random generation, and especially useful for all types of maps. They are actually something we've planned to use to visualize Mesh network coverage in our city as well.

The second problem was making sure all the points we use for map creation are not just randomly based, but instead fairly evenly spread across the map area so we can get relatively same sized city districts, but still with enough randomness that they don't just end being squares on an even grid. Turns out the Voronoi diagrams are useful here as well, namely using something called Lloyd's algorithm. Which is quite simple in the end, you start with a set of random points and create Voronoi diagram from them. Then you figure out the center points of each Voronoi cell, and use them to create another Voronoi map. And repeat the same process again and again until the result looks like what you'd want to get. Each iteration moves the points slightly apart from each other, over time spreading them evenly across the area.

After creating the map cells, we just define all cells below certain line as ocean, and above it as land. Then we pick a tile in the center of the map, on the sea shore, and assign the first mission to it. After that we lop through the rest of the missions, one by one, and try to find a place for it next to existing city districts based on few rules. All the districts/missions should be on land, and as you'd expect, harbour district needs to be next to ocean. For every mission taking place in other parts of the city we try to find a map tile with the same district type, so that we end with larger districts in our city instead of just scattering them all around the map randomly.

Turning the math into a map

With all the required map, district & mission data created, we still need to turn everything into something that's visible to the player. Time to create some polygons!

The basic concept of displaying 3D objects is that you have a list of points in 3D space, and then another list that tells the order in which you want to use those points to create triangles, which your computer's graphics card can then display on the screen.

The Voronoi diagram code we use gives us the corner points for each map tile, and we could easily add another set of points slightly above those, plus one at the center of the map tile. After some pen & paper sketching to figure out the correct order to list all those triangles (each triangle needs to be listed in clockwise order since that tells which side of the triangle is the front, and which one is the back), we finally had a map on the screen!

A city wouldn't really be much without some buildings, but the Voronoi code came in handy here as well. We just use the same method to create a bunch of random points inside each city tile, and then add buildings at those positions. In the long run we'll create different sets of buildings for each city district, but for now some random cubes worked pretty well...

That's the city part sorted out, the only remaining part was making it work as useful part of our user interface, displaying the available missions and allowing the player to select them from the map instead of the missions list we've used thus far. This ended being fair bit simpler than we expected, Unity includes a Physics Raycaster component you can add to your camera to allow the user interface & event system to interact with 3D objects. That would have already worked for mouse & keyboard controls, but we needed a nice way to navigate between map tiles with a gamepad as well. This could have ended being pretty complicated, but we realised that with some creative use of the Selectable class Unity uses for it's own UI buttons, we could actually make our map tiles work with the automatic navigation Unity's own Button objects have! All of the code for Unity's UI components is available in BitBucket, definitely worth checking out when doing any custom user interfaces with Unity!

In the end we also had to do some maths to make sure our map tile & building heights scale correctly based on how big the map tiles are (as that depends on how many missions there are), and to make sure camera positioning and movement are scaled as well. And then of course a decent amount of UI redesign to go with the map and mission information. And now we actually have a city in the game!

Other stuff

Switch to Unity's new Cinematic Effects

We've had some issues with one of the camera effects included in Unity and OpenGL. And since that's an effect we absolutely need to use for our HDR lighting/rendering to work correctly, it's been a serious obstacle for the Mac & Linux versions of the game. Luckily Unity is working on a new postprocessing effects stack, which is available to download already. While it's not fully complete yet, it seemed like it would be worth a try. And it definitely was, even though some of the features might still change the stability and performance are great, as is the workflow for setting up postprocessing configurations and even switching them on scene.by-scene basis.

Custom emissive shaders and casting light around them

We are using our own shaders for pretty much everything in the game, for sake of supporting vertex colours and to save the data needed for our data view effect. If you are using Unity's Standard shader, there's a dropdown box with the option to enable emissive materials to cast light to other objects when baking your lightmaps. We definitely wanted that to happen, but it turns out enabling it for custom shaders (even ones using Unity's Standard lighting model) isn't quite that easy. The option isn't available as a compiler keyword or anything simple like that. However, after a good bit of reading through the source code for Unity's included shaders, we found a way to display that option by using a custom editor for your materials. Bit more complicated than what we'd expected, but at least it works now!

Meeting and Greeting

Essex Game Dev Meet Up

With thanks to James Batchelor from gamesindustry.biz, we had the opportunity to meet up with other indies and games industry folk in Essex last week. There were a few familiar faces from our usual co-working days in east London, but we were blown away at the numbers that turned up. When you’re working outside of a big city it is easy to feel a bit off on your own - it was great to meet others in a similar boat and expand our local network. We look forward to the next one, James!

Indie Bootcamp

Creative England and Microsoft asked us in for a PR, finance and publishing workshop alongside our other Microsoft Greenshoots cohorts this week. If you haven’t been in, Microsoft’s Paddington offices are swiiiiiiiish. Oh how we wish we had one of those giant 100 inch touch screen monitors at our disposal! Drooling aside, we appreciated the sessions organised for us:

• Stefano Petrullo of Renaissance PR helpfully reviewed timelines and promotional milestones to work to in the run up to our alpha release, and hammered through the importance of consistent messaging. We hear ya, Stefano!

• Harvey Elliot of Playstack spoke on access to finance, covering Playstack’s own publishing and investment fund, as well as the many other options available to devs like us. He was a fountain of useful information - many thanks, Harvey!

• Colin Macdonald, Game Commissioner for Channel 4, was our final speaker, who gave his top tips for pitching to publishers. He reinforced the importance of a well oiled elevator pitch - a truly useful exercise. Safe to say we’ll be greasing our squeaky bits.

The other great part of the day was spending a bit of time with other devs, sharing challenges, and seeing their games in progress! Check em out: Ground Shatter Games

Needs More Robots

Burning Arrow - The Other 99 is currently in early access on Steam!

Fallen Tree Games

And that’s all for now, folks!

#gamedev #indiedev #essex #microsoft #voroni #levelkit #unity #creativeengland #AI #modding #algorithms #bitbucket #characterrigging #rigify #stealthgame #hackinggame

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offgridthegame · 7 years ago

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Dev Blog Post 23.01.2017 - Drones and pwns

S’been a while, eh!

We decided to extend this sprint in the way we often do over christmas so that the team has a bit of time to experiment and perhaps take on a few tasks that require a good bit of thinking time. It’s paid off as usual, and so we have some great developments in the game to share with you with this blogpost. Read on for all the juicy details!

We are all directors now

We were very secretive some time ago (nearly 2 years back actually!) about how we were in a small set of selected developers given access to an alpha version if some new tools in Unity. Well...

Originally the tools were called ‘Director’, and with a lot of experimentation and some fairly comprehensive bug reporting they eventually became Unity Timeline, which Unity devs have now been enjoying since last summer! We are now at the point where what we learnt from experimenting with the original Director tools can be put to good use. If you have played the Off Grid demo anywhere, then you will have seen the still frame animatic for the intro level which sets up the story of the game. We had a mocap session to get all this action captured and now that the Timeline tools have matured (and, more importantly, are stable) we are busy pulling this all together. The opening sequence of the game is going to change dramatically over the next couple of builds - how exciting!

To Octree or not to Octree

Steve had one pretty chunky task to do over the past month or so, and it's been getting the drones to be substantially more drone-y.

So far we have worked on the basis that drones are just characters that happen to be hovering, but this means we lose the opportunity to move vertically and get to places that characters can’t, or via routes that they are unable to take. So the task at hand was to remedy this. Navigation meshes are two-dimensional, so we needed to take a new path - navigation volumes!

Using the magic of octrees, we subdivided each level down to the smallest size that contains no collidables, or down to a single unit cube, whichever is bigger. Then, each cube is tested to see which cubes it is adjacent to, to create a graph representing all the nodes. After that it's simple - run A-Star on the network, and it'll find a route through.

This will be available to LevelKit, so drones are accessible to all! There's a few tweaks and kinks to work out, but overall it was a really satisfying feature to work on and should really change the way the game plays. You can run, but you can't hide! Well you can hide. It's a stealth game, after all.

Next will be to get them to move in a more dronelike manner, and perhaps optimise the navigation a little. But that may have to wait until after Steve’s put his cameraman hat back on for the upcoming sprint!

So much modding going on!

Josh has been hard at work testing the modding tools and refining his mods. In particular he expanded the museum of hacking he has been making.

The museum mod, which he initially designed to be just an interior, has expanded to allow for any future hackable devices to be added to it, no matter their size!

Josh then turned his attention to improving and developing the transport station map. The map has changed quite a bit since whiteboxing and still has a way to go. For a first attempt at a full level mod it is fairly ambitious due to it being a fairly large map with multiple ways to complete the same task.

The station has grown quite a bit to allow for more room for the guards and the player to navigate. This will also hopefully allow for a more interesting interior and gameplay possibilities.

Originally the apartments around the level were going to be just blocks that looked like apartments, but now some of them interiors to allow the player to find hidden data files or to find some higher ground to plan how they will tackle the mission.

The trainyard is still very much in progress, but has also changed quite considerably. The main additions to the train yard include a new walkway that allows the player to navigate to all 3 platforms. A warehouse has also been added which will include some puzzle elements for the player to complete. This is replacing the old puzzle element which involved moving the train carriages up and down the tracks as it was a bit clunky and confusing.

Meta-gamedesign

In the last sprint, Pontus redesigned the character profiles and our data files & SMS generation to handle metadata about the character personalities embedded in data files. That's working pretty well, and we already built a quick app for testing this. So it's time to take things a step further, which is why Pontus has spent this sprint working on the game design for how we'll actually handle metadata collection and character profiling as a player experience. And how that will then tie in with adding a password cracking feature when the player connects to a remote (or local...) device using our SSH app.

The basic idea is that as the player collects different data files, the included metadata is automatically used to build a catalogue of character profiles, over time adding knowledge about new characters, and their personal information, their likes and dislikes, and pretty much whatever background info we (or modders) choose to add.

All the collected information will be available for the player to view at any time as a new tab in the pause menu, so it's directly useful, for example, to try and guess what kind of approach might work best for distracting a specific guard away from your path. In addition to that, the amount of knowledge you have collected about a character is also then used to determine if you'll be able to access devices belonging to that character. After considering calculating the access as a proportion of known metadata VS all existing data about a character, and realising that this would cause a few odd situations, we settled for a fixed limit for access, and allowing this to be set in each device's Lua script so if the same character owns multiple devices, some can have easier, and some more difficult, passwords. We'll likely also add an option for a device to require some specific piece of information instead of some count of any knowledge, but this should be used as a special case option in missions as it requires the mission creator to make sure that exact data is available to the player at the right time.

A fairly interesting side effect of this design is that it is kind of realistic, in the sense that it's going to be easier to collect enough information about characters who have more metadata defined in their profiles. So, the more you share about yourself online and in social media, the easier it is for someone to learn enough about you to start guessing your passwords and to use the knowledge for identity theft and so on. And at the same time characters who have shared less about themselves (or, the mission creator has been more lazy ;)) will be more difficult to learn about, as you are more likely to just run into the same few bits of knowledge rather than learning something new.

Another interesting feature here is that your library of character knowledge will be persistent, so anything you learn about a character in one mission will be carried over to future ones. While this requires us to do a bit of a better job on the UI side to keep things manageable for the player, it also serves to create a longer game play loop, where social engineering can happen over a longer time span than just within a single mission.

Finally, we're probably going to add few different apps for gaining access to devices, in the sense that the one based on knowledge about characters (so, basically just guessing badly chosen passwords through social engineering) is just going to be one of the tools available for the player. We'd also like to include other tools that target specific vulnerabilities on devices, and perhaps a late-game one that just uses a direct access to government-collected data.

Big News

With all that dev news it’s worth pointing out that we have some other big, juicy news coming soon. We are sooooooo close to being able to announce it that the anticipation almost hurts!

You can find the newsletter signup page here!

If you aren’t already on our newsletter, please sign up! If you are and you have any friends who you think might be interested, then please share and help us reach even more people anticipating the game!

Ta ta for now,

Rich, Pontus, Steve, Sarah and Josh.

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