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[Rat Casket]

schools

[muki]

my piranhas aren't educated, though.










 

[DarkWanderer]

Oh yeah I wanted to ask this the other day but forgot to; Is RW still going to have the basic sound effects from the earlier build? Like the clanks & stuff? I really liked that quality, & right now am a bit weary of anything that sounds too organic. There's just something about modern, old school inspired/feeling games with sound affects that sound super high definition that seems like an aesthetic clash. I'm sure you could pull it off, but I like the arcadey aspect of the old sound effects.

Water looks amazing by the way.

[jamesprimate]

good question! Joar and I have discussed this quite a bit. Like you, I also dig a lot of the sounds in the lingo version, which have a pretty cool "industrial but videogame" feel. The ones we use we'll definitely want to spiffy them up a bit, give them all a nice sparkle of hi-fi, much like the visuals here where you can clearly see the "simple pixel platformer" origins, but there is a little more high tech zazz to them.

But don't worry about it turning into mass effect cut-scene "bwaaaah" hi fi audio or something. All the sounds and music in the game are synthesized from or processed through low bit hardware audio sources like vintage moogs, oberhiems, waldorfs and actual old videogame console sound chips (hey thats me!) Nothing goes above 16 bit, and its mostly just weird use of additive, formant and wavetable synthesis, which i feel complement well the otherworldly industrial beauty Joar creates so clearly with the visuals.

Actually, the whole reason i emailed Joar about this project waaaaaaaay back 2 years ago was that i had a nightmare (really!) that someone came along and ruined it with goofy vidya game sounds and music that completely destroyed the mood. So I have devoted my past 2 years 1000% trying NOT to do that!

also:

Flocks of piranhas.

Just sayin'

totally on the same page as this 

[Nilanjan]

good question! Joar and I have discussed this quite a bit. Like you, I also dig a lot of the sounds in the lingo version, which have a pretty cool "industrial but videogame" feel. The ones we use we'll definitely want to spiffy them up a bit, give them all a nice sparkle of hi-fi, much like the visuals here where you can clearly see the "simple pixel platformer" origins, but there is a little more high tech zazz to them.

But don't worry about it turning into mass effect cut-scene "bwaaaah" hi fi audio or something. All the sounds and music in the game are synthesized from or processed through low bit hardware audio sources like vintage moogs, oberhiems, waldorfs and actual old videogame console sound chips (hey thats me!) Nothing goes above 16 bit, and its mostly just weird use of additive, formant and wavetable synthesis, which i feel complement well the otherworldly industrial beauty Joar creates so clearly with the visuals.

Actually, the whole reason i emailed Joar about this project waaaaaaaay back 2 years ago was that i had a nightmare (really!) that someone came along and ruined it with goofy vidya game sounds and music that completely destroyed the mood. So I have devoted my past 2 years 1000% trying NOT to do that!

[compostface]

Whenever I'm happy about how my games are coming along, I can come to this thread to remind me that I have so far to go, and to get back to work.

[jamesprimate]

Sheesh, believe me, we have quite a long way to go too 

[Rojom]

What if your fur becomes "wet" after diving in water? This could decreases your mobility (speed, jump height) when back on land, thus making diving more of a risk. You would dry off naturally as time passes, but maybe if you stand still for a few seconds a short animation of shaking your fur would speed up the process. Might add more strategy when trying to run away from lizards -- ie, should you try to escape by going around a pool of water or should you swim across, knowing your mobility will be stunted on the other end. Just a thought

[Slader16]

What if your fur becomes "wet" after diving in water? This could decreases your mobility (speed, jump height) when back on land, thus making diving more of a risk. You would dry off naturally as time passes, but maybe if you stand still for a few seconds a short animation of shaking your fur would speed up the process. Might add more strategy when trying to run away from lizards -- ie, should you try to escape by going around a pool of water or should you swim across, knowing your mobility will be stunted on the other end. Just a thought

I really like this idea, mostly because I want to see the slugcat shaking it's fur

[JLJac]

PARTICLES

It's really strange I forgot this hahaha! Getting to it now... Hard to make it look good though - will take some tweaking.

JLJac what are the spec of your machine? which modern game run on it?

Here are my specs:



As for games, I don't know as I don't have any installed. The computer is an HP envy laptop, very new, but not the most expensive power monster on the market.

@Rojom, on the subject of fur, we kind of have schrödinger's slugcat here... I'm not confirming that it's furry, but I'm also not confirming that it's not furry. You'll just have to float around in uncertainty, sorry 

[Christian]

We're talking an alien slugcat here. It's probably completely hairless and the white coating is actually a mucus-like outer layer of skin that easily sloughs off, allowing the slugcat to escape the grasp of lizard claws and tongues.

[Slader16]

We're talking an alien slugcat here. It's probably completely hairless and the white coating is actually a muscus-like outer layer of skin that easily sloughs off, allowing the slugcat to escape the grasp of lizard claws and tongues.

....

[jamesprimate]

Christian knows what's UP

[Christian]

Christian knows what's UP

Ha, I used to write stories when I was younger, loved thinking of creature designs and stuff like that

[gimymblert]

@JLJac
I asked because you might meet problem when porting to something else but your own computer.

There is a bunch of things that limit shader per hardware:

- Triangle fillrate (number of triangles drawn)
- pixel fillrate (coverage on screen of each triangles)
- shader level (number of instruction/texture)
- drawcall (number of cpu to gpu transfer)

Your card isn't that bad, even though it doesn't run modern game on ultra it can run them. It also has the lastest tech (64bits, 28nm, directx11 compatible).

Given That 3D games use to have objects with each having its own textures and complex shader, each overlapping on screen, the 2D games you have is relatively tame. I don't know how your shader is setup, nor if it's only a single ubershader or broken in smaller shader for each part (background, characters, etc ...). You have a sub HD (and even SD resolution) and basically only a few triangles (ranging from 2 (render quad) to quad for each objects (given than game can have as much as 6000 tri per characters and you have multiple character with the env having a big number of traingle too). It's not particularly taxing, it's unlikely that you meet probel with drawcall, triangle and pixel throughput (no bilinear blending help even more), however ALU (instructions count) might limit you, nothing that isn't solvable (might need to break into multiple object and shader), but be careful nonetheless

To understand more go there:
http://simonschreibt.de/gat/renderhell/
everything is explain with nice animation


There is still a number of computer (such as mine) who are still on old limited hardware. Porting might prove difficult when texture and instruction count bottleneck. Also porting to mobile, tablet, smartTV and micro console.

[oahda]

Hey, what language(s) are you guys using to program this game anyway? And what shader language?

[Whiteclaws]

Hey, what language(s) are you guys using to program this game anyway? And what shader language?

Lingo to Unity C#
with Opengl GLSL (I think...)

[JLJac]

Unity, C# and Cg shaders

@JIMBERT, as always, thank you sooo much :D It might be the case that I'll have to write some alternative shaders and include graphics options... We'll see how it works when we have an alpha we can try on a couple of computers.

Update 347
I had enough of the jelly, so I scavenged the internet for some 1d wave equations. After a while I found one in some kind of academic paper, but they had also included some mathlab code - somehow I managed to lift that without necessarily understanding much of it. A lot of tuning later, we have correct(er) wave motion on the water surface:



I even faked a bit of interaction with the walls - if you look carefully you might see that the waves bounce off the walls a little bit. They don't do that if the water is in the "in front of terrain" mode, so the difference has actually been upgraded to not being strictly cosmetic. I also did a bit of optimization by having it not simulate the entire surface when in this "behind terrain" mode, instead it looks for the leftmost water tile and the rightmost, and create the surface between those.

Other than that I've done a very slight little vertex shader on the surface of the water, which you're probably not noticing but which is giving it a bit more depth. If you can kind of see the waves on the surface a little bit, that's it. Earlier the surface was just a flat color blob, now it has some small amount of shading depending on angle. I'm always hesitant about that sort of stuff, as the art style I'm trying to roll with here is flat colors, but I think that if it's subtle like that it can get a pass.

Hm, what else... I tilted all the polygons in the water mesh, so that in the darker palettes (like the green water) you get a bit of an impression of light coming in at an angle through the water. And I added some droplets, which I'm not perfectly happy with, I'd like some more impressive splash, but a more impressive splash seems like it'd take yet another custom shader, so they're good enough for now...

Now I can't really claim I need to do something else, so I better get those shaders working, haha~

[Rob Rule]

That water is legitimately beautiful. Wow.

[gimymblert]

That water is legitimately beautiful. Wow.