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[tortoiseandcrow]

The one thing I'm noticing is that the rotation of the antlers when it turns around doesn't always make sense given the rotation of the body. In that latest gif, the head looks like it rotates clockwise while the body turns counter-clockwise, as though the head were attached via a socket joint rather than vertibrae.

The body is 2D solid-colored. The direction of its rotation is entirely in your head.

Insomuch as any optical illusion is entirely in the head, sure.

I figured out what's throwing me, though: the head is not perfectly spherical (slightly angled - facing right it looks as though it is looking slightly down, and facing left it is looking slightly up), which gives it a specific orientation and makes it easier to track as a distinct object within the 2d body. Hence the feeling of "ball and socket" rather than vertibrae.

[charliecarlo]

That deer is ridiculously cool.

I'm kinda iffy on how I feel about that recursive 3D effect, though.
It looks kinda...
Silly, I guess?
I'm not sure what the word would be.
It reminds me of back when my Windows XP would fuck up.
And dragging the error window around created a magical trail of window graphics.
The Windows Worm Effect.

Anyways, I've been following this game for a while I just haven't had an account until now to comment on it.
Super looking forward to this game.
Don't stop being amazing.

[adge]

Seeing 3D objects in the context of this game feels weird. I always thought it will stay 2D only. Doesn't it go against the art style?

RW has always been 3d, or at least faux 3d:





im deeply in love with this raindeer btw. in context its going to look stunning.

What happened to the parallax scrolling effect? Kinda missed decisions on that topic.

[Crispy75]

What happened to the parallax scrolling effect? Kinda missed decisions on that topic.

Ended up being too GPU RAM intensive. You effectively have 32 full-screen (and larger) textures to throw around, which adds up to a lot of RAM.

[jamesprimate]

parallax was never considered, because a key the look of the game is the forced perspective and vanishing points of the faux 3d terrain and objects. Early into the port from the old programming language, Joar considered using an effect similar to the one above to "snap to" camera points when moving from screen to screen, but it would have made level files literally 30x larger and caused all sorts of other problems for what was essentially just a 1-time "hey coooool" eye candy transition effect, so we dropped it.

But that said, all of this is perspective is actually in every level screen now, subtly transitionings to other perspectives when going through multi-screen rooms. i just choose how its framed when its rendered to give specific effects to highlight aspects of the gameplay of terrain.

its pretty hard to communicate this without seeing, so i think even a lot of long time thread readers get thrown off when we talk about it, so let me see if this helps.


detail: https://i.imgur.com/3082xt7.png

notice how you can see the tops of the platforms here, especially the square-ish ones? and the pipes with the grating on the bottom left and right point down and outwards? Thats a top down perspective to highlight the surfaces that you can jump on and set some "im on some tall precarious thing surrounded by a big fall" mood.


detail: https://i.imgur.com/JPGimVF.png

here in the bottom part of that room, everything is facing upwards to show scale: "now things are towering above me". you can see it in those same sorts of grates mid screen, but facing outward and slightly upwards. etc etc. its a subtle thing, but a totally essential aspect of the rain world look. so thats what we talk about with all this 30 layers / diorama /  perspective stuff.

[charliecarlo]

It actually looks really good when used subtly like that.
I drop my previous statement,
As long as the camera angle never shifts to such an extreme angle, in-game.

[Christian]

Hey James, are you still working on areas like this?
http://i.imgur.com/FL81aH7.jpg
That concept room looked fantastic

[adge]

Yeah I knew the ground engine setup of the game before, great explanation though and great environments. But I never thought that moving "pictures" even 30 at a time could be a problem for nowadays computers. Or is there a difference between pictures/images and textures. Maybe I'm also digging to deep. Just interested.

I played the alpha and it totally feels great and there is no problem with the "cut" rooms. And it sometimes feels weird if there are passages where you have to climb or jump from one view to another and then grab on a bar or something when the screen changes. And if you don't get it, the screen completely changes again because you fall back in the previous view and that would result in some disturbed gameplay feeling sometimes.
Moreover I think that the scrolling effect would have added a "better environmental feeling". Especially for long vertical/horizontal rooms.  Except the effect would be as heavy as in the gif above. Would have been too extreme. But I think that was just for presentation purposes.
But that are just my thoughts.

If it's not possible than it's not possible. Still great!!

[Teod]

The bottom looks like a death trap. Is there any way out of there, or it's essentially game over?

[JLJac]

Yeah I knew the ground engine setup of the game before, great explanation though and great environments. But I never thought that moving "pictures" even 30 at a time could be a problem for nowadays computers. Or is there a difference between pictures/images and textures. Maybe I'm also digging to deep. Just interested.

Yeah I thought so too! Turns out that even in modern 3D games, you usually don't seem to run that many high-res textures where the color of each pixel down to the 256 color values must be maintained and conveyed - they do other tricks such as repeating the same texture in clever ways by for example re-coloring it. A lot of stuff happens in shaders. When researching this I came across a pretty amazing little community that made an art out of rendering super good looking 3D scenes using only shaders, basically no textures. Either they'd use some little 10*10 noise texture or something, or just generate perlin noise in the GPU. Really cool stuff!

But yep, moving about 30 (larger than) screen sized pixel perfect textures turned out to be too much for even my modern computer, at least through unity's rendering pipe line (which I have no reason to believe to be particularly bad) so we had to scrap the parallax effect. Basically everything else that is cool looking in the game since making that decision is based on our current setup (pre rendered screen per screen textures that have the depth coded into them) though , so I'm pretty happy with the trade-off!

[jamesprimate]

@Charliecarlo: thanks!! yes for a while it was quasi-randomized, so occasionally you'd get more extreme angles, but now that i am the master of perspective  i use it sparingly for effect and keep the angles fairly consistent per region.

Hey James, are you still working on areas like this?
http://i.imgur.com/FL81aH7.jpg
That concept room looked fantastic

most certainly! working on a *huge* one right this moment actually.

The bottom looks like a death trap. Is there any way out of there, or it's essentially game over?

it *can* be escaped, but basically a death trap.

in some of the early regions, we used the occasional "fall out of the screen pit death" for platforming challenges. but many people found this frustrating, considering that in other situations where the screen was open you could move through it. So that room above was a test of using "soft death pits", where the death is shown either due to the fall or to some gross creature lurking at the bottom. seems to work just fine, so when we get into the polish pass of the levels ill go back and turn every one of the terrestrial off-screen death pits into something like this.

note: that wont apply to sky regions such as Chimney Canopy and Sky Islands, which are supposed to be very high up

[Christian]

Will the instant death areas in Sky Islands and Chimney Canopy have distinct borders or something? Like gusting wind, etc.?

[adge]

Yeah I knew the ground engine setup of the game before, great explanation though and great environments. But I never thought that moving "pictures" even 30 at a time could be a problem for nowadays computers. Or is there a difference between pictures/images and textures. Maybe I'm also digging to deep. Just interested.

Yeah I thought so too! Turns out that even in modern 3D games, you usually don't seem to run that many high-res textures where the color of each pixel down to the 256 color values must be maintained and conveyed - they do other tricks such as repeating the same texture in clever ways by for example re-coloring it. A lot of stuff happens in shaders. When researching this I came across a pretty amazing little community that made an art out of rendering super good looking 3D scenes using only shaders, basically no textures. Either they'd use some little 10*10 noise texture or something, or just generate perlin noise in the GPU. Really cool stuff!

But yep, moving about 30 (larger than) screen sized pixel perfect textures turned out to be too much for even my modern computer, at least through unity's rendering pipe line (which I have no reason to believe to be particularly bad) so we had to scrap the parallax effect. Basically everything else that is cool looking in the game since making that decision is based on our current setup (pre rendered screen per screen textures that have the depth coded into them) though , so I'm pretty happy with the trade-off!

Could you show a link to that Community or tell the name please?

[chriswearly]

"oh don't mind me, just steppin' on though"

[Christian]

"oh don't mind me, just steppin' on though"

What are those...growths? Dead grass? Shedding skin? It makes it look even creepier, like its flesh is sloughing off

[Schoq]

real life antlers do that too (shedding the velvet once they're done growing) and yeah it's pretty gross

[gimymblert]

I remember seeing one where the head of his rival was stuck in his antler, ripped from the body

[charliecarlo]

I remember seeing one where the head of his rival was stuck in his antler, ripped from the body

That's so metal.

[Crispy75]

I remember seeing one where the head of his rival was stuck in his antler, ripped from the body

This forum has more smileys than any other I post on, but you managed to pick just the right one.

[tortoiseandcrow]

That's delightfully gross! I hope it drips.