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[mokesmoe]

That idea doesn't make very much sense. If it takes all of the water in the cistern to activate the doors once, then how will a half-full cistern activate them? Wouldn't they get stuck part-way through opening? If the water is draining slowly over the day, what decides the arbitrary point where they stop working?

Also I don't think it's really necessary anyway. If you know what the gates do it's your fault if you die from using one at a bad time, and I don't think it's a big deal dying to something you've never seen before. Most players will probably die to a vulture the first time they see one.

[JLJac]

Update 426

Did a little touching up on the shelter gates, bringing over some tech from the region gates to make it look better. Old ones were running on a different shader which had a bunch of problems, and suffered from compression making there be a lot of little pixel-wide holes in the machinery. Using some techniques from the region gates I got that back up to an acceptable degree of solid:



Also, little flaps at the entrance! As those of you who played the game at PAX might remember, you were usually blocked until the machinery was finished by some sort of invisible wall, which was obviously not the most intuitive solution. Now there are little hatches that won't open until you are actually allowed to go through. Crazy how this machinery used to seem extremely over-the-top, and now after the region gates it looks really simple!

Other than that, I'm trying to make it so that an AI creature can follow you through a region gate, or be brought with you in the case of portable critters. This is trouble, as all of the AI modules have an idea about what world they're living in, and have to re-adjust. I originally started working on a solution where each module got a NewWorld call and had to adapt and restart its internal processes accordingly, and it was to some success. However, there are maaaany AI modules, and more to come, and if I go with this solution I will have yet another piece of functionality that has to be created, tested and bug-proofed for each new AI module I write, after I have created, tested and bug-proofed it for the ones I already have. So now I'm exploring another option instead, which I hope will scale better. This idea is to just put out the entire AI of the creature and have it spawn a new one from scratch. This does have the side effect that the creature will forget a bunch of stuff, admittedly, but on the other hand most of the information it was storing was about the old region and isn't likely to be relevant again. Social relationships (when I finally get around to them) will be saved in a special data container tied to the abstract creature, to make it last over saves, and should be able to survive the AI switch. More on this as I actually accomplish something!

When this gets too frustrating, I have been resorting to some various poking around. Examples off the top of my head are: Fixing a shader bug where some distant objects would be red. Streamlining the player's in-corridor move set to make the jumps and slides more easy to pull off. Making the light source shader show one-way floors (crudely). Making a placable "garbage hole" object in the level editor for James to distribute through the junk piles in Garbage Wastes, where the garbage worms will later be able to pop out when I get around to it.

[Caspar2000]

Update 426

I imagine to die a lot in the game, wouldn't it get annoying to wait 15secs for the gate every time I start a game before the action starts?

Suggestion: Before the flaps open two long bars move horizontal. The space does not look so good when the bars are gone. They could always stay in closed position, saving time and maintaining a narrow look.

[jamesprimate]

testing out a Shadow Urban room illuminated by lantern mice. Shhhhh!

[chriswearly]

testing out a Shadow Urban room illuminated by lantern mice. Shhhhh!

Look/sounds great!

It sounds almost like air bubbles escaping in chains, producing the rhythms. Obviously it's more musical than that, and I really like it :D

[oldblood]

testing out a Shadow Urban room illuminated by lantern mice. Shhhhh!

Does look and sound great. Sounds almost whimsical which works really well with the soft lights and scurrying lantern mice. I do wonder how it would sound though in the dark with no lantern mice when everything feels more intimidating... which prompts the question (and you may have answered this already elsewhere) but just how dynamic will the music be to the environment?

[and]

This is how I just found out that I have integrated speakers at my work PC - just creeped out the whole office!

Great work on the sound; I really love the way the light moves over the background, it just gives it such a great feeling of depth.

[Teod]

testing out a Shadow Urban room illuminated by lantern mice. Shhhhh!

Great grate patterns.

Overall the Shadow Urban atmosphere seems a lot more cozy and peaceful than I thought it would be. I was afraid that I will be afraid of going there (well, more than anywhere else), but now I'm looking forward to it.

[JLJac]

I imagine to die a lot in the game, wouldn't it get annoying to wait 15secs for the gate every time I start a game before the action starts?

Suggestion: Before the flaps open two long bars move horizontal. The space does not look so good when the bars are gone. They could always stay in closed position, saving time and maintaining a narrow look.

Yes! Actually that is sort of why it's there. My reasoning is like this - with this little wait, you already have a bit of a stake in the game session as you go out into it - you have already invested 15 seconds. RW gameplay benefits hugely from higher stakes in my experience, if you care about surviving the nervous atmosphere is enhanced. Also this little wait creates a space for sort of debriefing and calming down before going out there again. "What went wrong, what am I going to do differently now, what route should I take" etc. Basically it's there to make the game not play like Super Meat Boy or similar, where you just throw yourself at death over and over. Not any disrespect to Meat Boy, I love McMillen and think he's an awesome game designer, but Meat Boy and Rain World are pursuing different goals. So the wait acts as ~ not a penalty for dying per se ~ but as an "Okay, you messed up. Here you have another go. But calm down first, think over what went wrong, and start fresh." When playing the game, at least I am enjoing it, and I didn't really hear complaints about it on the PAX floor either which has to be a good thing for something so boring as waiting. But we'll see what happens when we get beta testers on it - maybe I'll have to speed it up quite a bit at the end of the day.

What is it about the background in the shelter machinery you don't like? Should I throw some more stuff in there?

testing out a Shadow Urban room illuminated by lantern mice. Shhhhh!

Great grate patterns.

Overall the Shadow Urban atmosphere seems a lot more cozy and peaceful than I thought it would be. I was afraid that I will be afraid of going there (well, more than anywhere else), but now I'm looking forward to it.

Thanks! Good to know we have some connoisseurs of grate patterns among us, those took me like a day  Actually there is quite a lot of creepy stuff going on in the dark parts of Rain World as well... But then there are also sleeping lantern mice. So it's a sort of sour-sweet mix of both!

Update 427
Yay, got pathing creatures to work while following through a region gate! Was actually not quite as horrible as I expected. Other than that, I fixed the weird bug alpha backers will know of where a lizard carrying you through a short cut sends you flying all over the screen. And made a few more art assets for Shadow Urban. James and I had a talk about the area aesthetics, and agreed that neither of us are big fans of how the effect colors on plants look in darkness, so I made a plant which doesn't use effect colors but is instead intended to look good just with the light sources moving over it. It looks decent in my test setup, but I'll have to see how it behaved in James' actual implementations and maybe do some adjustments later on - it's a heavily procedural beast that isn't always predictable.

[JLJac]

Diving into a bit of sound stuff - trigger placement, adjustments etc, so might be a little quiet here for a day or two. Basically we're setting up a powerful infra structure for sound randomization, so the aural experience is going to be really organic. Taking a look in the sfx folder today I noticed that James has SIXTEEN (16!) sounds for the backflip jump, and similar amounts for most other player movements. Minor co-stars such as the snail has to make do with meager 8-12 variation on most of its sound effects though, so don't expect too much  And this is when he had to manually input each variation, now I've made an interface for him where the system will automatically detect a bunch of sound effects with the same name and make a pool for random selection out o them. Who knows what craziness might come out of that!

We also need more sound triggers placed, for example the vulture is silent as a ghost atm, and lantern mice and a few other things also need to have their triggers placed.

[Teod]

the vulture is silent as a ghost atm

Doesn't that add to his generally ominous style? Imo, he shouldn't be noisy, outside of some of his special moves.

Also, another thing about the sleepy lantern mice video: vertical bars Slugcat climbs are practically invisible to me, there is no way to differentiate them from the background.

[jamesprimate]

I'm thinking the Vulture is going to be pretty quiet outside of low pitched wing flaps, and maybe some assorted hisses and shrieks when you are dealing with it face to face. Oh also the gas jets too I guess. Want the ominous wing flaps to be an audio tell similar to how the shadow announces its presence. Something subtle, but makes you scramble for cover when you hear

[JLJac]

Hi everyone!

So, on the subject of the devlog thing we talked about earlier, I'm making a creature that I'd rather keep silent about as I think you guys will want to discover it yourself. It's a darkness dweller, and it's REALLY scary, so I wouldn't want to spoil that for you Estimate to be done tomorrow or the day after!

[Christian]

Hi everyone!

So, on the subject of the devlog thing we talked about earlier, I'm making a creature that I'd rather keep silent about as I think you guys will want to discover it yourself. It's a darkness dweller, and it's REALLY scary, so I wouldn't want to spoil that for you Estimate to be done tomorrow or the day after!

Oh, man, now you'll just have our imaginations racing till the game's release
Or the next alpha build :p

[oldblood]

Oh man. The tease.

You know thats just going to make me ask when the next alpha build is coming so we know how long we have to wait to find out...

[Christian]

Actually, talking about the next build, would that one have music and audio and connected regions?

[jamesprimate]

Probably! or at least 2 of the 3. Right now were scrambling to get together a build for E3, so audio is taking a back seat for a week or so.

and regarding this creature... not to overhype it or anything, but damn it is LITERALLY my nightmare. as in, i was telling Joar what i hated most in the universe, and... then he goes and sketches it and builds an even more horrifying version in game. *shudders*

not sure if ive ever seen something like this done from a technical standpoint either. pretty cool, pretty cool.

[Christian]

Probably! or at least 2 of the 3. Right now were scrambling to get together a build for E3, so audio is taking a back seat for a week or so.

and regarding this creature... not to overhype it or anything, but damn it is LITERALLY my nightmare. as in, i was telling Joar what i hated most in the universe, and... then he goes and sketches it and builds an even more horrifying version in game. *shudders*

not sure if ive ever seen something like this done from a technical standpoint either. pretty cool, pretty cool.

E3! That must be nervewracking and exciting! Have fun!

---

"damn it is LITERALLY my nightmare"
Hmmm...


"as in, i was telling Joar what i hated most in the universe, and... then he goes and sketches it and builds an even more horrifying version in game."
Hmmmmm....


Idk, maybe, but a comment like that, all I can think of is some kind of creepy giant spider-thing lurking in the darkness

[jamesprimate]

EUGHHHHHHHHHH   and i had just forgoten about that worm digestive thing too ick ick ick thanks christian XD




anyway, sad thing about this dark region is that nobody will see all the nice architecture

[Christian]

Maybe you could have some lizards or lantern mice climbing around/hanging from the arches so they subtly illuminate the architecture? Or bioluminescent plant life/vines wrapped around the struts, if there are any plans for that kind of stuff