hthstudios
Unity Report: Vaultus
Published: October 13th 2017, 4:13:58 am
To say it's been a busy week is kind of an understatement.
Things continue to move forward at a steady rate and we're making a lot of progress on the unity build. I'd like to take this time to show you what we've been working on behind the scenes. Now, some of you might not be aware since it is rather well hidden in the game, but Vaultus is the R&D division of HTH Studios, known as HTH labs. Anything that you see which is puzzle related or involves the expansion of the game has likely come through Vaultus. This is the case for both the studio IRL and it's in game equivalent. It is for this reason that it was very important to get the area built and online as quickly as possible and with as much functionality carryover as possible. I'm very pleased to announce that we've already achieved 80% of the translation. In addition to this we have also expanded the area quite a bit beyond what will be mentioned in this report.
---
The model of Vaultus that was originally rendered for use in the flash build of the game has a lot of problems with it. (1) It looks great, however, it was put together by an over-enthusiastic amateur, namely me from about three years ago. As you can see we were able to successfully import the model to Unity, unfortunately we began to notice that there were lots of little texture glitches and a tremendous drop in performance. Investigating this would reveal that the model itself was just a bit of a tattered damaged, overproduced mess.
Things had to be streamlined, simplified, or reworked all together. Everything from the windows, to the street lights, to the inner workings of the elevator system were all crammed with unnecessary geometry, surface errors, polygons overlapping causing Z fighting, and about a hundred other little things I certainly don't want to bore you with now.
To give you an idea of what process we're going to be going through with just about every structure that you see in game both on the New Cyana Islands and here at Vaultus, here (2) is an example of a section of the outer shell, you'll notice that some of the glass has gaps in it, and that there's an overall feeling of distortion or confusion to the model.
I'm trying to be very careful and stay as true as possible to the original structure while making sure the game isn't grinding down to 16 frames per second if you want to enjoy the view from the inside. Those nice big tall windows we're very much Limited buy those struts you see going through them, you would be forgiven for mistaking those to be bars. That turns out exactly to be what I didn't like about them.
The new model (presented in Orange (3) to indicate separate parts, and in Gray (4) to give an idea of what it will actually look like in game.) The new model eliminates those bars completely, replaces a lot of the unnecessary detailing on the outside with functional storage space, and a round door.
The same process was completed for the second floor, the walkway and the massive arms outside of the main structure. (5)
Another view of the exterior on the walkway. (6) Additional lighting and effects have been applied to Kie areas that aren't even visible in the pre rendered backgrounds flash used. Sprite effects (7) drawn in flash and edited in photoshop now allow visible electrical discharge to be seen at night. Particle effects (8) are also being applied to certain vents and exhaust ports.
- Import existing Area into Unity. - SUCCESS
- Large Scale UV Texturing. - SUCCESS
- Multi-Leveled Structure in world. - SUCCESS
- Multi-Part Structure. - SUCCESS
- Volumetric-like lighting. - SUCCESS
- Advanced Scene Management. - SUCCESS
- Gateway Technology Integration. - SUCCESS
- Direct link to New Cyana Islands. - SUCCESS