[News] The Material Standardizing process
Hello everyone, Corintio here!
This month has been very busy with housekeeping. Here's a summary of what we are working on on the technical side to prepare the first demo in Unreal Engine 5:
- We are standardising the naming conventions in our project content folder.
- Categorizing these assets so they are in a meaningful file directory (such as if it's related to architecture it needs to be in the architecture folder).
- Checking from assets we bought, what is being used and what is not, so we can delete what isn't necessary. This way we'll make the game's size shorter.
- Checking the quality of materials from these assets, if it's too low quality we skip the process on this bad one and replacing for a better one.
After verifying what's on the list above, comes the texture fixing part. This is standardising how we handle the RGB channels for the assets in the game. So we will set the ones that are ORM (
Occlusion,
Roughness,
Metalic) to MRAO (
Metalic,
Roughness,
Ambient
Occlusion) using the asset-fixer our programmer developed.
Does it sound complicated? Don't worry, let me explain to you a little of what all this gibberish means:
The whole point is to create later a master shader that will envelop every (or most) architecture in the game. What is the importance of this? Part of the reason our game has a bad performance is because of the number of materials without any standards we currently have.
Example: Let's say we have a chair and a bowl. The chair has a map with its colour, a normal map to give the illusion of bumpiness of the wood and then this ORM map that says how the light Occludes, what is the Roughness of the material and what parts of the chair have a Metalic effect. This map is a single image where the Red, Green and Blue channels contain the information on each of the aspects I listed.
Now let's say that the Bowl is on a different order. So if on the chair we say the Red channel informs the engine how the light occludes, on the bowl this same channel is used to inform the material's roughness.
We wouldn't be able to create a single Shader that reads the information of both the same way. Making is necessary to have one for each asset.
Each new shader creates a draw call, which weighs on your video card and CPU when you play our game. So the idea is that by standardizing how we handle each RGB channel for all the assets, we can reduce the number of shaders and thus reduce how much the game weighs on your PC, improving the performance.
Summarizing, we're fixing and cleaning the materials before we create new, optimized ones for the game.
Now let's go to what we are doing on the writing side:
Lily has been studying a new software called Articy. It will allow us to better organize the scenes the game has and later export scripts in a way that simplifies the life of people who will be localizing the game to other languages, starting with Brazilian Portuguese
We are also studying the prologue, taking notes of the story so we can also begin to rewrite the starting dungeon of the Legacy Version, in a way that the story not only doesn't have plot holes but also conveys the emotion we want you to feel when you realise what happened to Kalyskah's legion. I'm sorry, but our job now will be to make sure that you feel sad when you play that dungeon!
