And, wow - have we been productive ????
Level Design
Nico, our level designer, first learned how to work with our tools and to understand what is a feature and what is a bug in our very customized level designing toolchain. After some teething issues at the beginning, he's become very productive quite fast.
And below are the first results of a skirmish map for up to four gods:
The new four gods map is ready for action!
Many mortals available!
Four gods, four cities (and many more villages)
Who will succeed?!
While this map still needs some polishing, a second map for up to three gods is already in the making:
A three gods map is already in the making!
Nice place for a holiday ?!
The massive amount of buildings and characters being simulated and rendered in the end game of a five gods maps directly highlights the second very important topic we are currently working on:
Performance
There are several very complex issues if you want to bring a game like Fata Deum to life (large numbers of characters, complex AI logic, many buildings, etc.). Especially, if most of it shall also be visible at a distance.
One major bottleneck in the end game was the rendering of a large amount of characters. We do not want to bother you with technical details but we needed to test many different techniques and faced many technical issues until we found a solution. This ended up being a combination of several techniques that satisfies our high standards.
Test scenario: rendering as many diverse characters as possible at the same time!
Geri worked really hard to find this solution and the results are very promising: he was able to push us from 20 FPS in end game situations with a large amount of characters to over 60 FPS!
Before: low frame rate because of many characters rendered at the same time.
After: 60 FPS even many characters are rendered at the same time!
And these are frames captured inside the Unity editor, so performance is even better with a real build!
We will proceed to increase the overall performance, so that we will be able to provide you a smooth experience in all cases.
Camera Controls
The camera controls are the functionality which has been most criticized in the feedback form we have collected from all of you. So, we decided to put Jan on this job to focus on it!
One main issue here is to provide a smooth experience even when switching between different height levels and using different distance and view angles. While many strategy and simulation games have quite fixed camera angles and distances, Fata Deum allows you to move freely. This is great, but makes camera control quite complex.
As the overall complexity has been understood over time and the camera logic was technically a wild-mix of different camera control styles, Jan decided to rewrite the whole logic. While this part is done and we already have a much better experience, Jan will further improve and polish the logic over the next months while working on other tasks.
Jan also added the functionality for individual key bindings, which can now be defined by each player in the main menu:
Key bindings!!
Audio Improvements
There have been some issues on the audio logic which resulted in sounds being played much more often than intended, resulting in a more or less quite annoying gaming experience once the scenery became more crowded. Jakob, another new hire, did fix this at the very beginning. Our ears are very thankful ????
Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery
As we are now working in a much larger team with four software developers in parallel, it was also necessary to improve our workflow on an organizational and a technical level. Jakob implemented a Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery system, which allows us to automatically check the newest builds which are pushed onto the server and receive a fresh new version automatically every night. While setting this up was quite time-intensive, we can now proceed with focusing on our tasks and not having to waste time on time-intensive builds or code checks!
AI Dialogs
Jakob has also started work on AI related topics. As the AI is quite complex it will need some time until he can take over this part. One thing he is currently working on is the introduction of AI dialogues, so the AI god character reacts to specific situations, e.g. a simple greeting at the beginning of a match.
God Deceit speaks his first words!
Next Steps
We are planning to provide you with new updates every couple of months or so. In terms of what the team will be working on next:
- Nico will continue on creating new maps and improving the vegetation visually.
- Jan will further improve the camera logic and furthermore improve the UI.
- Geri will continue with improving performance.
- Jakob will focus on AI mostly.
Chris was mainly focusing on supporting all others with their tasks and bug fixing whatever stands in their way. But he hopes to continue working on AI across the next few months.
Stay tuned!
