DEVLOG 04 – A Journey Continues
Hello again early supporters,
This is our 4th development post for 2021 for Ex world Online: Obsidian. Last month’s highlight was about our 3D work and lore. This month’s highlight will be on the backend and programming of things.
Let’s hurdle right into what we have been doing at the Studio this past month. As usual, we will start off with the least bit of interesting information and build up from there.
• Ex World Online Obsidian Lighting and shading update
Since we are developing an anime inspired game, one of the major points we would need to cross off is having an anime/toon shading model that would set us apart from standard stylized games such as World of Warcraft and the likes. We are able to edit our UE4 engine to create a custom one following public documentation that was released on UE4 forums, however that limited us in terms of creating our own lighting and other various tweaks that we felt would give our game a unique touch. We have made the decision to revert the engine and create our own custom engine that would allow us to tweak and adjust to our own standards and I hope to post some stills of how it looks come next month’s update.
To developers who are out there working within the same genre: here is the documentation to the anime toon shading that we recently reverted from. It might be in line with something you guys are looking for!
https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/wip-a ... del/135956
• Backend development updates
It has been a slippery slope with this one as PlayFab has quite a few limitations with very complicated safe work arounds, but we have begun the work on the character initialization, inventory and APIs to be passed between the website to create one database where we can access everything. More updates on this to follow next month.
• Modeling and Texturing
Since we are reworking our lighting system, we decided to revisit some of our textures to better accommodate our new update we will be implanting. Just a few pictures to show the type of things that have already been reworked such as the rock texture, wood textures and brick textures that would go on the various serf stages such as settlements and villages would be built out of wood, but towns and cities would utilize stones and bricks. In addition to that we have also begun experimenting with water textures. Below are some of the images of the completed textures.
• Landscaping updates: Nile Island (Alpha Island)
As we are nearing our testing phase, we realized our current version of the island isn’t optimized very well, so we decided to rework the island using various techniques such as level and zoom streaming to offer better optimization. In addition, we decided to change up the geography of the island, adding more mountains, cliffs, hills and rocks to improve the layout of the terrain to make it feel more realistic rather than having a flat level. We also reworked the tiling texture to compliment the new rocks and background geometry. Here is an overview of how the islands with the new implementations.
• Combat, animation and locomotion update.
Since last month’s combat update, we have done more polishing of the systems to allow for better optimization of the animations and skills. Firstly, we contracted out an animator who is very skilled in his work to rework the Advanced locomotion system we were using to give players, and their respective races their own unique feel to it. The idea is to have a human move differently from a vampire and vice versa. This allows for more diverse gameplay and movement. We have mentioned that Ex World Online is an action-based game, and while that is true at its core, we have also implemented a frontal targeting system for certain spells and attacks. This has also allowed us to enable an aiming feature for targeted skills such as Archer class, Dark Arts and Priests that are required to aim in certain situations.
With the new updates to the ALS, we were required to implement a custom layering and curve system for pelvis and legs of the models. We added curves for each layering animation and cache poses to be able to debug the FootIK.
And that's a wrap for April's update. See you all next month, hopefully with more exciting news!
Best regards,
Geneva
Community Manager
