JLJac on April 15, 2015, 12:07:55 PM:

It is possible to batch render, but it still takes an awful amount of time. All the rooms would probably require both of our computers working hard for a day or so, during which we'd be limited in the work we could do. But yeah, totally possible! Just to be avoided if possible. Also James has an aversion for the batch renderer because he suspects it doesn't spit out the room pixel-perfectly the same, but this time around I'll do some empirical science on that and if it's actually the case I'll correct it!

JLJac on April 16, 2015, 06:57:56 AM:

@marcgfx, yeah def, but the editor runs in macromedia director, written in lingo, which is sort of terrible, and it's just a jumbled mess of horrible UI and old remnants of stuff that's no longer used. We have officially given up hope on it looooong ago, and we don't think it's worth it to spend any time on it. We're just going to use it to make levels for this game, and then say good-bye to it forever - think of it as an old car that you hope will have just enough life left in it to be able to drive all the way to the scrapyard  So yeah but no, I won't spend time slimming the level editor, I'll just make it do what we need it to do and then learn my lesson for the next project.

@Crispy75, each screen texture is a png of about 0.5mb, and the level geometry (once the AI data is baked in) is about the same, so a screen is ~ 1 meg. James hopes to have 700 of those by the end of it o_0 The disk space of the code is negligible, but the music+sfx will likely occupy some space as well.

Question
Does anyone have any experience with loading sounds dynamically in Unity? I set up this huge system for James to be able to import and work with sounds from a folder, only for us to realize that the reason it had been working on my computer was because I was running the unity editor in the background, which added metadata to the sounds as I put them in the resources folder. James is running the stand-alone, which doesn't merge the files into the unity project, and as an effect the loading of the sound files doesn't work

I've been looking at solutions for dynamic loading of sounds in Unity, with no results so far. Theoretically I think I should be able to use a WWW similarly to how I load the levels, and that seems to work to a degree - I get AudioClips out of it instead of null references or something, and there are no error messages, but the AudioClips don't play. Or they play, but they're empty. Their isReadyToPlay property is perpetually false. Anyone has ideas? 

JLJac on April 16, 2015, 09:18:09 AM:

Yay I think I solved it! You need to have a co-routine and yield it until it's done loading... I have to admit I didn't totally understand what was going on, but I found an example on a forum and messed with that until it worked, and then messed some more until it was a piece of my machinery as I wanted it to be. The main problem seemed to be that the solution included a lot of interaction with Unity, creating a game object etc, which is not my strong side. But, we're through I think! Now James can actually start putting in some sweet samples for this thing :D

JLJac on April 16, 2015, 09:36:15 AM:

Yeah I'm super stoked too! But it might be a couple of days, James says he needs to re-invent the sound world somewhat to fit the new less low-res art style, and that sounds to me like sitting very very many hours with headphones turning knobs very very slightly. And also my blunder with the import stuff which stalled us for an entire day... I have no doubts it's going to be super sweet though!

JLJac on April 16, 2015, 11:02:56 AM:

Haha yeah I can imagine! That qoute from me sort of exposes how incredibly little I know about sound design though - I just took what I myself do and changed "writing and deleting a single line of code that does very very little difference" for the knobs  So, it's sort of an awesome thing that I'm not the one doing the audio lol. Whatever wizardry he's up to - knobs or not - he probably needs a little time though, re-inventing stuff is always a biggie.


Oh man now I totally set some sort of time frame for work that James, not I, will do  And I rarely even keep the time frames I set for myself... So haha, all promises withdrawn! Take that with several bath tubs of salt!

Another thing that got kind of lost in the audio trigger frustration is that James recently sent me a put-together version of the Sky Islands region! And it's sweeeeeeet! I haven't played it very much yet, but I've had a couple of good runs and first of all it looks amazing. Weird antennae and relay structures, a lot of vertigo and here and there serene (or would be serene if it wasn't for the lizards) little sky islands. Plus, cicadas moving around, which is frustrating and fun. Lots of cicada jumping! I have a few memorable moments already, such as entering a cicada hive that's currently raided by two vultures, and standing at the bottom of a pit with a green lizard getting closer and closer, desperately waiting for my captive cicada to stop being exhausted so I can jump out of there. I got out a split second before the green lizard got me! Really nice to see how the mechanics interact to create interesting situations.

JLJac on April 16, 2015, 01:18:05 PM:

Usually with a very lukewarm degree of passion - I actually don't think they'd come down from their sky patrol if it wasn't that they saw me in the general area. Cicadas are really small and notoriously difficult to catch, so I gave the vultures a pretty low interest modifier for that relationship.

jamesprimate on April 16, 2015, 06:56:56 PM:

AUDIO STUFFF: THE RETURN. Day 1



YES, all the things that Joar said. I admit to being a little apprehensive about it, as conceptual changes will inevitably scrap a bit of the past couple of years of audio work. But it is necessary! The game has evolved significantly in the past year, and the audio needs to evolve with it.

Audio rant below, pls feel free to skip

One thing thats central to any self-respecting professional audio fascist is aesthetic consistency. For the lingo build, I had a pretty tight concept built around the idea of Rain World as more of a quick, "retro pixel platformer" (remember when people did that?), and so limited the tools used for the audio and SFX to what hardware would have been used for 16bit games. At this point "chiptune" is more of a buzzword and implies a genre more than anything else, so i'll avoid that and just say that the tools were simple chip-based additive/subtractive synthesis, 2 operator FM, basic wavetable / formant synthesis, and some basic sample / PCM stuff. Nothing that you wouldn't find in a classic SNES/Neo Geo/Sega CD game.

But that was 2 years ago! The game is now modern and sexy with shaders and dynamic lighting and who knows maybe particle effects, so limiting the audio toolkit to 90s tech just doesn't fit any more, and would be totally arbitrary. I had been anticipating this a bit the past few months and have been experimenting, filling out the sound profile with both hi-fi synthesis elements and manipulating junk audio sources (you might recall that track i posted built from a conversation Joar and I had at PAX), trying to extend the palette in both directions. Might still have to cut a bunch of that old stuff tho!

Now, the junk audio thing is funny, because the reason I started messing with that in the context of rain world was because of the SFX samples that Joar was using before I joined the project. As he tells it to me, he just made them with his laptop mic, recording moving papers around and slapping rulers to the table. The resulting sounds are a lot of messy distorted stuff, indistinct white noise elements and compression artifacts. AKA perfect for Rain World! I wouldn't want to use them raw, but if balanced, eq'd right, run through some nice filters and placed in the proper context, it sounds pretty cool. So I've moved to incorporating use of manipulated junk audio throughout the overall audio concept, and am pretty stoked with the results. Imagine you are being hunted through the deep darkness by some huge creature while something like this is playing in the background: https://clyp.it/jjn25egr Not all the music will be like this of course, but in the right context it creates a pretty amazing mood imho.

I dont think Joar was totally on board with this use of his samples initially, but audio is a really interesting medium. if you know what you are doing, you can basically make anything out of anything else. For instance, here is what a korg product rep can do with 1 sample on a cheap hardware sampler in 6 minutes:



So basically this entire post so far is me justifying that, yes, I, a "professional sound designer", will be using Joar's laptop mic recorded crumpled paper and ruler thwack sounds as audio source material, and its for the sake of aesthetic consistency, LOL

/AudioRant, it is now safe to continue reading

So on to implementation! Past day or so was spent familiarizing myself with Joar's audio language and establishing a new workflow. Like the rest of my life right now, it is a horrific mess of text files:



But as hellish as it looks, I am super happy with the results so far! My gameplan was to first do an updated version of the Lingo SFX implementation for some practice with the language and to get something to work from. I had expected that to take at least until the weekend, but managed to get a basic sound-set that already sounds significantly better than that in just the afternoon! Super encouraging results.

Anyway, I hope that wasn't TOO boring. The actual audio work itself is literally days of me moving knobs around, so that would be even worse to read! I'll post some video of this rough audio build tomorrow when I have all the bat sfx triggers sorted out, and post updates on how that evolves through to a more final version.

jamesprimate on April 16, 2015, 09:11:23 PM:

ty ty!

I agree with literally everything you said. Working with the junk audio stuff in this way definitely opens the door to incorporating field recording style soundscapes, and the way we are planning on doing the room->region->world environmental audio structure is already sort of set up for it. Would be a shame not to!

I probably wont do the actual wandering around with a mic bit, as i have become a vampire and sunlight would certainly burn my skin at this point, but i do have some field recording enthusiast acquaintances who's libraries i plan on thoroughly raiding 

And like you, I am highly suspicious of independent audio people who use DAWs like pro tools. reaper is leaps and bounds better than programs 20x its price

jamesprimate on April 18, 2015, 01:01:16 AM:

ahh thanks so much for the kind words! im really heartened that example wasn't considered "too out there", as that was a definite concern. we're both doing this as an art project and exploring some pretty weird techniques, but its equally important to have that not get in the way of communicating the mood of the game to a person experiencing it. like, sure its clever that i did that track from a 3 second junk audio clip, but... it also has to actually "work".


Totally 100% agreed. Its been a strange experience, since most of the tracks associated with the game were done years ago on a lark for what I assumed would be just a little free game. Things have progressed considerably since then, but also I have a lot of comments from people / backers who really like the original tunes, so I'd feel guilty completely scrapping them. They don't really fit the narrative aspect of the current game so i dont think i'd want them in the single player, but what I might do is have them as tracks available in multiplayer? Then they would be there for people who like them, but it doesn't derail the atmosphere.


Yep, totally. This relates to the dynamic audio question as well. The way I have it organized is that there are 3 layers of non-sfx audio, each specific to an individual region: one layer to set the ambiance of a room/sub-region/etc, such as dripping water or machines rumbling softly; another layer that relates dynamically to the weather, so wind, light rain, atmospheric stuff; and the third is tied to narrative elements, game objects or specific moods we want to convey, and that is generally "music" but can also be "music-ish".

the idea is that as you move through the environment, regions, rooms, etc., there is a kind of constantly shifting, blending soundscape around you, and you would rarely (or potentially never) hear the same blend of sounds again. thats the idea at least! all the pieces are there, we just have yet to implement it.


 

Anyway, audio stuff is on pause for a day while poor Joar sorts through some bat audio triggers and wraps up the FINAL editor update (fingers crossed!), so I've been putting together concepts for the next region: Garbage Wastes! Home to my favorite creature: Garbage Worms!!! I've been looking forward to this one for a loooooooong time, so its great to get down to business.





This region was also, if i remember correctly, one of the major reasons for Joar building the prop editor, so I'm starting to play with that a bit in context and DAMN it is going to add so much! There is serious potential for over use of it to ruin or at lest significantly change the already established aesthetic, so I'm starting slow. In the above room for instance, the boxes and some sticking up curved beams are the only prop additions.

jamesprimate on April 18, 2015, 03:45:43 AM:

thx, i have high hopes for it!


this palette is just temporary as i sketch out a few levels so that will def get fixed, but in general were not going to have any poison or acid pits or lava or anything like that. early on we decided that the creatures and the rain are going to be what kills you (and sometimes fall damage and drowning, ofc), so no spikes or lasers turrets. every trap it will be *possible* to escape. though that said, these specific pools will probably be full of leeches and other nasty stuff

JLJac on April 18, 2015, 06:26:58 AM:

Deeep in an extensive level editor upgrade, and making new art assets. I'll probably do an update when I'm through. In the mean time, here's some rust textures:

jamesprimate on April 18, 2015, 06:42:00 AM:

well, since you mention it... Lydia and I are doing a kind of music party this weekend, so we're offering to write tracks for LD games. youre right, its good to mix things up a bit

jamesprimate on April 18, 2015, 10:57:57 PM:

but... we dont take breaks for very long Joar whipped up a properly poisonous looking palette for the Garbage Wastes region:





Were working on a solution to the blockiness of the tile boarder, but otherwise lookin pretty nice

He has also, apparently, finished with what we hope to be the final level editor update!  I'm not sure if the editor has been his arch nemesis for this project but its certainly a main antagonist at least, so i hope he went out for a beer or something after closing that window  . I'll let him tell you all about the decals and props and draped cables, but suffice to say, it its going to add a ton of polish visually and should take us through to the end.

It's an insanely huge addition to my level toolkit because previously any visual concepts I wanted to have in a room, "the look", had to be completely done within the 3 layers of playable geometry, and MAAAAAAAn is that limiting! Now I can say "hey I want a fan tile here" and not have to make it work with the physical/spatial orientation of the room. Also, whereas the physical tiles can only be placed in 3 layers of groupings (0-10, 10-20, 20-30), the prop tiles can be placed at any depth from 0-30, meaning I have much more control of the perception of depth, which will make for a more nuanced look and expanded Three-dimensionality.

Anyway enough blurb, Imma get to it!

JLJac on April 19, 2015, 12:52:47 AM:

Yeah not quiiiite done, I need to add yet another type of prop, which will be used for more organic shapes. But we're totally getting there! Then I'm making a few art assets when I'm at it (new garbage tiles!) and after that working on the level editor can hopefully be put behind us. Except I'll have to return now and then to add assets. Haha. Anyway, it's Sunday so I'm taking a little time off, see ya soon!

jamesprimate on April 19, 2015, 07:04:00 AM:

ah yeah, this may be a bit of a design challenge. we have ideas for it, but will have to see how it goes in context. unfortunately, it seems like the completely open world is going to be unfeasible, especially since we are preparing for multiple platforms and generally would like average humans without supercomputers to be playing it. our proposed solution is to have a kind of transitional series of "gate" rooms between each region, huge dramatic doors and locking mechanisms, which might also house a shelter/save point. this allows for switching over the loaded region, as well as offer a neutral / dark palette to make the palette change less abrupt. we shall see!


Probably not for a little while, as we have some big deadlines coming up that we have to focus on. Sorry! Next one will likely show multiplayer though, which Im super looking forward to seeing in action.


ahhhh thanks! tears of joy  next gen graphics... spit out from the lingo level editor and bloom lighting effect that was in the old version Really Nice to finally see it getting the polish we've been looking forward to though! I think there is quite a bit more than can be done too.

JLJac on April 19, 2015, 12:47:33 PM:

Just want to clarify on that a bit - we do plan to have an open world as in the player being able to go anywhere at any time they want, but we've been reconsidering an idea we played with early on that the entire world would be loaded at the same time. We just didn't realize how large the world was going to be back then o_0 We've been thinking of the gates as a sort of airlock between regions so they can load and unload. Don't worry, I don't expect there to be any loading times to speak of (reading the world text files is usually quicker than a second) but the gates will be there as a room that exists in both region and acts as a transitional area, so that one region can be dropped from RAM and the next one fired up.

As for palette changes, we do have a few places where we know we're going to do a gradual transition (which will eventually culminate in one of those gates, for technical reasons) but for other areas I think it could be kind of cool to have abrupt transitions as well. You go through the gate room, anticipation builds up, and when you pop out on the other side BAM! Everything has changed, an exciting new region to explore. So from how things look now I think we might do a bit of both 

JLJac on April 20, 2015, 11:56:40 PM:

The game is divided into two modes, "realized space" and "abstract space". Realized space is what you see, abstract space is a sort of gross simplification of the game, reduced to basically board game rules, where each room is divided into a few "nodes" that simple representations of creatures occupy and interact in.

Abstract space exists to make the world feel alive. Because of the processes in abstract space, you don't need to move to creatures to "unfreeze" them, they move around in the world according to their own whims and needs, and you might encounter them at any place. Also it keeps track of stuff to make the world feel consistent - stuff such as what creatures are where, what damage state they're in, etc etc. Basically it is intended to create the experience that the entire world is up and running at the same time.

At one point I thought that the entire world was going to be about 100 rooms, and then I entertained the idea of having abstract space loaded for the entire world at once. Now that James has gotten started on the regions though, it turns out that a single region is more or less the size we anticipated the entire world to be. We did a test where we tried to put 4 regions together into one super-region and run it all in abstract space. It worked, but with really bad performance - and we have at least 12 regions planned.

So that's why I'm thinking of loading and unloading the regions from abstract space. I like the abstract space stuff, but mostly because of principle - it's sort of a simulationist element to the game. Performance, ie the game being able to actually run, is more important. Still I'm not too bummed about it, because if a 60 room region is up and running that is about the scope of simultaneously simulated space that I originally set out to do! The reason why I'm doing the abstract space system is because I want you to be able to follow a creature and see it go about its day, or have a creature follow you. The principal thrill of knowing that a lizard 230 rooms away is actually being simulated is less important than the actual game experience.

This said, if I go with the loading/unloading solution I'll still have to simulate some sort of creature movement in the unloaded areas as well... Because when you enter a region, it won't do that all creatures are just popping out of their dens even if you're halfway through a rain cycle. So for that reason, when you go through an area gate the region that is loaded will probably go through some sort of sped-up, simplified version of the standard abstract space simulation, to place creatures in believable positions throughout the region. The same process could be run on all regions during hibernation, so that populations will affect each other etc.

Don't worry about this stuff not being actually simultaneous as the realized rooms, ordinary abstract space isn't either  For this stuff I basically just save what time it was when the abstract entity was last updated, and on the next update weigh that into the simulation.

This means that effectively, the game will be divided into three modes rather than two. "Realized space simulation" - the stuff you see on screen, "Abstract space simulation" - the rest of the region you're in, and "Super abstract space simulation", the other regions. This basically means that the game is simulated at different resolutions, and the resolution gets higher close to the player - but the game is still to some degree running everywhere else as well.

So the individual creatures of the world (which will likely be in the thousands) will all consistently exist, they'll do stuff, and you'll be able to find them again (unless they got eaten) but the further away from you they are the more crude the simulation of whatever they're doing will be. Loading and unloading regions is mostly a technical issue, the implications for your actual gameplay experience is likely not going to be large. With the exception that you'll have to go through gates in order to move between regions - but the gates was part of the design even before because we want them to cover up the palette changes, so that's not really a change per se.

As for fleeing out of a region to avoid a creature, that's not really a viable option because the gate rooms have gates, and you don't want to spend 20 seconds in a tight airlock with a vulture! Also, creatures that are with you in the airlock should be moved to the next region, we need that for other reasons as well (ie pups). On top of that, the regions are large, so it's probably only in about 5% of the time you're actually close enough to a region gate for it to be an option. And if you still somehow manage to pull a move like that the gain is not much larger than a standard situation where you manage to go to a new room within the region and have a predator lose you - in common rain world fashion it's most likely to be out of the frying pan into the fire, with some other beastie waiting for you in the new room you arrive in.

jamesprimate on April 22, 2015, 02:05:21 AM:

personally, from where it is now id prefer not to have an in-game map, as from my perspective learning the terrain is a good part of the experience. the game as we conceive of it isnt really about "getting places" so much as it is wallowing around in the world.

the way the world map is laid out, there isnt really emphasis on dead ends: every path generally leads somewhere, though the challenges and experiences in each route differ. you're always getting *somewhere*. this goes the same for region to region connections as it does room to room connections. since there isnt really "keys" outside of things you might generally find in a region, or much in the way of item objectives per se, multiple routes to every destination, and the creature migrations that give you a sense of general direction (as gimmy mentioned), i dont think a map is especially *necessary* unless as a player concession. but we'll see how it goes! so far there hasnt been any mention from anyone while playtesting it, though we have yet to connect the whole world and that might shake things up quite a bit.

oh another thing to mention is that the rooms arent laid out in a 2d x/y fashion. in fact, *soft spoiler alert*: we are planning some regions where the connections and orientations are VERY not 2D, if you catch my drift. So a room-specific map probably wouldnt even be possible. but if necessary, i could see some sort of vague region map working to preserve the mystery and also not driving players mad.

anyway, like so many things, thats a ways away. Joar just hit me up with a COLOSSAL editor update, so i am digging through that and happily playing with piles of refuse and junk in the garbage wastes!


detail: https://i.imgur.com/63SIfMW.png

how does s/he stay so clean in all that gunk??

jamesprimate on April 22, 2015, 07:44:20 AM:

ROFL

@Woodledude: thx thx! part of it is the look of the region and another part is all the cool new stuff that can be done with the updated editor toolkit. once we get all the regions put together, im going to touch up the old rooms (only 230 of em, no big deal ) and make sure everything blends/transitions nicely

jamesprimate on April 23, 2015, 12:24:16 AM (Last Edit: April 23, 2015, 12:38:46 AM):

WHOA! Thats pretty crazy to have such a large spread for an alpha demo D: Obv we'd prefer people to see the finished product. But hey, Im just glad they didnt shred it!

@Princessa: they picked us up right after the kickstarter, so a little over a year now? but they are super chill and letting us do our thing, so im not surprised some ppl didnt notice!