Shadows, my oldest enemy

Published on March 18, 2013 By Frogboy In Elemental Dev Journals

The goal is to have the Legendary Heroes beta out this week. It’s been held back mostly because we’re having trouble with the self-shadowing.

Shadows are a pain in the butt. In Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion, more engineering hours were spent on the self-shadowing than anything else. But ya gotta do it. It’s one of those uncanny valley things.

Game Geeking

Derek (Kael) and I have been going over various UI elements, particularly regarding the behavior of selected units. Most of you don’t know this but Derek and I lived together for a year. When he first joined Stardock, he lived in Ohio and until his family could find the right place here in Michigan, he lived with me and my family. I can honestly say, now that they have their own place, we really miss having him live with us (my 6 year old in particular asks when Derek is coming home). So a lot of day time gets “wasted” now discussing game stuff like when units should be centered on the screen or how much we wish we could steal and clone Soren Johnnson’s brain.

You’d be surprised how much time can be spent discussing the best way to implement shadows. Baking vs. dynamic. How realistic should they be? How much perf should they be allowed to use (memory vs. GPU). As geeks, we never get tired of this stuff.

Starcraft 2

I’ve spent too much time playing Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm. Tom Chick, aka, the meanest man in the world, has a review on it. Personally, I’m loving HOTS but having not played SC2 since it was relatively new, I’m not sure how much of the awesomeness is in HOTS and how much has evolved in free updates. In either event, Blizzard deserves a lot of credit for turning a strategy game into its own ecosystem. I am particularly impressed with their AI which provides a good, if decisively non-human, challenge.

DLC

I’m getting a lot of emails regarding post LH DLC. Yes, we plan to make it but we basically want to focus on making LH as good as we can and then after release find out what people want us to make.

Yes, we’re still hiring

We’re looking for more experienced game developers. Stardock pays well and has lots of fringe benefits (personal fitness trainer, nutrionists, movie days, etc.). There won’t be any MP in any of the Elemental games until we can hire at least 1 more network developers. We want MP. I agree with the arguments for it. I think LH in particular lends itself to it. But I have to have coders who can do it. I’ve literally got 2 people on the games side of the company who can do that work and they’re working on future games that absolutely have to have MP.

Stay tuned

I am still hoping we make this week for LH. The current plan is for LH to go “gold” this Spring. We’re friends with the Snowbird guys and we agreed we’d come out after they come out so that no one is stealing the other’s thunder. Here’s my plug for Eador: Masters of the Broken World. If you want to see a game with a good use of shadows, check that game out. Talk about a beautiful looking game. They have another game coming out that I think has been announced called Caribbean (think 17th century RPG). Keep an eye on Snowbird. As a child of the 80s, I get a great deal of joy interacting with game developers in the former Soviet Union. It just goes to show how much better the world is today than it was 30 years ago.

Comments (Page 3)

Kantok

on Mar 19, 2013

Arrogancy

reply 27

I've been a programmer for a long time, and one of the things I've noticed about people in this industry is that there's a powerful desire to make things "correct" - except "correct" is usually an ideological thing, like the way a very old English teacher will tell you that you MUST NOT use the word "quote" to refer to a quotation, but only as a verb. ("To quote", yes, "a quote", no)

I'd like to suggest that maybe shadows are something like this. Maybe not! Maybe you've got some data that shows that it's a big deal. But like, guys, one of the best games I ever played was this thing called Chrono Trigger that you might have heard of once upon a time. It's shadows consisted of little round black circles underneath character's feet. And there's this game called Planescape: Torment whose spiritual successor just managed to raise millions of dollars on Kickstarter; it also used little round circles under a character's feet.

Those were really fun games.

You're attempt to tie the discussion on shadows to the success two classic games that didn't have advanced shadows by modern standards strikes me as a bit misguided. Those two games didn't succeed because they didn't have shadows, which is your implication. They succeeded because they were masterpieces of design and story telling. The fact that they had crappy shadows is a technological fact of the time they were developed in. Nothing more.

Why waste all this effort on graphics? Baldur's Gate I was critically acclaimed and has sold millions of copies and it was only 800x600. Clearly you don't need any higher resolution to be successful.

MarvinKosh

on Mar 19, 2013

It's because players expectations have changed. Also, there's something to be said for the free publicity when someone shares a screenie or five of a game, having good graphics there can really get more people to check the game out. Not so much on social media, because there tends to be such a blur of activity there that screenshots can go ignored, but particularly on forums (other than Stardock say).

My avatar is a crop of a screenshot from FE. Doesn't look brilliant but it's not bad. And it's on every post I make here and on at least one other forum so, you know, it's permeating your brains.

flagyl

on Mar 19, 2013

Kantok

reply 31

Quoting Arrogancy, reply 27
I've been a programmer for a long time, and one of the things I've noticed about people in this industry is that there's a powerful desire to make things "correct" - except "correct" is usually an ideological thing, like the way a very old English teacher will tell you that you MUST NOT use the word "quote" to refer to a quotation, but only as a verb. ("To quote", yes, "a quote", no)

I'd like to suggest that maybe shadows are something like this. Maybe not! Maybe you've got some data that shows that it's a big deal. But like, guys, one of the best games I ever played was this thing called Chrono Trigger that you might have heard of once upon a time. It's shadows consisted of little round black circles underneath character's feet. And there's this game called Planescape: Torment whose spiritual successor just managed to raise millions of dollars on Kickstarter; it also used little round circles under a character's feet.

Those were really fun games.

You're attempt to tie the discussion on shadows to the success two classic games that didn't have advanced shadows by modern standards strikes me as a bit misguided. Those two games didn't succeed because they didn't have shadows, which is your implication. They succeeded because they were masterpieces of design and story telling. The fact that they had crappy shadows is a technological fact of the time they were developed in. Nothing more.

Why waste all this effort on graphics? Baldur's Gate I was critically acclaimed and has sold millions of copies and it was only 800x600. Clearly you don't need any higher resolution to be successful.

I suspect his argument is more along the lines of-instead of utilizing a lot of resources on an asset that many will not notice or want, the people power could be used to make the core game better and worry about graphical flourishes at a later time, if at all.

I think MarvinKosh's point is very apropos in this instance.

abob101

on Mar 19, 2013

It's pretty much a given the game has to have half decent shadows. I know some folks (not sure here, real life people ) who are happy to play the game with blobs for units and squares for buildings if all the other components are spot on. Uber TBS strategy nerds don't care so much for fancy graphics 'n stuff. That's cool. But the reality is a lot of people like fancy graphics. If it looks sexy it will probably sell a few more copies and hopefully that money goes into improving other areas.

In terms of delaying it... presumably once the beta is out they'll want to be working on bug fixes and balancing stuff... rather than stuffing around with shadows. So if they get it out the way now, there's more time for fixing other stuff when the beta comes out. Well that's what i'm telling myself while I wait patiently

In any case, cool to see lots of folks are hanging out for it.

Ben Yeoh

on Mar 19, 2013

quoting post

The goal is to have the Legendary Heroes beta out this week. It’s been held back mostly because we’re having trouble with the self-shadowing.
Shadows are a pain in the butt. In Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion, more engineering hours were spent on the self-shadowing than anything else. But ya gotta do it. It’s one of those uncanny valley things.

Can you share about some of the difficulties and problems you have with the implementation? Filtering issues? Shadow frustum optimization issues? Baked shadows with dynamic shadows blending issues?

Darxim

on Mar 19, 2013

I think that a bob 101 (there forum, I put TWO spaces in his name, so don't make this paragraph a link to nowhere) has a point. If they're going to add shadows, they need to properly utilize them to sell the game. Therefore, in Legendary Heroes, you must add Succubi. Give them a higher polygon count that other units, and make sure they're well animated. A few screenshots of those will get some attention. The shadows will really help highlight the curves. Succubi gotta be curvy.

Markon

on Mar 19, 2013

Great screenshots certainly make for some good publicity and some sales, but you know what else makes for good publicity and sales? People being really excited over playing a beta.

If they hadn't gotten expectations high with previous statements saying "it should be this date", then I personally, and certainly some other people, wouldn't be disappointed right now. We would just be waiting.

Mhantra

on Mar 19, 2013

Well done shadows aren't typically the first thing noticed if at all, but are certainly noticed if they are poor, or if you are used to shodows, are removed.

Frogboy

on Mar 19, 2013

Even in beta 1, the shadows won't be "right", they'll just be better. The goal isn't to make the world realistic. But as game developers, we do have a desire to have our game be visually consistent.

To use a book analogy, there are people who only care about plot and there are people who only care about the quality of the writing. But most people fall somewhere in-between.

I don't think anyone will ever accuse an Elemental game of having state of the art graphics -- it's a DirectX 9 game after all. But we are motivated to try to make the game as consistent to our vision as we can. It's not like it holds up the game development process, it just holds up how soon we are able to give it out to the public.

TheChronicToast

on Mar 19, 2013

Frogboy

reply 39

The game itself continues getting developed every day. It just means that Beta 1 will be further along in other areas. It's not like the rest of the team is sitting around having beers waiting for the shadows to get in.

Even in beta 1, the shadows won't be "right", they'll just be better. The goal isn't to make the world realistic. But as game developers, we do have a desire to have our game be visually consistent.

To use a book analogy, there are people who only care about plot and there are people who only care about the quality of the writing. But most people fall somewhere in-between.

I don't think anyone will ever accuse an Elemental game of having state of the art graphics -- it's a DirectX 9 game after all. But we are motivated to try to make the game as consistent to our vision as we can. It's not like it holds up the game development process, it just holds up how soon we are able to give it out to the public.

All I can say is that I love cranking the graphics to max settings (now that I am actually able too with my rig) in Fallen Enchantress and just getting immersed in the game world and the events and actions that are going on.

Markon

on Mar 19, 2013

All right, all right, sorry I'm so grumpy. I just know my free time is almost done, and I had really pegged on this to be my free entertainment. If you could magically send 5 cool people to my house, all ready to play the Rise of the Runelords adventure (Pathfinder), I could use that as free entertainment....

DeathMutant

on Mar 19, 2013

"Movie Days?", I need to suggest that to the rest of the Engineering team. I know several people already plan to be "sick" the day before the next installment of "The Hobbit" is released this December.

We should have also "Launch Days" for newly released games too!

Kongdej

on Mar 19, 2013

Frogboy

reply 39

I personally believe people work faster and produce higher quality stuff if they can rest and relax once in a while, so no evil faces from my side (meaby only bad jokes)

Only real thing that makes me wonder, is its nicer to know about why or what is happening (feels like you "forgot" about the forum and your beta release date for a while)

But whatever, I'm too poor myself anyhow
Anyhow, I am sure the shadows is going to look great! and personally I prefer having nice shadows in the game, they usually add a great sense of depth and perspective to a game world!

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

mqpiffle

on Mar 19, 2013

There are many problems with the lighting/shadows in FE that basically make it a 2d game with a 3d engine. Just look at your cities from a low angle on the 'shadowed side' of the building. It looks horrible; you never want to view the world from that angle - ever - and something about that is just not right.

I'm not a huge proponent of cutting edge graphics in a strategy game. However, we're dealing with a 3d engine and these are issues which must be resolved.

If we can get nice dynamic shadows with low computing overhead then I for one am all for it.

Alstein

on Mar 19, 2013

I don't think time off is a problem - Stardock isn't crunching as far as I can tell. Hopefully everyone is working 40 hr weeks and getting enough time off over there.

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