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 7)

Gibbevex

on Apr 05, 2013

Yeah, please don't spend too much time on shadows. I barely notice them regardless, and end up turning them off to maximize framerate and speed...
I believe work on gameplay elements would be better.
But great game, regardless.

Heavenfall

on Apr 05, 2013

Frogboy

reply 78

...

The Stormwind mod is amazing.

...

Close enough, but I'll take it!

Sinperium

on Apr 05, 2013

Personally I really LOVE shadows.

Good shadowing takes a game out of 2D and really brings it into 3D.

Hardcore speed players might turn them off but in games where graphics are prominent they are awesome.

Just my opinion. I though the shadows in Rebellion were a great touch.

And regarding player opinions...

Heavenfall

on Apr 05, 2013

Frogboy

reply 67

In Civ IV, modders had to write c++ code to hack the ability to change graphics. In FE, we get complaints that the built-in editors aren't consumer friendly enough. in other games, modders would write that.

I used to hang out on a French site called CanardPC. And I honestly thought that if we just worked hard enough and made the game really good they'd like it. But there is no threshold to cross where they'd ever admit that the game is good. So I gave up on them. I feel that way about some of our modders that way. As an end user, I could write a pretty impressive role playing game with base FE. I could do a Civilization V style total conversion with FE out of the box. Yea, it would require me to write some C++ code to juggle around XML files a bit but it's a lot less work than Civ IV required to do meaningful mods with it.

I happen to know a guy who made a pretty significant Civ IV mod and he'd be the first to tell you that FE, out of the box, is more mod friendly than Civ IV.

There's a big difference between a game being mod friendly and a game being some sort of universal toolset.

I thought about how to respond to this for a while.

There have been requests for all kinds of strange tools, there's no denying it. How many times have I read posts about in-game quest editors, or some kind of spore-like monster creator, or even just the ability to edit existing sovereigns/factions?

You guys have held our hands all the way, in my opinion, and that's probably why it stings when the modders aren't always "grateful".

But herein lies the contradiction. FE and E:Wom and FE:LH are built to hold the modder's hand. This is the approach you have chosen. We have no deep function access - UI or scripts. We are limited to the XML data and graphics (3d and icons/textures). It's a sort of mass-market mod access, intended to make it easy to mod but at the cost of functionality. You've chosen a way to let people mod the game that is ironclad - we have no DLL access and no source code is available, literally no way in except active memory.

So what is my point? You say you don't want to hold our hands. We are in agreement - I don't want that either. I want to be set free from the restraints you've placed on modding - the very tools you are so concerned about. But so long as they remain the only way to mod the game, what can I do?

Please stop lamenting the fact that we ask for better tools when the only way to mod the game is through those tools. The modders didn't dig that hole.

If you really want to have your mind blown, your path is clear. Not more tools but more accessibility. And those that make the great mods won't ask for their hands to be held any more, nor did they ever.

StevenAus22

on Apr 16, 2013

Thanks for your considered reply, Heavenfall. Frogboy, remember how Civ4 gave access to AI and UI functions? There is no access to AI functions or deep UI access allowed so far in this series. A big part of the reason FFH2 was so big was because Firaxis had the courage to open up some deep internals to modders. You can have this courage too.

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