Before Cedric takes over again…we just waited two days more to give you a very first look at another new aspect of what is also in work at KTX…
Hello guys, let's talk a little bit about “foliage” today...
Talking generally about vegetation related to the Haunted 1 set of maps you may find it not as fantastic as some other parts of the visual content. In fact, EPIC (the company that created the Unreal Engine) implemented hardware instanced static meshes into Unreal Engine 3 when the maps of the game were close to completion.
However, the most exciting thing about "foliage" is that you can turn a boring naked floor into a very detailed area without stumbling into hours and hours of hard work.
Have look at that beautiful picture…
…making a beautiful meadow like this requires a mesh for grass and one for the yellow flowers that you compose with only minor differences in size, rotation and color between each instance of the meshes into the landscape - and it turns into a completely unique appearance - and how unique depends on you.
So, what happened lately: the thoughts of making the DLC even better for you, led me to a wrong way, because I thought too much about the appearance as about the game performance, we already talked about. In the end only seven meshes out of a collection of 40 were integrated, without affecting the good appearance recognizeable, but it helped the performance.
With closer look at one of those meshes you will realize: there is not a lot of detail in the geometry, which makes clear that the texture is by far the most important part of a vegetation asset - save time and don’t look elsewhere.
The following images are made to give you an impression of how I check the sense of scale, the way my foliage reacts to lighting, as well as performances and how I recognize in which way my meshes fit together best - I just put them in an empty map.
Finally, see how the assets are used in the upcoming DLC. As you know from the beginning of today’s remarks, Hardware instanced meshes don't work well with lighting in the Unreal Engine 3 - but I'm working on a solution…as much and as soon as I can.
Nov 14th, 2016 - News from TheHauntedgames
Here we are again with the biweekly notes:
On January 4th we announced to reactivate the plans for The Haunted 2 and to work on downloadable content (DLC) for The Haunted 1. If you have read that Jan 4th announcement exactly you can imagine how happy we were to be able to present just some month later the first official preview of the DLC in the work process.
We had discussions about how to do the DLC since we reactivated the plans for “The Haunted 2” (have a look on announcement Oct 4th) and are now going to finish a DLC in the far improved style on UE3 - heading UE4 !
And while doing that - here is the next “behind the scene” info from Cedric:
Hello guys, the last post was about the process to make an asset from start to finish - today I will talk about optimizing of performance.
As you know, the PC version of the original game was released at the end of October 2011 and developed until spring 2012, when the lights went out at THQ. Although "The Haunted 1" was not my first game (I also worked on Divine Divinity Ego Draconis, Mini Ninjas, and some Nintendo DS games), I was not as experienced as I am today.
The DLC in the work process will now benefit from six years more experience and we gonna have a look at that a bit closer. If I am going to open today the Museum map I made back then, I can see instantly things that negatively impact the performance. Even on my current computer (i5 6600k, Geforce 770gtx 4gb, 64Gb ddr4) I can't even reach the maximum framerate of 120fps allowed by my monitor while playing around with the Unreal Engine Level Editor.
Having a look at the following two screenshots (hopefully, Steam won't resize it down too much), you can see that I only get 86fps…
…looking at the entire map, the framerate drops down to 30fps, and the map is not even that big.
The next two screenshots show still a work-in-progress, but most assets are already in there and, much more importantly, the polygons count is nearly 4 times higher than in the museum map above, allowing me to add the details I was talking about (in this case, a very dense vegetation). Lastly we note that - no matter where you are in the level or even looking at the entire level from above - we reach the 120fps and it never drops below!
Besides that, from a gameplay point of view, the level is already done. Most major assets are done, those that are not just need to be properly textured. The vegetation assets are 100% done. The textures are 90% done. The detailing assets are 50% done.
What's left to do is the lighting (I think you could guess from the screenshots), the pathfinding, items placement and the level event.
I can guarantee you that this DLC will get released before “Half Life 3” ;)
Upcoming DLC 1 - QA Highres Screenshot
Oct 21st, 2016 - News from Hauntedgames
Did you read last news Oct 4th ? Sooo. today we lift the curtain - Cedric Danneels is back and today he gets directly to you with the promised next "behind the scene" info...
ALSO: everyone should now get The Haunted: Hells Reach to play the upcoming DLC, we have reduced the price to 8.99 and will also make special offers. Quite close is the next special sale simply watch our steam store each weekend!!
Hello everyone, Cedric talking here... Back in the days, I made the Museum level for THE HAUNTED: HELLS REACH.
As announced earlier, some of you may also know me for making in DARK SOULS 3 Irithyll of the Boreal Valley and a part of the Lothric castle.
I took over the realisation of upcoming DLC recently and decided to remake things. It may be longer to do things that way, but even if I took my distances with THE HAUNTED: HELLS REACH after the THQ insolvency post-release debacle, I still have some pride and certainly want the players to get a proper product, so that's why I'm here now - to lift the quality step by step until state of the art.
Since there was a comment about it, I’m tempted to show you the reason between what appears to be a day lighting - but I feel it's better to keep that part secret until the end since it's the main feature of the level.
So - no pretty screenshots today, that will be for the next update...
Today is going to be a small “making of” an asset where I’ll explain a part of my designing process.
It all starts with this… …a small set of very simple meshes. Those meshes will be used to block out the rough shapes of the level, get a sense of scale and also test the gameplay very early on. As you can see, they follow strict size guidelines, this is meant to make sure that the assets will assemble properly without gap. When using random sizes, everything will need to be adjusted later on, potentially causing new problems in other areas. This step is for me the easiest part but also the most important, if you mess up here, you can easily double or triple your production time.
I always keep my set of meshes as small as possible, a wall, a door or two, some pillars and slopes and you're good to go. No need to juggle between a hundred of different assets and spend time wondering if Wall002 would be better than Wall015, simplicity is efficiency.
At this point of the production, making changes is extremely easy so I make sure to test the gameplay a lot to make it as fluid as possible. There may still be some changes later on but unless there was a major oversight on my side, the gameplay should be close to final and any change should be minor. The later the change, the harder it is, the longer it takes to fix, taking away some precious time that could be used to polish the level.
—
So now let's take one of those meshes, for example the pillar and let's proceed to the next step. For every mesh, I gather some references and do some research about the architecture that I want to recreate and then start refining my meshes and diversifying them.
The meshes should have enough details to be recognizable but still basic enough to be easily modifiable. Once done, i can start replacing the block meshes by their refined version and see if they fit well. Things like pillars become much thinner when going from a 8sides cylinder to something more refined like on this picture, which may look wrong.
Once again, since the meshes are very simple, adjusting the proportions is still very quick and easy at this point so it's better to make sure that the architecture is well balanced rather than having to do fixes later.
—
Once every mesh has been modeled, placed in the level and adjusted to look correct, it's start to move to the third phase; making the final mesh with all of its details. Well, here it is…
…and you may notice 2 things:
1.) The shape of the base changed compared to the previous version. The reason is that in the previous version, it was easy for the player to get stuck while back-walking. This is a part of the work that players don't realize very often but when making an asset, we have not only to care about how it looks - we also have to make sure that it doesn't hinder the player's movements. When a game advertises itself as "utra realistic", it actually means "ultra believable". The reality is always slightly altered to help the gameplay because even if we know that graphic make a game sell, we also know that players forgive more easily bad graphics than they forgive bad gameplay.
2.) There are some weird shadows and the mesh looks a bit blobby. What should be flat surfaces appear to be slightly convex. There are two main ways to fix that.
First way is, we could make a high poly asset then "bake" a normal map that will correct the surface. This way allows us to make very high quality assets, however it takes a very long time (more than a day for a pillar like this), time that i don't have.
Second way is to fix the geometry itself by modifying what we call the vertex normals. This process only takes a few minutes and will also allow me to make the texture without needing a high poly bake.
And here is our pillar with its geometry edited. It looks much better than the previous version and has the same memory weight:
A little peak at the wireframe: I kept the geometry relatively light compared to nowaday's standards. Nowaday's graphic cards can digest millions of polygons per frame at 60fps but since the DLC is for a game that was released five years ago, a part of our playersbase may still have a low end computer so I keep the things a bit more simple and light.
—
We are getting close to the end now. What is left to do now is to make the texture for our asset - and have a look at how nice our pillar mesh looks combined with its texture:
And then place it in the game…
Well, that’s from Cedric for today. Now its your turn to say: what would you like to see in the next update ?
...and please remember - get your own copy of THE HAUNTED: HELLS REACH for as low as 8,99 or the four pack or watch special sales !!!
Oct 4th, 2016 - News from Hauntedgames
2016 is, like announced in january, an exciting year and we are happy not only to found the base for Haunted 2, we also found solutions for the DLC...The Haunted:Hells Reach was made with UE3 and as we all know that is not state of the art - but we need to make the DLC with UE3 to fit that in the original game. Sooo: Step 3 of the level work is done and we are now improving the DLC1 to bring on those more impressive visuals. Today we show a bit from "behind the scene" with two " before / after " shots to give an idea where we go...direction high quality assets!
You´ve checked out our last announcement from Sep 1st ??? http://steamcommunity.com/games/43190/announcements/detail/803152542812095166 The images from Dark Souls 3 made by that former Haunted Team member ? Well, that one joined also back - and since we are now in the final phase of the DLC we are going to inform more often about the ongoing things at The Hauntedgames. Stay tuned - next "behind the scene" info friday, oct 21st 2016 !!
Sep 1st, 2016 - News from Hauntedgames
PRICE LOWERED like promised !!! It´s time to get your copy of Haunted 1: Hells Reach now to be prepared for the DLC to come! Trading cards will follow soon!
All meetings on GAMESCOM in Germany some days ago also brought light and good results for future work and publishing on Haunted 2: Back to Hell...and another project!!!
AND by the way - are you familiar with the area of these 6 images below?
You´re right - this is IRITHYLL of the Boreal Valley from DARK SOULS 3 !!!
But did you know also that it was actually made by one of the "The Haunted Team Members"?
News from Hauntedgames
Hello to everybody…
We have given us an overview of the fan-wishes and thank you all for constructive postings and your eMails !!! We want to take that all into account as far as possible. :-)
The first wish we are going to fullfill now is the question for DLC…the DLC-work began (see first preview Jun 24) while we are setting up a new team for Haunted 2 (Back to Hell).
Then we will see a price reduction for the full game.
Thirdly…trading cards.
Okay so far…and do not buy the game from any other place than from STEAM (please read announcement from Jan 3, 2016 carefully !!!) we DID NOT authorize any other sale and Cosmi Valusoft do not have any rights to sell our game, not digital like a steam key and not one physical product.
Finally, as anybody should know, the development of a game like Haunted usually costs from a million bucks upward - THQ went bankruptcy - we never saw the money that was put into the game and in lawyers, although the game was successful, while THQ sold. We are Indies, lost a lot of money and are right now paying again for new dev. - sooo the DLC’s to come can’t be sold for nothing, but also not expensive…for the new start we want you all to buy it ! :-)
Thank you and have fun !!!
DLC
Because images speak louder than words, here the first official preview of the ongoing work on the announced DLC...
DLC
Because images speak louder than words, here the first official preview of the ongoing work on the announced DLC...
2016 - it goes on!
SyA salutes all friends of "The Haunted: Hells Reach" and wishes a successful and healthy 2016!!! Here are the news:
Like everyone knows, was "The Haunted: Hells Reach" 2012 a victim of the insolvency of THQ. The console versions could not be completed and the license to sell the PC version has been, as well as the distribution rights of many other videogames, acquired by Cosmi on the purchase of THQ subsidiary Valusoft (Press Release Apr 25, 2012).
Needless to say that the video game marketing ran then absolutely differently than planned between THQ and SyA.
On November 4/5, 2013, the companies SyA - Signo y Arte (Licensor) and Cosmi Valusoft (Licensee) signed a contract for the premature termination of their Publishing and Distribution Agreement by end of the day March 31, 2014. For this purpose, the following public statement was agreed and issued on Nov 11, 2013: "Cosmi Valusoft and the Licensor of “The Haunted: Hell’s Reach” Signo y Arte, S.L., have reached an agreement under which all rights to “The Haunted: Hell’s Reach”, have reverted to Licensor, and Licensor is free to bring the game to market."
About two months after the last permitted sales by Cosmi Valusoft the game was relaunched by SyA. Unfortunately we had to take note of the fact (immediately after the relaunch and our last report in the community Dec 2014) that we were not the only ones, and still are, which sell "The Haunted: Hells Reach" - even though we have NOT assigned rights to distribute/sell the game to others. This led to unexpected legal considerations and SyA again could not act as it was desired. In other words, we now also have to bear the additional costs of Investigation, criminal charges and damages actions in the different countries in addition to our extremely high losses due to the insolvency of THQ.
The GOOD news - due to the criminal investigations we saw that there are more friends of Haunted, as we thought because of what we saw until then. Also the market appraisal of SyA and THQ were correct - quite contrary to other opinions. That's why SyA will reactivate the plans for "THE HAUNTED: BACK TO HELL" from October, 2011.
In addition, and in the meantime we think about the completion of DLC/Add-on for "The Haunted: Hells Reach" for all legally acquired games.
