Zetheros
Developer
Hey Exanimates,
The renderer update is in great shape, we've mostly been polishing up various assets, tweaking things and adding "less important" features. We've been keeping very busy with this, and because we're working with content a lot, in practice we're doing a lot of testing ourselves so we didn't feel the urge to rush a tester build out just yet. Things seem very stable, and we actually ended up fixing a bunch old bugs rather than finding new ones.
We've updated a huge amount of assets in the early levels, and basically all our materials. With all the improvements some our oldest assets stood out like a sore thumb. To help us do this we leveraged the work we did on procedural materials for characters and weapons. With some additions to our tools we can now add procedural materials with published parameters into our workflow for any object and get really good results instantly.
We've also been adding the full range of procedural material variants for characters, making some more improvements along the way, and updating a few common assets there. We've got some really nice new procedural leather and other materials are looking really good. The whole system has changed quite a lot, with several fine grained modifiers rather than a few fixed ones and a much wider range of possible colours.
We got a few more optimisations in too, and performance is really good. We hit some high framerates in 4k resolution and experienced the dreaded coil whine on one of our systems, which quite a few Exanima players seem to experience. We used the opportunity to investigate this and found a way to better balance the load on the GPU to greatly reduce the problem, which also led to improved performance.
We're a bit further along than we thought we would be for our first beta test, and we don't expect there will be many issues. Everything is pretty much ready to go, at this point we just want some things to make a good first impression so we're adding a bit of polish where it matters most.
Have a great week!
-the BM team
PS: Madoc has allowed Zeth to stream a sculpt of an upcoming Exanima monster. Spoiler warning! Don't click if you want a blind playthrough.
If you want to see the stream live, go to:
For past streams: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcC5ir7qOYHGJBpm0pQGm7Q
The renderer update is in great shape, we've mostly been polishing up various assets, tweaking things and adding "less important" features. We've been keeping very busy with this, and because we're working with content a lot, in practice we're doing a lot of testing ourselves so we didn't feel the urge to rush a tester build out just yet. Things seem very stable, and we actually ended up fixing a bunch old bugs rather than finding new ones.
We've updated a huge amount of assets in the early levels, and basically all our materials. With all the improvements some our oldest assets stood out like a sore thumb. To help us do this we leveraged the work we did on procedural materials for characters and weapons. With some additions to our tools we can now add procedural materials with published parameters into our workflow for any object and get really good results instantly.
We've also been adding the full range of procedural material variants for characters, making some more improvements along the way, and updating a few common assets there. We've got some really nice new procedural leather and other materials are looking really good. The whole system has changed quite a lot, with several fine grained modifiers rather than a few fixed ones and a much wider range of possible colours.
We got a few more optimisations in too, and performance is really good. We hit some high framerates in 4k resolution and experienced the dreaded coil whine on one of our systems, which quite a few Exanima players seem to experience. We used the opportunity to investigate this and found a way to better balance the load on the GPU to greatly reduce the problem, which also led to improved performance.
We're a bit further along than we thought we would be for our first beta test, and we don't expect there will be many issues. Everything is pretty much ready to go, at this point we just want some things to make a good first impression so we're adding a bit of polish where it matters most.
Have a great week!
-the BM team
PS: Madoc has allowed Zeth to stream a sculpt of an upcoming Exanima monster. Spoiler warning! Don't click if you want a blind playthrough.
If you want to see the stream live, go to:
