Hi there, here is some news from the tech department. We’ve been working very hard to improve the Creator engine for Planetfall and I’ve been asked to write this week’s Dev Diary about some of the big changes we’ve made.
The first thing we decided to do after the release of AoW3 was to move over to 64bit. At the time, we were really struggling getting all the DLC content running within the ~3GB memory limit and the modders among you will also know that this really limits what you can do when you want to add cool new units and structures.
The second project we started was focused on improving the visuals. We spent quite some time figuring out what kind of lighting technique would be best for Planetfall. How realistic should it be? What fits best with the art style? Physical Based Rendering (PBR) gave some great results but it had as drawback that it can make things look too washed out, reducing the colorfulness, and we really wanted to create colorful planets! In the end we made some modifications to the PBR algorithms until they gave the results we wanted.
Below is a screen shot that demonstrates how the surrounding environment, in this case just the terrain, influences the lighting of the object.
Here are some screenshots that show the difference between Planetfall and AoW3.
Of course, this is not all that we’ve been working on. We’ve also added to the renderer:
· Full anti-aliasing support
· Soft shadow support
· Optimized for high res-displays (4K) – Interface scaling
· DirectX 11 (AoW3 uses DirectX9)
· Improved multi core support
Another system that we improved is what we call the snapshot renderer. In AoW3 all of the unit icons needed to be handmade and this was quite time consuming. In Planetfall units can be upgraded through the unit-modding system and we really wanted to see this reflected in the icons as well. The new Snapshot renderer allows us to generate unit icons on the fly in-game, based on the unit-mods that are enabled. it even takes the player colors into account!
The screenshot below shows how the Kir’Ko Frenzied is posed in one of our Tools, along with an actual shot of it taken in-game.
And the icon in use in the game:
Many more improvements were made to our tools / networking / procedural generation but we need to keep something for the upcoming Dev Diaries. Next week Tom will talk more about the combat system!
The first thing we decided to do after the release of AoW3 was to move over to 64bit. At the time, we were really struggling getting all the DLC content running within the ~3GB memory limit and the modders among you will also know that this really limits what you can do when you want to add cool new units and structures.
The second project we started was focused on improving the visuals. We spent quite some time figuring out what kind of lighting technique would be best for Planetfall. How realistic should it be? What fits best with the art style? Physical Based Rendering (PBR) gave some great results but it had as drawback that it can make things look too washed out, reducing the colorfulness, and we really wanted to create colorful planets! In the end we made some modifications to the PBR algorithms until they gave the results we wanted.
Below is a screen shot that demonstrates how the surrounding environment, in this case just the terrain, influences the lighting of the object.
Here are some screenshots that show the difference between Planetfall and AoW3.
Of course, this is not all that we’ve been working on. We’ve also added to the renderer:
· Full anti-aliasing support
· Soft shadow support
· Optimized for high res-displays (4K) – Interface scaling
· DirectX 11 (AoW3 uses DirectX9)
· Improved multi core support
Another system that we improved is what we call the snapshot renderer. In AoW3 all of the unit icons needed to be handmade and this was quite time consuming. In Planetfall units can be upgraded through the unit-modding system and we really wanted to see this reflected in the icons as well. The new Snapshot renderer allows us to generate unit icons on the fly in-game, based on the unit-mods that are enabled. it even takes the player colors into account!
The screenshot below shows how the Kir’Ko Frenzied is posed in one of our Tools, along with an actual shot of it taken in-game.
And the icon in use in the game:
Many more improvements were made to our tools / networking / procedural generation but we need to keep something for the upcoming Dev Diaries. Next week Tom will talk more about the combat system!
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