Development Report 1/16/2020

Sup everyone,

Here’s a bit different report this time, since Mr.Versus wasn’t able to be make it this time. So, I’ll make this short one.

As I mentioned in a past post (previous to the Bioasshard Arena 0.2.103 release) I had to send my PC for fixing after the release. Because we wanted to accomplish our 3 targets (Bio Arena 0.2.103, Case of T + and the reintroduction of Omnia In Unum) before the end of the year (we ended up failing by a day or two xD) I decided to wait until that was done, and then sent it over. The message I gave in the previous post I had to write it in Mr.Versus’ PC. And now they sent it back, saying “We couldn’t reproduce that behavior in our end and everything seems to be ok” … Sooo, yeah, here I have my machine back just like I sent it. What’s funny is that I didn’t experience the freezes since then, so let’s hope it was a temp strange behavior and that it won’t act up again lol.

So, as you may have guessed, we’re already fully back at work, mainly focused on two important tasks:

-Fixing the Fatal Error on Bioasshard. Looks like I found the cause, it was an engine bug, making textures to never stream out even if they were set to stream out of memory. And since in the last version more textures were added for the extra effects, the memory use grew up a lot. Funny thing is I tried to upgrade to the latest engine version, only to found is pretty broken, at least for me. Constantly crashing with a single camera move. So, ended up moving to a previous version but newer than what I had. In this version such bug it’s said to be fixed, so we’ll see. But even then, we’ll be making a huge optimization pass to clean code, texture sizes and try to reduce the overall size of the project and the loading times.

-Improving the quality of the cel-shading for Omnia In Unum. Yeah, right after publishing the teaser for the reintroduction of the project, we realized the cel-shading was not even close to as good as we want it to be. It’s hard to achieve a good cel-shade in UE4 since it’s so oriented to realistic looks. Hell, even epic is getting rid of features well-used for NPR looks like gaussian blur. I’d like to have the skills Arc System Works have, because their job with cel-shading is just perfection. But we’ll see what we can achieve. One thing I want to get rid of is the exaggerated bloom, since it makes Kintaro’s hair to shine so much in certain angles… xD.

And well, it’s time to get back to work. Hope you’re all ok and had good times during these past holidays.

We’ll be back the next report with the usual way, with Mr.Versus writing his text-walls lol.

Don’t forget to take part on the survey, since it’s a REALLY important one and for now not even the 50% of all you guys took part on it. And we’ll probably close it the next week, so please, do it asap.

See ya in the next report.