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We need to have a mission where you rescue "The Chimps" by taking the last train to Clarkstown. And one of them wears a wool hat, like all the time.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Titan City is in the Northeast United States. NRD is a remnant of WWII, originally, and there may be some other Research Districts in other places.
We may have plans for them. Such glorious plans.
[color=#ff0000]Project Lead[/color]
Yes, it is entirely possible the Southwest Research District has a RenFaire over it. (and if you get that one, you deserve that shirt.)
[color=#ff0000]Project Lead[/color]
In the fashionable lower east corner of the upper west side?
"I don't think you understand the gravity of your situation."
Very cool update. A little peek behind the curtain to see the work being done is always nice to keep my interest and enthusiasm. Keep up the good work guys!
I'm thinking it would be interesting to have the river between Charleston and Highpoint be a natural feature, but then have the channel between Ironport and Charleston/Liberty Harbor be a dredged canal and therefore be very deliberately artificial. Just one of those things that might be of historical interest for why the map looks like that.
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
[img]http://i.imgur.com/Obr50CY.png[/img]
I have to wonder if this body of water was man-made?
Is it a water plant, filtration thing, or other? Sea-world? Pirates of the Caribbean Vegas attraction?
Cant be a naturally occurring lake with lots of straight edges? :P
Actually, Ironport's Island is an artificial island, similar to Harbor Island in Seattle.
Technical Director
Read enough Facebook and you have to make Sanity Checks. I guess FB is the Great Old One of the interent these days... - Beamrider
On the aforementioned [url=http://1drv.ms/1BvprLC]Dragoncon PowerPoint[/url] (thanks again, Conundrum of Furballs!) slide 15 it's labeled as "Lake Verdandi (L1)" with "Skuld (R3)" and "Urd (R4)" connecting it to the Bay. Since it's in Rhinehart Park, I'd not be surprised to find out it was artificial. I'm still hoping to see anime inspired costume contests advertised as being "at Lake Belldandy". Nordic inspired costume contests would also be appropriate there. I'd be willing to make an avatar of [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/94406#comment-94406]Mei Ling Kowalski, [I]Gydhja[/I] of Freya[/url], to officiate. ^_^
Foradain, Mage of Phoenix Rising.
[url=https://cityoftitans.com/forum/foradains-character-conclave]Foradain's Character Conclave[/url]
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Avatar courtesy of [s]Satellite9[/s] [url=https://www.instagram.com/irezoomie/]Irezoomie[/url]
Here is the slide Foradain mentioned, which also provides a good example for how the map has changed.
[IMG]http://i67.tinypic.com/jg48kg.jpg[/IMG]
You actually remembered that, Foradain? You are such a nerd! ;)
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[font=Pristina][size=18][b]Hail Beard![/b][/size][/font]
Support [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/52149#comment-52149]trap clowns[/url] for CoT!
You'll notice NRD has its right name on that map. As well as all the zones you know about. And some of the stuff we had to clear off to make the map usable - this is literally a false color of an early version of the holy map.
[color=#ff0000]Project Lead[/color]
We have GRABBED the entire mixamo library. Not long after it went free in fact. So wasn't going to let that get away. I watched the internal scramble to grab, import, and ensure it worked with our skeleton (a very minor amount of work compared to make even a few such animations).
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[center][color=#ff0000]Interior Map Lead and UI Designer[/color][/center]
Thanks, I do my best! ^_^
The only hard part was scrolling down the front pages to find the Con update...
Foradain, Mage of Phoenix Rising.
[url=https://cityoftitans.com/forum/foradains-character-conclave]Foradain's Character Conclave[/url]
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Avatar courtesy of [s]Satellite9[/s] [url=https://www.instagram.com/irezoomie/]Irezoomie[/url]
So hard not to make a jab at Bethesda map of FO4 right now. Anyways I am hoping this games map is more dynamic in size and scope. So far just reading the posts it is going to be impressive, but then again CoX maps were more impressive than FO4. NO! WRONG! BAD YAHTZEE!!
All joking aside tho to be honest I am a visual kind of guy and a "have to see it to believe it" when it comes down to the tech updates. Showing wire rigs or land drawings does not really give me the same latch on feel because I really do not understand it all. It is like explaining how the Ghostbuster's proton pack works, all I would get it not to cross the streams. How close are you to a working full section of the model city to show off?
All 4 Mutants
Evolution is key. And mutants are key.
If this is how big the city is, thank you. Now I have an idea.
All 4 Mutants
Evolution is key. And mutants are key.
I don't want to put any words in the devs' mouths, but I believe the appropriate phrase is...
[youtube]4cia_v4vxfE[/youtube]
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[font=Pristina][size=18][b]Hail Beard![/b][/size][/font]
Support [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/52149#comment-52149]trap clowns[/url] for CoT!
Nice! I thought that might have been what your beta character was from! It really is an amazing set and if it's free it's for me :D
The Carnival of Light in the Phoenix Rising
"We never lose our demons, we only learn to live above them." - The Ancient One
Avatar by lilshironeko
TL;NR: "How to read the map above" (in a technical sense), feel free to skip it if you can read the map plenty well already. :)
[hr]
For context (and speaking as the person who extracted this image):
This is a snapshot of the terrain data covered by "launch zones" (plus anything else that happened to fall in the rectangle big enough to cover them), rendered using a standard color ramp from purple (lowest) to red-then-white (highest). The ramp is an "S" curve rather than a linear curve so that there is a much more dramatic transition of color right around the mean sea level (and thus expected water level) of the map. The blue is actually based on depth, not "painted to be water", which is why there are some "inland" blue spots that may or may not actually end up being water.
And black? That would be spots where there is no terrain data (or rather, wasn't at that time, I have no idea what they have it looking like now).
Purple lines mark proposed zone boundaries; I'd name the colors of approved ones but you'll notice there aren't any. :)
Purple *areas* mark spots known to need rework at the time (and this completely predates the change to make Ironport an artificial island).
Light blue marks areas that need to be "turned into" water but which either aren't naturally below MSL, or aren't connected to the ocean in a way that would make a "flood fill" algorithm catch them. The ones labelled with "L" are lakes and "R" are rivers, the numbers are just to have a simple reference "ID" for each. Note that "need to be turned into water" does not *necessarily* translate into "man made", but that is certainly one of the most obvious reasons that something might need to be altered from the real world data.
The scale measure is accurate, and each of the "squares" is 1km on a side (they are, in fact, the lines along which the original data was split up).
So other than the things Nate stated had been reworked, and any other updates they may have made, this is in fact "the map" to the launch zones — or rather, it is where the map started / where it was as of the D/C panel.
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[color=#ff0000]Developer Emeritus[/color]
and multipurpose sheep
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
If you go back to the main post on Kickstarter and look at the "and this is a neighborhood section" 3D shots: those are built from the same data source as the big false-color map that has been linked several times. So to refute the old adage: in this case the map actually *is* the terrain. They are showing you "and when we power it up, it looks like this…" (although still perhaps at the "scorched eyebrows" stage, admittedly).
That linked map only covers launch zones (and bits of non-launch zones / non-zones that happen to be caught in the same rectangle). There are several "as complete as anything else" non-launch zones it doesn't show, and you'll notice that there is a pretty significant amount of room for expansion into areas that aren't zones *yet*, should that make sense at some point.
The internal coordinate system can handle up to 200km south/west from "roughly Alexandria", and "enough to wrap around the earth" to the north/east (although it would start suffering pretty major distortion if you went far enough, which is why there are literally hundreds of such coordinate systems that are documented well enough to be in public standards).
As for where the relatively high-resolution data ends, taking a look at the original KS post should give a decent idea… although I believe it has already been expanded past where it was when we first started the map project, and if more high-res data becomes available it is at least theoretically possible to integrate (how much effort would depend a great deal on how much had been "built on top of" whatever area was involved).
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[color=#ff0000]Developer Emeritus[/color]
and multipurpose sheep
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
All I can say is "the standard 'sky sphere' approach wraps a texture containing a projected flat map around a sphere" — think of it as "take a wall map and turn it into a globe" — and then lets you stand *inside* the sphere rather than outside it.
Well, that, and "as of relatively recently, NASA started publishing 8k and 16k versions of the Tycho catalog star map. By interesting coincidence, the maximum texture size that UE4 can handle on DX11 hardware is 16k x 16k.
I will, however, also note three very important points:
[list]
[*] At one point I tried doing this with a 4k texture (either the mag 3.0 or 4.0 map, I think), and it was not even remotely enough to look good
[*] I have not attempted to actually stick this on a live sky sphere and put it into a game to see how it impacts things like FPS rate… keep meaning to, but haven't gotten around to it yet
[*] Even if I had, that says nothing about where the CoT project might stand on the subject
[*] To really be worth it you also have to then have a meaningful conception of "the virtual time" which is sufficiently well defined that you can calculate the proper orientation and rotation of the sky sphere relative to your main "world" (since in UE4, the universe really does revolve around wherever you stick the viewpoint, more or less).
[*] Off by one errors remain one of the hardest problems to fix in computer science.
[/list]
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[color=#ff0000]Developer Emeritus[/color]
and multipurpose sheep
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
Warning: highly technical software / world-building geekery follows.
You can spend your time in one of three ways:
[list]
[*] Creating everything by hand
[*] Using a basic algorithm and then modifying everything by hand
[*] Modifying the algorithm(s) so that they do what you want
[/list]
The first one is the "classic" approach.
The second is the most common approach to procedural stuff today. It has the advantage that you can get something "vaguely usable" very quickly, but you still do end up having to go through a lot of stuff modifying it by hand, and long-term updates are still fairly costly (fairly high technical debt rate).
The third is the "ideal" approach, but it has some very significant costs of its own, mostly in that unless it is set up in very specific ways (that aren't always evident in advance) it requires an extremely specialized skill set to attempt it, and many of the costs are "up front" — if the second case has technical debt, this is the case where you're hoping to avoid much of that debt. However, if you get it wrong you may have *more* technical debt in the end, and it is way, *way* more complex to get right.
However, the statement of "they have the same cost" is only true for specific project sizes. The exact size varies by the exact nature of what you're doing, but the overall behavior can be summed up thus:
[list]
[*] Manual: constant, near-zero "fixed cost" up front, but scales extremely poorly
[*] Hybrid: constant, moderate to high "fixed cost" up front, scales tolerably up to a point, but beyond that point scales poorly (there is an "elbow")
[*] Algorithmic: scaling "fixed cost" up front, scales very well, may permit emergent (unexpected) results
[/list]
For a big enough size, algorithmic will always win, simply because the cost of the other two does not scale well enough to remain practical. Algorithmic *can* scale that well, but it doesn't *automatically* scale that well, and the "up front" cost is not only the highest of the three, it is also the only one that, itself, scales (although it scales fairly well).
To horribly abuse o() notation and put it another way:
[list]
[*] Manual is something akin to o(1) + o(x^n), with a small k on the first component — it scales *very* poorly
[*] Hybrid is something more like o(1) + o(n^x) with a moderate k on the first component — it scales better than manual, by a long shot, but still not really all that great
[*] Fully algorithmic is closer to either o(log(c)) + o(log(n)) *or* o(log(log(n)) + o(n log(n)) — it actual scales *very* well, though not o(1), but the "up front" is generally significantly larger (and may be based on complexity or on size)
[/list]
Note that the above are not "actual" o-notation values, but rather an attempt to give a "general behavior" comparison between the approaches. If you can't read it, back up a couple of paragraphs — it is saying the same basic thing, just in "math" rather than English. :)
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[color=#ff0000]Developer Emeritus[/color]
and multipurpose sheep
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
Yup, Math is a language, particularly with Algebra. But, when the guy started talking about negative invisible numbers, I had to give it up.
Be Well!
Fireheart
Thankfully the imaginary numbers should be limited to the combat system.
*rimshot*
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[color=#ff0000]Developer Emeritus[/color]
and multipurpose sheep
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
@DeathSheepFromHell, so when you were talking about the skybox, are you talking about the 6-sided cube style of skybox? Or do they use something different in Unreal?
The Carnival of Light in the Phoenix Rising
"We never lose our demons, we only learn to live above them." - The Ancient One
Avatar by lilshironeko
I saw those, I agree the "mixamo" animations look great, I'm very happy of this info as you clearly avoid much work if you use those animations instead of manually doing them, and their quality seem really ok for a superhero game (which contains everything, from guns to fantasy weapons to martial arts etc.).
Are such animations really usable with no restrictions? It seems too good to be true^^.
quote=IzzyPerhaps take advantage of work others have already done like the Nature Pack for UE4?
or Base Building using Smooth Vogel Terrains for those Base Caves! Like MineCraft, just Smooth'er! ;D
(Garrilon) Those look good (just looked at the starting frame) for certain places, and, sounds like a good idea... If they aren't too expensive... If so, that would be a good time to add a second chance for some of the kickstart goodies (not all of them) by having another crowdfunding for them and whatever else needs the cash...
And, just the first 20 levels areas need to be done in much detail, the rest could be done by something like sim city, and then redo in patches when they are finished...
I don't think it should be all that easy to level up past 20 very fast (faster than the pieces needed are available for download), and, as we the players are really fiending for a game like CoX, we (should) be understanding about delays...
Awww snap! Sh1t just got imaginary up in here.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Keepin' it complex.
[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]
Hmm.. can someone remind me, what was said about the Sky Pirates, and where will they dwell?
Will it be in Air-Ships, using some advanced tech like:
and stay up there indefineatly.
And can we expect Sky Pirate Invasion Events akin to Rikti Invasions on certain districts (depending on resources they need)? ;)
Aether Pirates,
Technical Director
Read enough Facebook and you have to make Sanity Checks. I guess FB is the Great Old One of the interent these days... - Beamrider
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/missingworldsmedia/the-phoenix-project-city-of-titans/posts/634075
So, I think we'd be talking about Zeppelin-Forts and floating Cloud-Bases, plus the possibility of 'pocket-universes' and demi-planes accessed by odd gizmo-tronic gates and Steam-punk wizardry.
Be Well!
Fireheart
I'm wondering if Snow Patches (and the rest) will be handled better than CoH/V did it?
Instead of seeing this..
[img]https://cdn.tutsplus.com/gamedev/uploads/2014/01/triPlanar-regularTerrain.jpg[/img]
in CoT we might see this instead... with a Tri-planar material?
[img]https://cdn.tutsplus.com/gamedev/uploads/2014/01/triPlanar-Terrain.jpg[/img]
I wonder if Plaid clothing would also work this way? :)
Edit: it looks like Tri-Planar materials use 3 passes to render. I wonder if this can be used only on objects that are close, and not on the farther ones.
Two seconds on the Internet informed me that UE4 can do triplanar materials, so I presume you're asking whether we'll see it used in CoT rather than if it's possible.
As for whether UE4 can do something graphics-oriented better than the CoH engine, I think it's safe to assume that the answer is "yes" in every case.
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[font=Pristina][size=18][b]Hail Beard![/b][/size][/font]
Support [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/52149#comment-52149]trap clowns[/url] for CoT!
True, I don't think the real question in this regard should ever be if UE4 can do it better but rather how much better it can be done.
And what of the various better ways is best suited to our needs. Some things might look awesome but be too work and cpu intensive for our purposes.
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[center][color=#ff0000]Interior Map Lead and UI Designer[/color][/center]
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