Developer Diary 38

I'm moving back to the early artwork from 2014. The atmosphere is much stronger and there is barely any motion sickness while moving through the woods. Each level consists of a group of domes with holes in the ceiling. Pillar BSP's represent tree trunks and the ceiling holes are sources of static light for better orientation. Enemies are either invisible or hide in the darkness around the player. When he's engulfed by light, he is safe, but when he's moving through the darkness he's vulnerable to attacks.
Progress is very slow these days. I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around the old concept, while approaching it with all this knowledge that I acquired over the last two years. FPS remain high despite hundreds of point lights that are spread out across the domes, representing torches, electric lights or simply daylight - light shafts.

Getting there.

Developer Diary 37 - Architecture and Demotivation

Over the last week, I created seven major architectural segments based on Gothic architecture from 13th century Europe. Each segment took roughly 4 hours to complete. I planned these segments so I would be able to combine them in many different ways, creating enormous structures and palaces with little time input.

I finished the final Gothic cathedral top segment today and converted all other segments into static meshes. With those static meshes I built a large template palace to see how the structure would appear in VR and if I could keep my 75 fps.

While the framerate remained steady at 75 fps, the structures caused so much motion sickness in my head, I could barely keep my dinner down. I don't know what to do anymore. I'm severely demotivated. With all this time spent on another set of structures... and it looks like I can't even use the majority of them, because the gameplay itself will cause people to throw up.

The palace looks incredibly beautiful from the outside. Hell, if this whole thing were a desktop game, it would be the best thing ever. But there's a reason, why I want to build it in VR ... I think it all has to do with the size of the buildings: If each structural element is as tall as a skyscraper, motion sickness doesn't appear to be as bad. But if these structures are close to reality, something goes off in my brain that can't process the images accurately. It's the opposite of what you read online about VR. They all keep blabbering about: "OHHH You gotta keep the structures and door sizes realistic!!!! It's soooo important!!"

And it's pure bullshit. The smaller each hallway and building the worse it gets. And whether you like it or not: A realistic hallway, with realistic measures and realistic doors, is surprisingly narrow. And the FOV does the rest ...

I don't know whether I should be thankful or depressed about the fact that I'm so susceptible to motion sickness. Apparently there's an entire spectrum of people reacting differently to VR and if you want to sell your game, your level needs to be solid and cause no motion sickness whatsoever. But most developers stop noticing motion sickness triggers in their worlds, because they have gotten so used to their HMD. I never got used to mine. It's a nightmare. If I mess up my world, and get sick from it, I can't put on the glasses for several hours or I'll throw up immediately. Some developers keep it together by drinking bottles of whiskey, which is in my opinion the dumbest way ever to deal with this, because you don't fix a shitty level by getting drunk.

Then there are sooo many demos out there right now... they didn't give a shit about the FPS, so they thought: "Hey! Fuck  RAM and GPU efficiency, let's downscale the textures!" and it's like you're back in 1996 again.

I can't use too many foliage models or I'll lose my fps.´, which means I HAVE to use fixed structures as converted static meshes. I can't use the structures I created, because they cause motion sickness. I can't scale the structures, because then EVERYTHING is out of proportion. I can't use the monastery models to create the palace, because they were not designed to be used as "palace cells" and can therefore only be connected with each other in a single direction.

This just sucks in so many ways.

Developer Diary 36

What if each structure is larger and more complex in size? What if there's an architectural system that can combine single elements into enormous structures, which still look as aesthetic as if they were planned as a single building?

Developer Diary 35

This number cost me around 120 hours of work. Steady 75 FPS in Virtual Reality with Open World Streaming System, Day Night Rhythm, AI and while calling the Dharmapalas (also during Flight).

Developer Diary 34 From 30 FPS to 60 FPS

Sony released a quality threshold for VR games: Any game with a standard FPS rate below 60 FPS will get rejected. For the last two weeks I've been optimizing the project like hell to reach that number. With everything so far I'm almost getting up to a constant 55 FPS from the original 30 FPS with some performance spikes during large scenes and landscapes ...

- New Ocean Blueprint
- Total AI Overhaul (AI is now entirely relying on collision volumes for animations and DMG )
- Removed early Z-Pass
- Shadow settings overhaul
- Bought InstaLOD and created LODs for all landscapes and major meshes
- Incorporated those LODs (I'm still finetuning each setting, sometimes rebuilding them all)
- Post Process system overhaul (Removed a lot of settings in favor of Bloom)
- Incorporated the Oculus Forward Renderer for UE4 as seen in the Showdown Demo
- Created a holistic system of Culling Volumes
- Identified the Mip Map GPU performance bug (which lowered the PIE play for about 15 fps...)

Developer Diary 33 - Beaches, Bridges, Towers, Foliage

Damn ... I want to cut the trailer soooo badly. But I need to pull myself together and finish all setdressing elements first. I was working on the beaches today and made a couple of tests with instanced rock meshes. I'm not far off. Maybe another month or two and I'm there....

Developer Diary 32 Updates

This is what I've been working on for the last two weeks:

- Implemented Underwater Lightshafts and Random Fish Swarm Particle FX
- Lightshafts and Fish move with the rising Sea once the Manta is called
- Optimized the Ocean Blueprint to save FPS during gameplay
- Changed Water Reflection and Ocean Wave Material
- Created a script for the Exponential Height Fog component to rise with sea level

- Added AI for the Obersturmführer and Wehrmacht NPC
- Implemented Kill and Impact Volumes for Rifle Shots and set up associated Damage Scripts

- Fixed Dharmapala Scripts for Guivre, Pegasus, Begtse, Mahakala and Geruda.
- Created separate blueprints for each island building surrounding the monastery
- Replaced all previous meshes with Blueprints
- Created Visibility Volumes for each Building Blueprint
- Implemented "Tick Inactivity" when Blueprints are culled from the Viewport (massive FPS boost)

- Added a 6th Dharmapala, corresponding to the element water. The ice wolf freezes the sea and a blizzard rages down on Jonah's environment
- Fixed lighting and fog settings to work with the newest Oculus runtime
- Added streaming layers for each level and map component, including individual setdressing of the monastery and the island building interiors

Currently I'm working on multiple AI scripts and some finetuning of the Obersturmführer Aiming animations (I want his head and the gun to move with the flight direction of the player)