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My O3DE tutorial, first a series of short videos

 
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Welcome back!

Good news! And bad news.Project is coming up nicely, with a small private demo released to some friends. Got great insight from it, and even fixed some issues. Big problem is that some other issues depend on a full team, or at least, on some artists working regularly.  The game requires a total rework of the art. That's inevitable. We took some bad decisions to speed up work that has proven to be a burden in advanced stages. For example: using MakeHuman to generate characters. Per se, it is not that bad, if you take some time to retouch the result. Also, animators hate MH's rig. Don't use it. I had an excellent animator, and the game anims are bad. Not totally his fault, he had to work with a subpar rig that limited what he could do.  Also, another advice. Godot really sucks with kitbashes. Now we have a nice kitbash that allows me to create all sort of fancy buildings, even with interiors, but the game suffered a severe perfomance penalty. Godot can't properly instance...

Testing O3DE: new video

 O3DE is no longer the newcomer. From "why do we need another engine if we have Unreal, Unity and Godot?" we went to "Maybe I should consider this as a valid candidate". Version 24.09 offers a certain level of maturity, enough to make it worth the risk of trying it. In fact, there are people already working in serious projects, like Carbonated Inc. which is using it for a multiplayer mobile game. So, I am spending more time with O3DE. It is something completely different and requires more effort than other engines, specially because I have other projects to take care, and also because I have to learn Unreal at same time (it is one of my jobs now). But, despite lack of documentation and tutorials, I have advanced a bit, mostly thanks to the help of the community. Lets see what can I do with it in the future.  

Video: dialog system

 

Project progress, and some thoughts about our workflow

 Well, considering most of the team is working only a few hours every week, we are not too behind schedule, but I don't foresee we can release a demo for november. Some time has been spent trying to find a workflow that help an small and unexperienced team to produce a sizeable amount of complex assets. We are still experimenting, but a few things are already in place. Ok, lets see what have we done.  After several tests, we have defined player models structure. We are using a body separated in six parts: head, torso, arms, hands, legs and feet. To save time, the character is generated via MakeHuman. The pro is that you get a complete and anatomically correct model in minutes. The cons, you have to work a bit to lower the poly count, because MakeHuman offers a high poly model and a very low poly one that looks ugly. Also, all the models looks pretty much the same (you will notice that in the character creation scene), but as we use an isometric camera, during gameplay the raci...

Prototype video

 A bit late, but here is it!  

At last, testing O3DE 23.05

 Took some time, but at last I managed to install O3De 23.05. I have no time to extensively test it, because there is a project requiring all my effort, but I took a couple of nights to work with it. I cant find any dramatic changes, this is not a big leap like 22.10 was. Im not sure if we will see another release like that again. Im not going to get into a proper analysis (a few hours are not enough), but here are some things that O3DE needs to improve: Project creation process now involves a build, that requires Visual Studio. That is annoying for artists. Project build is complex. And I mean complex. It takes 12 steps, and manually copying stuff. Lucky us, it is being fixed and I hope we will have the new building script in next major release. Animation workflow is annoying. As  a developer currently working in a project that requires several animations and retargeting, I dont see feasible switching to a workflow that produces separate files for each animation. By the way, ...