| Appanvil karma designer | ||||
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How I manage what to change
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In 2019 I started to use a method to track what’s problematic and what to do. Usually, the process was like this. I took a screenshot when I saw a problem in the editor or in game. Added a note to describe the problem and what to do, with some arrows to point out the exact relevant parts. Then the screenshot was automatically saved to a folder. After collected some shots I organized them into different folders for different priorities.
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The picture above shows the folders for different priorities. WNF is will not fix. This is pretty much standard task priority thing in the game industry. Just usually tasks or bugs are managed in systems like JIRA.
The One Thousand Changes
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The screenshot above is an overview of what have been done from 2020 to 2024 for this map. There are 1080 screenshots so yeah that’s the amount of the changes.
2020
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We all know what happened at the end of 2019. 2020 was a bumpy year for me and I was neither in a mood of doing mapping nor having enough time for that. The changes
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The One Thousand Changes
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The screenshot above is an overview of what have been done from 2020 to 2024 for this map, since the last version 20200711. There are 1080 screenshots so yeah that’s the amount of the changes.
2020
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2020 was a bumpy year for me. And I was busy with my real life so didn’t find much mood or time for making this map. So from the last version 20200711 was released till the end of the year, mostly the changes were just updating the placeholder meshes or fixing materials.
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I started to work on the final assets in 2021. Finding or baking textures, updating meshes, making materials, trying to do layer blending, creating masks, tweaking reflection. It was painful to setup some global masks for rusty effect variations, and to figure out how to do extra normal using a 2nd UV for trims. Asset wise, the map was like pre-beta at the end of the year.
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This was the year the assets were done to semi finalized. UVs, materials, textures, not only for the main area but also for the background vista. And the lightmap UVs were mostly close to final. Layout was almost final. Among the things, an important one was the optimization. In May, the map was getting close to 600MB, and the optimization changed that to around 450MB. You have no idea how painful that was. There was also the mask improvements for moss and dirt which turned out to be more time consuming than I thought.
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From the end of 2022 I started to fix the corner transition issues by having instanced corner meshes. Then there was the mask work for the big terrain ground. And the roughness mask pass for the whole map. Also the decals for rusty or dirty leaks and others. Adding wetness (low roughness) was much trouble because manual reflection capture is very very tricky to do (you will understand if you ever tried that for good quality). There were also the continued asset polish and optimization. I had to “refactor“ the materials to control the file size as much as possible. And also the masks were combined into multi-channel linear maps. Then there were further aesthetic improvements of leak masks so they looked more believable.
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2024 started with final collision passes to find and fix all the collision issues and I learned more about the tricky things related to bullet collision and impact VFX. There were the decal final pass, the roughness mask final pass, the mesh polygon optimization, the lightmap final pass, the sky dome final pass, the global masks final pass, the final lighting pass, the final postfx pass, etc.. I learned there is a reflection capture issue requires a manual update after a building of the lighting. Also spent weeks doing performance optimization, fixing lighting glitches and performance issue for lifts. Found a workaround for an interesting bug of the UT lift. The draw call cost was too much viewing from some positions so there were weeks spent on instancing meshes while figuring out how bullet collision can work (it can only work when you use the proper parent class). I also managed to improve the bot behavior in this map a bit by tweaking item desirability and adding wall dodge points. The rest were testing compatibility for all the game modes worth to be checked, and tweaked the speculator cameras.