Archive:
Not a super productive day – Storm Bert caused some flooding over the weekend, and I spent all of yesterday helping people bail out water… I’m physically drained, today – but I did get The Watch Tower where I want it. Added some enemies, plenty of pickups on alternate routes, some new obstacles, and a checkpoint, so when you get to the top and die on the flip-flop platforms, you’re not sent all the way back to the start. It’s not the biggest room, but it’s a nice diversion.
I couldn’t decide what to do with Nomen Luni, so spent the rest of the day trying to find the look for Cold Storage. Getting ice to look decent, without being super expensive, took longer than I expected. Ended up buying a material off Fab, and then tweaking that to do what I wanted instead. I’ll look at it tomorrow with fresh eyes.
That Ice material is still too expensive. Looks lovely, but it would happily kill perf on my 3080 if I let it, so I’ve made my own. I’m much happier with the result, but I’ve got a translucency sorting issues, especially with the paint pickups. To be expected… I’ll try and remember to dig into that before I ship.
The colours need some tweaking, but when everything’s moving, and those lights sway, it’s a pretty cool effect. (Sorry, not sorry).
I’ve brought the Bouncers back from the first game, but this time the aim is to let them destroy all the ice cubes. The stacks fall down as each cube is broken, and there’ll be some collectables on top of each, that you can grab. I rolled out Chaos Destruction – UE’s set of tools to do real-time destruction – to handle the cubes smashing, but… it didn’t look particularly nice. Opted instead for an old-fashioned particle effect. There are still some sorting issues, but the fact that I have a little more control over where the particles go, and how quickly they fade out, makes all the difference.
This room is by far the most render heavy in the game. Transparency everywhere, so I’ve hard-coded a material change if the material scalability settings are Low or Medium. The cheap material looks utter garbage, but it’s opaque and keeps the cost down. Sorry, potato devices. Not much I can do, except find a better texture…
While I was looking at the shader cost, I noticed that the cocktail glasses (and the particle effect) were still pretty bad, so I’ve massively reduced the spawn count of the particle effect, and switched the glass over to the super cheap hack I made for Sandy’s. It’s actually made the glasses easier to spot, so win-win?
I want to rebuild The Chapel:
Which is easier said than done. I was able to recover the benches, pillars and altar, some tombs and the stairway leading to the original room from my archive, but the candlestick holders and wall bases are missing. I have a vague memory of being lazy (I’m SHOCKED) and kit-bashing a load of Asset Store packs together, but I don’t have the meshes. Most Unity Asset Store stuff shipped without them and regardless, I probably couldn’t use them as-is. Everything I’ve uncovered so far has mirrored UVs with overlapped quads (texture space was at a premium back then!), which is zero use to me now, as I’ll be bringing them into Substance Painter for a tart up. I won’t be able to bake AO, etc. with a load of overlapping UVs…
Fortunately, I archived the versions of Unity that were used to ship (a long story for another day, get me down the pub), so I was able to install one, copy over the old Lumo Unity Project, wait half the day while it re-imported everything (ffs), then load up the original rooms and poke around at the assets. You can’t export meshes directly to FBX from Unity 5.x (or at least, I don’t know how to), but you can export assets to Unity Packages. So I did. And then fired up a hex editor to see what I could see.
A tar file, then? And since no one would ever tar something without compressing the result, probably a .TGZ, which 7Zip will quite happily open
.
Yup, it’s a tar file, containing:
I wonder what happens if I stick a .fbx extension on that asset?
Thank you very much.
That wasn’t quite the end of it, a lot of the FBX files were ascii, which Blender wouldn’t open, so I had to round-trip them through Unreal (which will), but I managed to get hold of everything. And start re-UVing…
Made really decent progress on the Forgotten Abbey. Modelled the entire room in Blender, made a custom shadow box, new materials for the assets I rescued from Lumo, some fake god rays and new window frames. The lighting’s not quite there, but I’m happy with the mood. Dark and unused was the goal, and this feels pretty close.
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