ED Home

Erebus Weekly

Erebus Weekly - Week 001 - 02.24.2017

Welcome to the Erebus Weekly, Week 001. Quite a few random things were accomplished this week, mostly getting organized (not much to see here), but also a few handy assets were developed. I'll just jump right into it...

THIS

Yeah, literally, this. Developed the HTML/CSS and other assets for the Erebus Weekly, as well as whipping up Week 001's entry! The Erebus Weekly will be useful for tracking our progress and keeping our community (do we even have one?) up to date.

Internal Organization (giggity)

Lot's of organization on the backend (giggity again), with a lot more to do yet. Various assets, projects, etc. were pruned or archived, while current and actual useful stuff was organized better. Tons of resources were updated or at the least, cleaned up to be easier to use. Too much to list, and it wouldn't really affect anyone outside of my crazy OCD ass anyhow. Just know that this bit will help efficiency AND sanity.

ED Logo Love

A little bit of kindness was imparted on the Erebus Design logo. We now have 4 sizes available for quick cheating (copy/paste) into our designs: 256px, 128px, 96px, and 48px. There was a 64px version as well, but he ran away with the spoon. Check it out.

MatCap Studio

Utilizing blender and pent up rage, a nifty matcap generation pipeline was created. MatCap stands for "material capture", and is a way to quickly get visual feedback about the surface of your 3D models. Rather than having to calculate lighting and reflections, this data is approximated (faked, rather) using a generated matcap image. Here is an example of a matcap. Also, here is a screenshot of a bunch of monkey heads with some of the matcaps generated.

As well as that matcap generation thingy developed for blender, a slick material for utilizing those matcaps was created in Unreal Engine. For the most part, the result is 1:1 with what you see in blender, sRGB and tonemapping aside. This (growing) library of matcaps will be useful for modeling/sculpting, debugging, and blockout sessions. Also, a blueprint actor was developed for easier showcasing of the matcap library. Here's a screenshot of that. Suzanne rotates and the matcaps cycle through at tweakable rates. Cool.

EGT Rework (part 7.3)

Don't be thrown off by that title. It's total bullshit. EGT (Erebus Game Template) however, is not total bullshit. A cleaner base was built as a jumpoff (I'm actually starting to call EGT a boilerplate) for UE projects. Here is a bulleted list of some of the magic (because both magic and bulleted lists are awesome):

Now, there is still a hell of a lot to do with EGT before we can call it a stable boilerplate for our UE projects, but even now, it's a nice fast start with some common settings and plugins already set up for us. In the future, this efficiency will rise with the addition of more tools and assets that are commonly used or just very helpful. More on that in some other area. It's simply too much to go into for the Weekly.

UPB Action

Ultra Puck Battle got some attention this week as well, dealing mostly with organization. Having moved the whole toolset over to a completely free and/or open source ecosphere caused a bit of havoc. Good havoc, though! Outside of our launch platform (Steam, itch.io, etc.) and Unreal Engine licensing/royalty costs, we won't have any fees to worry about. The idea of having to pay for so many little tools based on our success and all that jazz, is a serious headache. Well, that headache is now gone. Yay!

The various systems/controllers that build up a brunt of UPB have been further optimized and organized as well, particularly in the way they communicate with each other and the various pieces in the game (such as the paddles, puck, etc.). It is now possible for any blueprint to get the frequency values from the audio controller, simply by adding a component and fetching the frequency structure (or individual float values).

The arena design has had a makeover, yet again. This is due to moving over to blender, mostly. The final vision for the arena is baked in, it's getting the actual assets produced that is taking so much time. One of the concepts being put to work are arena detail elements, or an ADE for quick internal nerdiness. An ADE has a specific size constraint, with (currently) 3 sizes: small, medium, large. An ADE has a mount point and default transformation, allowing for an ADE to be placed in the arena at corresponding ADE mount points.

An example might be a light, a small light to be precise. The model and its orientation are built to specification for a small ADE, and an ADE blueprint will reference this mesh. Now the arena controller will know of all the available small, medium, and large ADEs and will procedurally place ADEs at corresponding points in the arena. We can also manually specify ADEs at mount points in the arena, of course. This system will allow for faster arena design when we start working on new and/or alternate versions of the arena.

One of the ADEs developed for testing while developing this system was a sound visualizer of sorts, meant to represent a futuristic subwoofer. Feeding off the sub-bass frequency, it bumps a holographic effect to the beat. This ADE was a large type; the plan is to develop medium and small "speakers" in the same style for the other 6 frequencies. Here is an animated GIF of that ADE. Note that the holographic bump distance, colors, etc. are all tweakable.

Closing Time

Well, that about wraps this week up. There were plenty of other little bits and bobs that were created or worked on, but those things are still too young or not at a level worth talking about or showing off yet. Rest assured that they will find their way into future Weekly entries. We have plenty more magic and gold to produce! Until next time...