Sunday: May 18th

Current News

We had a busy week! From updates, to new community managers, to having our first iteration of the Code of Conduct on our forums - it's been a lively week!

We had an update from our Art Department on the Kickstarter wallpapers, which also included a sneak peek video. Check out the update here: http://cityoftitans.com/forum/kickstarter-desktop-background-news

This week we welcomed two new Community Managers - Shadow Elusive and HiroA. You can read their greetings to the City of Titans community here: http://cityoftitans.com/forum/meet-our-new-community-managers

Egads! Our Report Post button has apparently done gone ran away with the last forum software update, so in the interim you can private message to Shadow Elusive, HiroA, Minotaur, or myself (VDG) if you feel a post needs to be reported for violating any of the forum rules. Read that post here: http://cityoftitans.com/forum/reporting-posts

Speaking of forum rules, please read our Code of Conduct guidelines here: http://cityoftitans.com/forum/code-conduct

Forum Topics

http://cityoftitans.com/forum/collab-central
Have I not shared this before? What's wrong with me? Check out ChristopherRobin's collaborative art thread - some truly awesome work in there.

http://cityoftitans.com/forum/meet-your-heroes-day
A fun role-playing thread by Xselcier

http://cityoftitans.com/forum/power-origins-meaning
Thread by Robertt Steel about a possibility advantage/disadvantage system tied to origins

Ask-A-Dev

Did I tell you we love questions? We love questions. Ask one here: http://tinyurl.com/askadev

From: Radiac
For: Business & Marketing
When should I expect the receive the T-shirt I bought with my Kickstarter money? Also, will the non-physical stuff (e.g. Iconic, Mogul, etc) be dealt with before the game is released or after? Thanks.

Terwyn, Marketing Manager: Given the sheer size of donations we received during the Kickstarter, it should be no surprise that it has taken us a long time to track down our benefactors to confirm specific details. Since some people have surprisingly contributed well over a thousand dollars, and haven't read their e-mails instructing them where to sign up for their goodies, we've had to extend the deadline and reach out to these individuals personally. So, eventually, we started collating the results, and found that some people had left shipping addresses in Titan City. A nice thought, but unfortunately unhelpful for items existing outside of the game world. As well, more than one person had left the default size of t-shirt in the system, and we're quite sure that half of our base do not wear a women's Extra Small. Needless to say, that started off an entirely new sequence of back and forth communications, forcing us to have to collate the list again.

Good news, however, despite all of that, the orders are going out more or less as we speak, and they'll start shipping as soon as they can. Everyone should be getting the shirts more or less at once, presuming that local postal systems are equally efficient. As for the digital goods, they will be plotted out and dealt with accordingly well before the final build of Titan City.

I hope this answers your question adequately.

From Around the Web

Sunday: March 16th

Current News

This week's update was from our Art Director, Petalstorm, and showcased some awesome artwork by some of our newest artists. You can view that update at:

http://cityoftitans.com/content/art-our-new-artists

Also, as some of you may have noticed - our blog url has changed! We've switched from the old 'tppdevblog' moniker to 'city-of-titans' - and I totally forgot to announce that change. My bad. Won't happen again. I promise.

Forum Posts
http://cityoftitans.com/forum/famous-ray%E2%80%99s-original-pie-shop-open-business
How have I not linked to this RP thread before? Shame on me! Thread by GhostHack

http://cityoftitans.com/forum/superhero-parenting
Thread by HellsBouncer, but address the topic of being a superhero and parenting.

http://cityoftitans.com/forum/grayson-tower-villain-based-open-rp
An awesome villain RP thread, by RottenLuck.

Ask-A-Dev

Visit: http://tinyurl.com/askadev to submit your question!

From: jcheraz
For :Gameplay
"Newer games are going with fewer toolbars and power clickables. Levels provide updates and expansions to existing powers, rather than new powers. Will you follow suit?"

Felix, Systems Analyst: We plan to provide a fairly dynamic experience. In some cases you will be able to choose "meta powers" that affect your other powers rather than just add a new clickable. However, in keeping with our overall design intent, many of the later powers will be situational, rather than just obviously better. It is our intent that your early powers will remain useful throughout the game.

From: Dimma
For: Gameplay
"Would you consider power rating score for characters? It could assist with PVE balancing and be used by players in PVP to determine an opponents relative power."

Felix, Systems Analyst: We will not provide a power rating score for characters. We feel that the inclusion of such a feature would be toxic to the overall cooperative nature of the game. However, we acknowledge that there will be "gating" down the road in endgame content, where a certain amount of endgame progress is required to participate in certain content.

From Around the Web

What the what? Wireless Electricity?
http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/14/tech/innovation/wireless-electricity/index.html

A 3D capturing camera? I want one. Nao.
http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/14/more-project-tango-specs-revealed-showing-two-wide-angle-and-one-depth-sensing-camera/

Also, a 1001 movie clips you need to see before you die.

Pre-Update "Under The Hood" Blog Entry

MISSING WORLDS MEDIA
Pre-Update Blog: Thursday September 19, 2013

Contributing writers: DeathSheepfromBelow, Petalstorm, Robin, and VDG

Hey everyone, I know you’re all waiting on the edges of your seats for some KS info - and that’s coming Soon™. What I want to show you guys is a quick and dirty “under the hood” look at what we’re working on, using very specific example.

A week ago some of you may have seen an image teased on Facebook of a potential - and let me stress that - potential - City Hall model. Until we have final tools for asset creation, everything has gone, and will continue to go through, multiple iterations until a final look is settled on. This blog is about one of the City Hall concepts that was generated by our team of artists (2D and 3D) and tested in the Unreal engine.

Front view in Sketchup

Why go through the effort of making a mock-up of a concept and then importing it into the engine? Many reasons - one of the most important ones is to give an idea of scale and how it might look inside the engine from the perspective of the player. It can also influence some necessary changes that wouldn’t be apparent on just pen and paper or in a 3D modelling application.

After the initial concept sketch was done on pen and paper, the sketch was brought to life in Sketchup, a very popular architectural and 3D modelling tool.

Currently we are using Blender and Sketchup as our tools. Sketchup is an awesome tool for beginners and it great for architectural modeling - the video game Uncharted even made use of it (http://sketchupdate.blogspot.com/2011/02/art-and-design-of-uncharted-2.html.)

One of the concept models, as viewed in
Sketchup

Blender is a power open source 3D modelling tool that is capable of beautiful renders (I’m obsessed with their Cycles renderer,) cloth and fluid simulations, animation, video editing, sculpting, and so much more. However, it is has an extremely steep learning curve, unlike Sketchup.

So here comes the fun part: how to get this model from Sketchup to Unreal. As it so happens, much like image files, there’s no one universal file “type” for 3D models - there’s a considerable variety. Some save just the basics - the shape of the model and how everything is connected. Some file types save everything - from materials, to morphs, to animations, to particle effects. Sketchup happens to only export the most basic file type - simply known as OBJ. The Unreal Engine, however, only accepts model types with the FBX extension, which is currently a proprietary format for the Autodesk suite of tools (like Maya.)

So, how do we get from Sketchup to Unreal? Well, we have to use a program that sort of acts like a “converter” - that’s where Blender comes in. Blender can fortunately export to the FBX file format, although it is not perfect and can be a bit buggy. So we import the OBJ file into Blender, do some quick checks to make sure everything is still connected, and then export to the FBX format with the correct options selected.

And this is what imports into the Unreal engine:

The model imported into the Unreal Editor.
Not what we modeled. Not at all.

Doesn't look better on this angle either.

To summarize, this took some time to fix, and it took some good people. There are some very complicated parts as to what occurred here and why this building could function as Grade A Architectural Nightmare Fuel, but I’ll cover the most basic thing that went wrong in the process.

3D models are comprised of vertices, edges, and faces. The vertices are essentially points plotted on X, Y, Z coordinates. Edges define how vertices are connected to each other. Faces define the “area” that fill an area between vertices and edges and will ultimately display the texture applied to the model. Every face has what is called a “normal” which defines the direction the face is pointing.

A view of the model from the outside and inside

In Blender and Sketchup you can see a face from both sides since both of those programs consider a face to have two sides. However, this can actually become a memory hog for your computer. In almost every single video game engine, a face is only considered to have one direction.  If you look at the side of the face that is in the opposite direction of the normal, what will happen is you’ll simply see right through the face as if it wasn’t there.

Why did this make our model look like a bonafide freak show in Unreal? Since normals don’t matter in Sketchup the program doesn’t bother to set them correctly. When we imported it into Blender it couldn’t tell where the inside or outside of the model was based on the data stored and imported from the OBJ file, and that carried through into the FBX file.

Before and after of fixing the direction of
the normals on a face.

What we had to do was manually correct each and every single aberrant face on the model in order to get it display correctly in Unreal.  This means making sure the normals are pointing outwards from the model, rather than inwards. This was an incredibly time-consuming task because this model has over fourteen thousand faces (that’s actually low for a 3D model.)

Periodically, we had to test-import the model as we fixed these normals. This helped us to find areas we may have missed due to some of the faces being incredibly small ( and due to the fact that, after staring at the same thing for hours on end, you tend to start missing things ).

And this, below, is our final result in Unreal.

View from the front

Yes, this is what we had modeled.

This isn’t to knock Sketchup and Blender - they’re both incredible tools (and free!) but they have some serious limitations when it comes to using them with other programs (especially Unreal.)

As I mentioned earlier, FBX is a proprietary format, but it is also the preferred format for importing into Unreal. Right now Blender only speaks an outdated version of it, but more importantly, it simply doesn’t do nearly as well with game assets as the proprietary tools do. Thirteen hours using free tools, against roughly three hours using a trial version of the alternative. For a relatively simple, low-poly mesh building. Multiply that by somewhere between “several dozen” and “a few hundred”, for just the building exteriors. That doesn’t count the time spent on the learning curve.

Well that’s it for this blog. If you have any questions, comments, concerns, then join the discussion on our forums (http://www.cityoftitans.com)!