Developer Stream Recap: April 30th, 2020

Not a rant, positively the most edifying thing I’ve read about this game in a week or so. Very much appreciated. :smiley:

@Spynosaur_Nicole great to see your smiling face!! Thank you for sharing the kitteh, I will be putting the re-stream on the big tv so my herd can meet your Taffeta.

I am really looking forward to where the Team is taking us with Followers. This is exciting, and as Followers are such a crucial, unique and engaging aspect of the gameworld, a definite step up.

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I’ll further expand on this from my own personal experiences - it can easily take about a week to make a single character art asset. Let that sink in when you think about the amount of armor pieces added in a dlc pack. Now - in this case the full set would be the single asset because you’d make the set as a whole and just chop up the parts (boots, gloves, etc.) when adding it into the game, but that’s still 6 different models for a DLC.

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@Multigun just wow. Thank you so much for your work!

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Thank you for taking the time to explain some of what goes on in the modding process. Most of us have no or little idea. What’s worse, is if we get some education of doing a mod for one game engine and expect everything to operate the same in other game engines.

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I cannot say that I am surprised by this revelation. It is seems to be a logical outcome. It is more ‘interactive’, and has what is potentially a large pool of items left in it and removed all of the time which it must remember. I do understand that one must pick their battle when it comes to performance. However as with thralls and lighting (eg- standing torches), individual responsibility must also be factored in to this as well. We have tremendous freedom, but it is also on us as users to do so in a sensible and measured fashion.

I also have a follow up question to a concept which I only partially understand in this context. Could you please also further elaborate on what is meant by the term ‘expensive’ for the benefit of myself and others?

Thankyou, and I am glad that you like the idea. If you have any screenshots of your added storage options for your mod I would love to see some. :smiley:

I have taken this into consideration here. And I am trying to be civil and constructive in my own reply. Furthermore, I appreciate you taking tje time to explain this to us.

I do not recall ‘ranking’ anything in my post. Whether or not you choose to believe it, the line which you copied over in your post was intended in the context of a) frustrated grumble, and b) an open-ended question. You see this symbol → :grey_question: is used to denote inquiry. I didnt mean to imply that it was a cake walk, and upon re-reading it, it comes of as a bit abrasive. So I am going to edit it out, and for that matter rephrase the whole post.

I hope you are not insinuating that my use of the word ‘reskin’ was directed as an insult, because I can assure you it was not. Otherwise this ‘discussion’ devolve into something far less constructive. I was NOT insulting Funcom. Period. Why would I insult a company I care about and have spent the last year and a half helping where I can…!? It sounds to me like you are either getting bogged down in, or are playing on semantics. Sure I could have sustituted reskin with: ‘thing which takes on the same outward dimensions as a chest and functions identically to a chest but looks like a re-imaging of a chest’ but I dont have that much free time on my hands.

This ^^ is what I was asking for!! Thankyou very kindly for that @Shadoza, that is exactly what I was trying to convey! I am glad someone understood what I was referring to, Im not really up with the latest buzzwords. A retexture…okay. Thankyou for your integrity Shadoza.

Again here, I was not trying to say that it is ‘easy’; that was not my intention, nor for that matter did I even use that word in my post! I understand that some features are more difficult than others, however I am going to make an important point of my own here. People get paid to work. Yes, jobs can be tough, and some job tasks are more of a slog than others. But that does not mean that we should not do them, or that they are not worth doing. I have spent the vast majority of my own life doing some very hard manual labor jobs, and usually for minimum wage at that. But that is life on planet earth; we are paid to work.

Look Multigun, forgive if the tone of this post hasnt come off as very constructive or civil, I do appreciate you trying to better explain some of the inner workings and terminology to me. It did actually provide me with some interesting insight. And I can appreciate and acknowledge the take home message. :+1: And in the interests of being respectful and constructive here I am going to go back and rephrase that post.

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Yes, it is “easier.” But that’s my point, there are still variables involved that doesn’t make it a super fast process. Not if it’s intended to make it look professional and high quality, in addition to the training that comes with that.

Ya, something along the lines of that the server has to run inventory checks on every object that has an inventory in it on a regular basis. It was explained to me, but I’m quickly forgetting the tech details. If server didn’t run regular checks, stuff goes poof. But it runs those checks regardless if it has something in it or not. So the more inventory (and larger) inventory type objects there are, the faster expenses go up in a hurry server side.

Radium torches are often seen as less expensive to server performance than regular particle torches. But are they? Possibly, probably. But Radium Torches have inventories, where as particle based torches do not. Particles are expensive in general though, for sure. The cheapest torch of them all would be glow torches.

Right so, expensive means in terms of performance cost. It can sometimes also refer to development costs, but in development world, it usually means performance wise. Having hundreds of thousands of polygons with 25 materials (or whatever high number you want), would be considered “expensive” in terms of your “budget” in the 3D world. Our GPU’s can only allocate so many resources to what is shown on screen, so the number of texture draws goes into a “budget.” Our Conan Exiles servers can only handle so much data being processed by it. Hence a “budget” and “expense” is formed. Etc.

You’ll note that Conan Exiles is more complex than it used to be, including things like Mounts. Well, how did Mounts come about when there were tech issues before? Performance improvements of course (among many other things). So the total costs of the performance budget was lowered to the point a new feature could be added via performance improvements. But for every new feature, that bar goes back up. Then you have to see what other ways you can lower the total budget again so you can move in more new stuff (AI Improvements).

Though you can’t do that for forever. At some point performance will be as good as it can get without adapting either a newer engine, or newer hardware to run the game off of (looking at you new XBOX and new Playstation), or both.

No no, sorry Croms. I wasn’t meaning that by you. I can see why you felt I meant it that way. I was trying to explain why the term “reskin” irks me, and did a poor job at communicating that.

By “players”, I meant the general troll population that stops by (insert game forum here) and declares whatever new thing that is made as "Oh, that’s “just” a “reskin!” For example, Call of Duty. While the gameplay is often similar between each version of the new Call of Duty, players will often call the newest version as a “reskin.”

Now, I’m not an FPS shooter fan these days, so I don’t particularly have any weight in the discussion of what makes a good FPS. But I can appreciate work in game development in general. In this example, those players don’t account for the coders, the animators, the artists who made brand new original art, the Q/A testers, and etc. They just shout for all to hear that it’s a “reskin” in their efforts to downplay the work that is involved.

Other examples would be with Conan Exiles. People often say that the various cats, Lions, Tigers, Sandbeasts, are “just a reskin” since they share animations and attack combos. Which doesn’t account at all, for the rigging and modeling that goes into each of those animals (and believe me, rigging a new 3D model is not bloody easy, even with an existing skeleton).

Yes, I’m probably getting a bit bogged down in semantics here, as you say. But that’s the explanation, and why that particular phrase is an eye twitch moment for me.

Though, are you asking for that? So the below ended up being a lot longer than I planned on, and it really doesn’t matter that much what you call it (except if you want to see my eye twitch every 5 minutes). But for the purposes of the educating route, here we go.

A retexture is taking an existing 3D model, its UV maps, often times its Normal Maps too, and changing its appearance in smaller ways. Like, for example. My very newb project Limestone Buidlings is a retexture in the most basics of senses. We used a new Diffuse and tinting to get the look we wanted, but we used Funcom’s buildings, their 3D assets, to do it.

Now fast forward 2 years to now and I would have totally done it differently and better if I were to aim to do that project again. But that’s my point. A true, valuable retexture takes skills and expertise. Not some amateur hour by a modder like me 2 years ago (or even now really, I’m still learning and will always be learning). Now if somebody wanted to call something a “reskin”, that mod would be it.

Most of the assets that I could see in the video, even things like the carpet, were new 3D assets. Which is more complex than a retexture. You create your asset in your 3D software program (Blender, Maya, Zbrush), set up collisions, UV map it, bake the normals for high to low poly transition, create your masks, add other texture maps as necessary, paint your diffuse, set up your master material if necessary, set up your material instances, adjust for world lighting, set up granite (which is still science fiction to me) and etc. For an animated chest, that doesn’t account for rigging and animating the object.

So a “retexture” wouldn’t really be the proper term either. Not if you wanted a completely different looking chest. Again, that gorgeous water fountain statue is a heap more complex than a bloody chest, so Funcom’s artists would handle it just fine if tasked with it. A retexture would be more along the lines of say, the vanilla wood chest. You change its color (possibly reusing the tint mask), change the type of wood grain with the Diffuse, maybe add some symbols using the normal map texture. But you use the existing UV map and 3D asset to do it with.

Fair point.

All good Croms. The only reason I responded, at all, is because you are you. 95% of the time I don’t respond to a post because I know it’s not worth any type of back and forth conversation as it always leads to nowhere. Sometimes I slip up, then I’m quickly reminded why I shouldn’t bother in the future. But with a Croms_Faithful, I felt it was worth the effort. And as always, it was!

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The problem are the no-lifer, who complain about holiday decays.
These guys have only Conan and thats it. Many of such people are even for a shorter decay!!

And I doubt they are the majority, but they are “loud” and this is the only thing which counts for FC.

Be loud. Everywhere. Socialmedia, Reddit and here.

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The most important thing I learned from that stream: Scott has surprisingly Vanir looks. It’s easy to imagine him wearing mail and a horned helmet, swinging a broad-bladed axe. Add some Norwegian fjords on the background and we’d have a neat work of art.

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What about a alternative to black ice building pieces?

I got a question regarding the upcoming DLC:
Since the pillars are “modular” and the DLC has 10 more building parts compared to the other DLCs (new one has 49 and the old ones have 39) could that mean we get more than one “capital” for pillars (the top part that supports the “roof”).
Like, currently the advertised pillars are similar to the “doric order” which I really love (that was something I expected to be in the aquilonian DLC) but maybe there were more top parts shown at some point in the stream? Ionic or corinthian capitals maybe? That would be super awesome and I wonder if anyone saw something like that in the stream (can’t watch it currently myself).

They only showed off the one style that I saw.

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Ah damn I was really hoping for more, though I still wonder what these additional 10 pieces are. I hope mods will be able to utilize the pillar system so maybe modders can add even more variety (but I heard modders can’t access DLC stuff)!

That’s true. DLC items are not released; it keeps some unethical modders from copying the DLCs and releasing them as their own work. Unfortunately, it also keeps the ethical modders from working with all the assets to make original works based on Funcom’s products. So a few unscrupulous people messed it up for all of us (no, I do not have any specific names in mind).

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Well from what I saw it’s just different pieces that stack on top of each other like the regular pillars do now, they’re just designed to give the appearance of a single continuous column. Given some of the amazing mod building sets out there I’d be legitimately surprised if someone didn’t take a cue from this set and make their own versions.

Yep. There’s no mechanical reason why you couldn’t stack pillars of different designs on top of each other, and probably the “base” and “capital” parts of the Argos columns can be stacked in reverse order, too. So modders who want to adopt this style of pillar building shouldn’t face any technical difficulties. From a mechanical point of view, a pillar is a pillar, whether it has a base, a capital, none or both.

(Side note, and many games get this wrong: a Greek Doric column has no base, it was a later Roman addition to the design. Of course, Argos predates both of these ancient/classical empires by 10,000 years, give or take a few centuries, so they can build their pillars however they want.)

My first time on here, thanks for all the info. This is one of the best community sites I have experienced. Looking forward to all the coming updates ::partying_face: :partying_face:

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I believe I understand what you mean. This is the assessment of one who for the record, has a generally poor grasp on technology. If I am correct, I largely suspected as much. It sounds like the total amount of CPU processing resources or running capabilities are akin to an individuals annual budget derived from their employment income. We have, or at least begin with, a fixed numerical value which we recieve each year. We are of course free to spend/allocate the funds from that fixed figure in any way we choose. However, we must remain mindful that our ‘funds’ are not bottomless, and as such, spend our allocated income pool wisely. ie-pick our battles when deciding how to spend it. Does this sound correct to you?

I am assuming that they already did this at least once while Mounts were being implemented? Regardless, I feel I comprehend this aspect well enough.

You have recently explained this to me elsewhere and I believe we have this one nailed down. I accept the disinction, and explanation. I will probably continue to refer to such additions as either a retexture or reskin for the purpose of ease of reference, as opposed to belabouring on with a more prolonged and less familiar syntax. However, please understand that when I do so in the future, I do it for the aforementioned reasons, no to be derogatory or for the purpose of belittlement.

Perhaps you could immobilise your eye manually when I speak those terms? :wink:

Well thankyou for the kind words. And I do appreciate the time and the detailed reply, as did many onlookers too I see. :+1: You would be amazed just how much users such as yourself @Barnes have already taught me about technology, especially when we consider that such things were quite alien to my upbringing. I am always open to recieve further education. Although whether or not I grasp the individual concept is sometimes anyones guess.

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Hi GrumpyBram and welcome to the community! Thankyou for the kind words. We have a really good and fairly close community here on the forum. Sure we bicker at times, but its usually just because we care about and are passionate about the game; its almost always good natured and constructive. If you have any questions be sure to post them, and I think you will be pleasantly surprised by just how much help you will be offered, and the overall willingness to do so. I hope you enjoy Conan Exiles as much as we do.

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Yup, basically.

Among many other times, yes. Even sometimes little things are done to help with performance, such as why NPC tents can no longer be destroyed (they became indestructible to help consoles and low end PC’s gain just that much tiny more in performance help).

Funcom probably has some more wiggle room to help with performance, as Funcom has said themselves, when they first made Conan Exiles, UE4 was new to them and they were on a major timeline. So a lot of the core code was done in a non ideal way. Some of it is very wound up together though, which can make things difficult to implement. Which is why Mounts is/was a much bigger deal than people realize in terms of what it took to get them running properly (as in, it wasn’t just performance improvements. Just about everything with the character controller needed help in that regard).

But like I said, they can’t do that for forever. Newer engine versions have improved significantly in terms of performance and features (the one thing we can thank Fortnight for), but an engine upgrade would be immensely time consuming, and immensely costly (actual dollars in term of labor and time). Before Tencent, I would say the chances of that were near 0%. After Tencent, 10% :stuck_out_tongue: Late stage engine upgrades just generally aren’t done for a reason.

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Yeah