AQWorlds
Artix Krieger
| Thursday, May 2, 2024
Greetings and salutations,
I flew back in to Florida to some much needed, uplifting, news. Warlic, Zhoom, and Spider had a breakthrough on the armor converter tool! You may remember us talking about the challenges in the previous post. Well, it looks like they solved them. They are prepping to run the first test converting every armor.
The new armor converter is attempting to do a basic (no animation, no color customization, no fancy pants stuff) conversion of every single armor from AdventureQuest Worlds into a format that AQWorlds: Infinity can load. The armors might not look super great. So do not get too excited.... yet. We must both remain cautiously hopeful that this test produces equippable versions of most existing armors.
It is actually 8,300 named armors x 2... because there is different art for male and female versions. Broken into their individual pieces, the project contains well over 1,000,000 files.
This will be similar to the way the weapons were converted for the last Tech Demo test. Which also means, game artists will need to manually add animation and the fancy stuff. But having SOMETHING equippable is a great start.
Best guess? 3 days. We do not have an exact conversion time per armor, because Unity goes slower as this process goes on. Once the conversion is done, testers will start checking the armors to see which ones are usable or not. It is like Schrödinger's armor... we will not know how good it is until we look at it.
I am sharing this news with you now so you can be a part of this as it happens.
The previous attempt to just import the assets & pivot data took exponentially long. It said it would take over a week, but it was never actually going to finish. It would take an infinity. This was not why we named the game Infinity! Also, there was a memorable usage/leak issue. Once the machine's memory exceeded 90% use, Unity bogged down like crazy and the armor conversion grinded to a near halt. The armors took over a minute each to convert and the time increased with each additional armor. They tried switching to texture packer sheets, but surprisingly, this caused the importing of assets to take even longer! This is because the texture packer import has it's own scripts that would write out to a database that grew to over 3 Gigbytes of text data. Not great. Mind you, this was just importing the armors for PC. We needed a solution that would allow us to do it fast for PC, Mac, iOS, Android, and other platforms-- and the items would grow weekly as we continue creating weekly releases. Anyway, that was the situation as of last post.
Since then the crew painstakingly created their own system. The new tool imports the files, does all the meta data work, prepares the textures (including setting pivots), and then creates the parts called "armor slots" which Infinity uses to equip your gear. In short, Unity was just not designed to handle this many files. So it was pretty exciting to hear how Zhoom, Spider, and Warlic worked together building this over the past week. It was the culmination of everything they learned... combined to solve an otherwise unsolvable problem.
As I write this, Warlic is running scripts to set the image settings and generate the armor slots. Tomorrow, at long last, he will start the process of building them into Asset bundles.
No matter if this test goes good or bad.... there will be a post with screen shots coming when it finishes and we go into game to look at the armors. With the armor importer doing its thing, Spider has returned to working on the DragonSlayer class & Monster AI. The content crew is using the new NPC tool to create fully animated NPCs and wrap up Willow Creek & the Dragon's Lair. These are the things that will be featured in the next tech demo.
Battle on!
Artix
P.S. So, I flew back to my hometown for a funeral. While it was a sad time, I am grateful for the opportunity spend time with family there. While there, I went to a store to pick up medications and a man standing next to me dropped item without realizing it. I picked it up to help him and then the man collapsed. His hand was shaking uncontrollably. I rushed to help him and then swiftly went to alert the store's staff so they could call in an ambulance. But as the staff went back to the man... he was gone. He had suddenly stood up and walked around to the cash register to check out. It was so surreal. Have ever been in a sorta weird head space and then additional strange things happen around you that sorta breaks your brain? Because then I went back to the hotel. As I was walking down the hallway to the elevator a hotel staff person yelled out to me, "Hey!". He warned me that a man was roaming the higher floors without pants. It was one of those sorta days.
