WHATS HAPPIN'
Welcome back folks!
We’ve been hard at work since the launch of our website, but we’d like to take a moment to thank you for sticking with us. We’re trying to get the message about our game out there, and seeing you join us and talking about the game really warmed our cold hearts this January. As we said in the last update, we’re hoping we can deliver monthly-ish updates on Prelude’s status. With that said, let’s talk about January!
Content Theory
This month, we asked ourselves one simple question: can we own all of the content in Prelude? Originally, we were using external weapons and vehicles that just did not work for us. Performance issues, artstyle clashing, the whole nine yards. Incidentally, this got us thinking about how we make things, We’ve taken ownership over 90% of the content in the game, so why couldn't we take it all the way? Well, it ended up revolving around those two key elements that also, incidentally, were in dire need of a tune-up...
The Things That Drive Us
We started with our vehicles, since they were going to be the biggest challenge. We were actually considering cutting them entirely, because the framework we were using was tanking performance hard. With Prelude, we are keeping a keen eye on performance and our entity budget, and certain vehicle frameworks create a unique entity for every light, wheel, seat, license plate, cupholder, etc. Now imagine that multiplied by however many players we want to support, and things start to get pretty inefficient!
Big Bill Hell's, the finest used car store in the tri-state area!
The Source Engine, of course, has built in vehicles. These don’t use nearly as many resources as the third-party frameworks, but the handling is notoriously horrible, and the scripts controlling them are even worse! So, it’s a fine line between performance and gameplay, as well as requring a big time investment to figure out how it all works. Luckily, we’re the sort of crazy people to do such a thing. We spent a week trying to decipher just what the hell Valve was doing when they made their vehicles back in 2003. We spent a week just trying to get a handle on the scripts, and in a way, it was like understanding how a real combustion engine works (or at least, it was just as hard!)
Eventually, we got them working. We were able to create a fleet of vehicles, ranging from heavy trucks, to small sedans, and even managed to re-build our firetruck and ambulance, two vehicles integral to the few actually paid careers in Prelude!
One of the first assets we did work on was the firetruck, which was a unique challenge with it's 6 wheels!
Bringing us to the next problem: models. This brought us back to the original problem. Most community-made vehicles use extremely high-detail textures that are ultra-shiny, which doesn’t fit very well in our established art style. We searched high and low for community made vehicles, ones that were based off of late-90s/mid-00s vehicles, and we just weren’t happy with what was available. Then it hit us: Left 4 Dead has a ton of environmental vehicle models, all with decent detail that fit neatly into our Half-Life 2-esque art style! We spent another few weeks decompiling each model, building working wheels and rigging (a nightmare, for those in the know) and using our new vehicle scripts to tune each car individually for their expected purpose.
Don't they just look so pretty, lined up like that?
With the vehicles implemented, we were free to begin working on the UI and functionality for Big Bill Hell's, the premiere used vehicle dealership in Union City! We ended up using the already existing UI for stores, but added an extra spin on it with the preview of the vehicle to the right. It took a lot of back and forth, and a bit of iteration, but the answer ended up being that simpler was better!
Bang Bang, Shoot Shoot
That brings us to today! We now have a fleet of vehicles and we own 100% of the content for it, and the framework for our vehicle economy is in place! So, now came the last gameplay element on our chopping block: Weapons. In keeping with the theme of ownership, we decided to completely clean our game and rebuild our weapons from scratch. They were also built a third-party framework, one that was tanking performance and had a mis-matched art style, so we completely cut them, and looked again to Valve games for sources. CS:GO seemed like a great place to start.
Bones, our local weapons dealer, seems well stocked for the future!
The story was more of the same: decompile, update models, recompile. But with CS:GO, some love and care needed to be put into those assets to bring them back to Garry’s Mod. For one thing, all the materials need to be redone, as they were originally made for the “Character” shader in CS:GO, which Garry's Mod doesn't support. This gave us an opportunity to improve the original look of the textures, so we took a pass at them! All of our weapons have been retextured to feel more gritty and dirty, and we've added things like mis-matched parts to really feel like guns that exist in a "lived-in" world. We also refined Valve's weapon animations, which were a bit wacky and didn't play well.
With just the right coat of paint, CS:GO's weapons clean up well!
Finally, we needed some arms, ones that represented what the player is wearing at any given time, so we used the "Pirate" hands from CS:GO, but re-built our clothing system on top of them.
A CS:S Classic remastered!
Conclusion
So! That was our journey into content ownership this month. Now, 100% of Prelude's models, materials, sounds, and everything else is built by us from scratch, or based off of Valve games. This design philosophy has been used with everything we build, and we think it's the right decision going forward to own everything we put in. Plus, this gave us a great excuse to balance these forgotten elements of the game, and now, we can work these refined items back into our economy, so that by launch, players will have aspirational items like high-end weapons and vehicles to work towards. Exciting stuff!
We hope you've had a good start to your year, and we appreciate all the love and support you've given us. 2022 is looking good for Prelude.
See you next month! 🥰