RedFrame Featured by Unity

Posted on April 11, 2013 by Andrew Coggeshall — No Comments ↓

For anyone who doesn’t know, we’re building RedFrame using the Unity game engine. Unity is a wonderful tool with many features that make it appealing for indie development, including the ability to deploy to multiple operating systems as well as an amazingly simple asset pipeline.

The folks at Unity were kind enough to feature our game on their site, and we recommend checking it out if you want to get a little more background on the project. We have been a bit tight-lipped so far and hopefully this is a good introduction to who we are and what we would like to accomplish with RedFrame. Check out the article!

Posted in Design, Pipeline, Programming

Creating Floor Plan Screenshots

Posted on March 12, 2013 by Michael Stevenson — No Comments ↓

As we craft the puzzle structure for RedFrame, it’s very useful to have a birds-eye view of the environment so that we can better see how puzzles physically relate to one another. I spent some time over the weekend creating a simple Unity editor script that allows me to export two very large screenshots, one for each floor of our house environment. The script creates a new downward-facing camera, sets it to orthographic mode, and adjusts its near and far clips planes to cut out only the vertical section of the house that I’m interested in. It then manipulates the camera’s projection matrix to produce an oblique projection. This oblique perspective makes it much easier to see walls and determine height, and has the fun side effect of making it feel like a top-down RPG.

Rather than capturing an image with Unity’s built-in Application.CaptureScreenshot method, I instead chose to render to a much larger off-screen RenderTexture with a square aspect ratio. This way I can guarantee that the resulting images will always be the same dimensions, regardless of how the Unity editor windows are set up.

I combined the two floor images in Photoshop as separate layers, and gave the top floor a slight drop shadow. I can easily toggle between the top and bottom floor by hiding the top layer. I’ve created additional layers in which I can create diagrams and notes. As the environment evolves, it’ll be very easy to re-run the script in Unity, producing a new pair of screenshots that can be dropped into the same Photoshop file.

You can download my floor plan screenshot script here. It was written very quickly, so if you see room for improvement please let me know!

Posted in Design, Pipeline, Programming

Environment Update

Posted on January 19, 2013 by Andrew Coggeshall — No Comments ↓

A few months ago I finished building and lighting the the RedFrame house environment. Not including bathrooms, the house has 17 furnished rooms, and a couple outdoor areas. The general look has changed a lot since we last showed a demo. I’ve started to use higher contrast in many areas, and the general color scheme of each room has converged into a unified style, making each room feel unique. Here’s a quick tour of some of the areas that convey the main feel of the game.

-Andrew

Posted in Uncategorized

Repurposing Old Systems

Posted on January 14, 2013 by Michael Stevenson — No Comments ↓

It’s always a little sad to see good code slip into obscurity as gameplay changes and mechanics drift from their original goals. During our lengthy exploration into RedFrame’s core gameplay, a lot of our ideas reached a fairly playable state, only to be discarded once we embarked on our next prototype. But all is not lost; by diligently using version control (SVN – that’s for another post) we’ve retained a complete history of our creative and technical output. I’ll often pursue old systems to remind myself of previous ideas that may become relevant again some day.

One such forgotten system was an object carrying mechanic that I developed about a year ago. The system offered some neat affordances for both the player and the game designer: the designer could mark an object as “portable”, then mark valid drop locations on surfaces. At runtime, when the player approached the portable object it would highlight to indicate interactivity, then they could click the mouse to pull the object into their hand. There could never be a case where the player could permanently lose the object, such as by dropping it behind a couch, because the designer would not have designated that area as a valid drop location.

It was a great system, but it became a solution looking for a problem. We quickly ran into an interaction problem common to most adventure games: pixel hunt. It’s a major failure of design when the player is compelled to click aimlessly throughout an environment in an attempt to discover interactive items. The issue is bad enough on static screens in point-and-click adventures, and a full real-time 3d environment only magnifies the problem. The system had to be abandoned – it just didn’t work in the game.

Fast forward a year. Just last week we realized we had a related problem: our core gameplay had been reduced to interaction with 2d planes (we’ll talk more about this in future posts) and we’d lost the feeling of actively participating in this dense world we’d created. To avoid spoilers I won’t reveal the precise nature of the solution we’re currently exploring, but it turns out that my object pickup system was perfectly suited for the job.

At this point I have a known problem, and I have code that can potentially solve it… but now how much of this code is actually usable? Luckily, the code came into our new project without any errors.

In general, it’s not uncommon for older code to have to be thrown away simply because it can’t easily interoperate with new systems. When it becomes more work to fix old code than to write new code, you can become trapped by constant churn that will bog down even a small project. To mitigate this, I try to structure my code in a very decoupled way.

Rather than writing my pickup and drop code against an existing player controller, I instead included two generic entrypoints into the system:

PortableObject FindNearestPortableObject (Transform trans, float maxDistance, float viewAngle)

This method searches for PortableObjects within a view frustum implied by the position and rotation of a given Transform object with a given angle-of-view. I chose to require a Transform rather than a Camera component since it can’t be guaranteed that our solution requires us to render a camera view. It’s generally best to require only the most generic parameters necessary to perform a desired operation. By artificially restricting the use of a method by requiring unnecessarily specific parameters, we harm future code re-use without adding any value.

DropNode FindNearestUnusedNode (Transform trans, float maxDistance, float viewAngle)

On the surface, this method is effectively identical to FindNearestPortableObjectToTransform. Internally, it uses an entirely different search algorithm. This is a case where conceptually similar tasks should require a similar invocation. This serves two purposes:

Technical - It’s possible to swap two methods without re-working existing parameters, changing resulting behavior without having to track down new input data. This increases productivity while reducing the occurrence of bugs.
Psychological – By using consistent parameters across multiple methods, the programmer’s cognitive load is significantly reduced. When it’s easier to grasp how a system works, and it requires less brain power to implement additional pieces of that system, the code is much more likely to be used by those who discover it.

Lastly, the system includes a PickupController. This is a general manager script that manages picking up and dropping one object at a time, using the main camera as input. PickupController has no dependencies outside of the scripts belonging to its own system – it assumes nothing about the scene’s GameObject hierarchy aside from the existence of a camera, and doesn’t require any particular setup of the GameObject that it is attached to. It simply scans for PortableObjects to grab and DropNodes to place them into. By making the fewest possible assumptions, it’s able to be included in just about any project without having to be modified.

Writing re-usable code can certainly not be easy, but I’ve found that its long-term benefits tend to outweigh the cost of minimally increased development time. Once you’re comfortable with writing reusable code you’ll find that your earlier work will pay off again and again, making you more productive by obviating the need to repetitively solve the same problems.

-Mike

Posted in Design, Programming

Lightmap Workflow, Part 2: Architectural Lighting

Posted on December 28, 2012 by Andrew Coggeshall — 8 Comments ↓

The above is an in-game screenshot demonstrating externally baked linear space lightmaps rendered in Unity

Previous article: Lightmap Workflow, Part 1: UV Generation

Background

RedFrame is meant to be a highly atmospheric and immersive experience. To create this atmosphere, it was important for us to focus on lighting. Many games have compelling lighting, however they tend to be outdoor environments lit by a single directional source representing the sun. In comparison, we are creating a nighttime environment illuminated by lamps, sconces, and recessed lighting.

I struggled for many months to achieve a look that I really liked. Hopefully what I have learned can be helpful to anyone trying to create something similar. It is important to note that we are using a lot of precomputed lighting with Mental Ray, which is not a viable option for games that have highly dynamic environments (which, unfortunately, is most kinds of games).

This is a workflow for Maya and Mental Ray, but the concepts are universal. There are five concepts that I will cover:

Correct falloff / Gamma Correction
Physically accurate soft shadows
Distribution / Photometry
Color temperature
Indirect light

Once you understand these concepts, you will have a non-software specific checklist to use in creating your interior setup.

Correct Falloff / Gamma Correction

For many years working in 3d, I was told that real-world light had a quadratic falloff. This is known as the inverse-square law. Any energy that radiates out from a source in 3d space has an intensity equal to 1/(the distance traveled)^2. However, many lighting tutorials that I had read glossed over this fact, and instead suggested using a linear falloff which looked better. I always thought that this was weird since the quadratic falloff was physically correct. Naturally I tried using quadratic falloff which, to my dismay, resulted in too much contrast compared to the linear method.

As you can see, quadratic light falls off much too quickly, and the light has extreme contrast. The linear option looked better, but it always seemed unnatural to me.

It also bugged me because I knew that light obeyed the inverse-square law in nature, but this was for some reason incorrect. I have learned that it is generally not a good idea to ignore things that bother you. If you are doing everything correctly you generally won’t have the uneasy feeling that I experienced when setting my lights to linear.

It turns out that the reason I was having this problem was that 3d software renders images mathematically correctly, but since it is displayed on a computer monitor, it is being viewed in Gamma Space. If you are unfamiliar with the concept of Linear Space vs. Gamma Space (as I was), I suggest watching this video. Because of the way in which a monitor displays images, an image needs to be adjusted before being output to the screen. This adjustment is often done automatically in many cases, like when a gamma correction value is embedded into a digital photograph. However, out-of-the box 3d rendering does not produce this correction for you by default.

To set the rendered image’s gamma correction in Mental Ray, you must provide the inverse of the most common output gamma value of 2.2. This is calculated as 1/2.2 which is about .455. In your Mental Ray render settings, input .455 into the Gamma parameter under the Frame Buffer section.

As you can see, I am now able to use quadratic light falloff with less intensity and the light dissipates in a manner that is much more natural looking. Keep in mind that we are gamma correcting a final rendered image in Maya, but Unity is optionally able to render in linear space. In the future when we bake light maps, we will be able to render them in linear space and have Unity perform the gamma correction at runtime.

Physically Accurate Soft Shadows

Now that we have a correct light falloff, lets look at shadows. In the previous example the shadows were hard, meaning that any point on a surface is either completely inside or completely outside of a shadow. In the real world, light sources usually have a size, or diameter, which makes their shadows soft. If a light source has a diameter, the rays emanating from it will originate from different locations across its diameter. This will cause some of the rays to be occluded by the object casting the shadow, while others will not.

As you can see in the above image, the rays originating from the outermost area of the light source are able to wrap around the object casting the shadow. As you move towards the center of the source, the rays become more and more occluded by the object. This effect will not be as extreme with something the size of a light bulb, but it is still present. Giving any light source a diameter greater than zero will make the shadows look more realistic.

To set a light diameter in Maya, change the type of light to Area Light. Also, ensure that the decay rate is still set to quadratic as discussed in the section above. You will also need to check off a few Mental Ray settings: Open the Mental Ray Tab for your light object, then under the Area Light section, enable “Use Light Shape.” I selected a sphere as my shape since that is a good approximation of a light bulb. You can also increase the number of samples for better quality shadows.

As you can see in the above image, the shadows now have a more realistic and familiar look to them.

Distribution & Photometry

So far, these examples have all used point lights which means that the light radiates outward equally in all directions. If we want to create effects that mimic the appearance of recessed lighting, we will need a more sophisticated distribution. Below you can see an example of recessed lighting that looks much more interesting than a standard point light.

This effect is known as photometric lighting. You can recreate this type of uneven light distribution using something called an IES file. These files are available all over the web and are commonly made available by different light manufacturers. IES files are frequently used by architects in pre-visualization renderings, so they are designed to accurately reproduce the appearance of commercially available bulbs and fixtures.

With a little bit of digging, you can locate some of these files to use as a profile for your light. I’m not sure about the legality of distributing them on this site, but a quick Google search should be productive. To hook up the IES file, open the “Custom Shaders” tab under the Mental Ray section of your light and click the checkerboard icon next to the “Light Shader.” From there, click the Mental Ray Lights section and select the “mia_photometric_light” node. Under the node’s settings, set the intensity mode and distribution mode to 2. This will tell the light node to use the IES profile. Click the checkerboard icon next to the profile section, which will create a new IES profile node.

Once the profile is selected, render out an image. As you can see, the distribution looks like a recessed light that you would see in a house. There are many different IES profiles available online that can create a plethora of effects.

Light Color

Note: Light Color section has been edited to use a blackbody node which doesn’t need gamma-counter correction.

The behavior of the light is starting to look pretty good, however the color is wrong. Lights in a house tend to have more of an orange color. A quick way to emulate this is to plug in a Mental Ray Color temperature node called a mib_blackbody. Plug this node into the color of your light.

This node will let you select a temperature, which will generate a light color. I like values around 3,800 for indoor lighting. You can see a nice chart of color temperature here. Once set, you can render the image and see if the lighting looks more like an artificial light source. If it is too orange, try increasing the temperature.

Indirect Light

If you are unfamiliar with indirect light, it is worth doing a little research before proceeding with this workflow. However, the basic idea is that when light hits a surface, it bounces off and reflects onto other surfaces, some of which are in shadow. This means that the areas in our rendering that are completely black and in shadow should potentially still be receiving some light from other nearby surfaces that have received direct illumination.

I use an incredibly simple setup for this. In your Mental Ray render settings, under “Indirect Lighting,” you can turn on “Final Gather.” This is a method of simulating light bounce that works pretty well. Set the Accuracy to something like 500 and set the Point Interpolation up to 50.

These are quick and dirty settings but should be sufficient for you to get the idea. Once it is set up, we can render to see the indirect lighting.

Conclusion

Getting our lighting workflow ironed out was a difficult process, but in retrospect the steps are pretty straightforward. Keep in mind that recreating this exact workflow is not nearly as important as internalizing the concepts that I have covered. Many developers will be using different 3d software and, even more commonly, baking light directly inside of their game engine. These differences in tools will likely require significant changes to the workflow. Also, using an article like this as a direct template will result in a homogenous look. It is much better to understand why we’ve used these techniques in RedFrame so that you have more knowledge to draw upon when you approach the visual design of your project.

-Andrew

Posted in Pipeline

Global Managers With Generic Singletons

Posted on December 21, 2012 by Michael Stevenson — 2 Comments ↓

Global state and behavior can be a bit tricky to handle in Unity. RedFrame includes a few low-level systems that must always be accessible, so a robust solution is required. While there is no single solution to the problem, there is one particular approach that I’ve found most elegant.

There are many reasons one might need global state: controlling menu logic, building additional engine code on top of Unity, executing coroutines that control simulations across level loads, and so on. By design, all code executed in Unity at runtime must be attached to GameObjects as script components, and GameObjects must exist in the hierarchy of a scene. There is no concept of low-level application code outside of the core Unity engine – there are only objects and their individual behaviors.

The most common approach to implementing global managers in Unity is to create a prefab that has all manager scripts attached to it. You may have a music manager, an input manager, and dozens of other manager-like scripts stapled onto a single monolithic “GameManager” object. This prefab object would be included in the scene hierarchy in one of two ways:

Include the prefab in all scene files.
Include the prefab in the first scene, and call its DontDestroyOnLoad method during Awake, forcing it to survive future level loads.

Other scripts would then find references to these manager scripts during Start through one of a variety of built-in Unity methods, most notably FindWithTag and FindObjectOfType. You’d either find the game manager object in the scene and then drill down into its components to find individual manager scripts, or you’d scrape the entire scene to find manager scripts directly.

A slightly more automated and potentially more performant option is to use singletons.

Singleton Pattern

The singleton design pattern facilitates global access to an object while ensuring that only one instance of the object ever exists at any one time. If an instance of the singleton doesn’t exist when it is referenced, it will be instantiated on demand. For most C# applications, this is fairly straightforward to implement. In the following code, the static Instance property may be used to access the global instance of the Singleton class:

C# Singleton

public class Singleton
{
	static Singleton instance;

	public static Singleton Instance {
		get {
			if (instance == null) {
				instance = new Singleton ();
			}
			return instance;
		}
	}
}

Unity unfortunately adds some complication to this approach. All executable code must be attached to GameObjects, so not only must an instance of a singleton object always exist, but it must also exist someplace in the scene. The following Unity singleton implementation will ensure that the script is instantiated in the scene:

Unity Singleton

public class UnitySingleton : MonoBehaviour
{
	static UnitySingleton instance;

	public static UnitySingleton Instance {
		get {
			if (instance == null) {
				instance = FindObjectOfType (typeof(UnitySingleton)) as UnitySingleton;
				if (instance == null) {
					GameObject obj = new GameObject ();
					obj.hideFlags = HideFlags.HideAndDontSave;
					instance = obj.AddComponent ();
				}
			}
			return instance;
		}
	}
}

The above implementation first searches for an instance of the UnitySingleton component in the scene if a reference doesn’t already exist. If it doesn’t find a UnitySingleton component, a hidden GameObject is created and a UnitySingleton component is attached to it. In the event that the UnitySingleton component or its parent GameObject is destroyed, the next call to UnitySingleton.Instance will instantiate a new GameObject and UnitySingleton component.

For games that include many manager scripts, it can be a pain to copy and paste this boilerplate code into each new class. By leveraging C#’s support for generic classes, we can create a generic base class for all GameObject-based singletons to inherit from:

Generic Unity Singleton

public class UnitySingleton : MonoBehaviour
	where T : Component
{
	private static T _instance;
	public static T Instance {
		get {
			if (_instance == null) {
				instance = FindObjectOfType (typeof(T)) as T;
				if (_instance == null) {
					GameObject obj = new GameObject ();
					obj.hideFlags = HideFlags.HideAndDontSave;
					_instance = obj.AddComponent ();
				}
			}
			return _instance;
		}
	}
}

A base class is generally unable to know about any of its sub-classes. This is very problematic when inheriting from a singleton base class – for the sake of example lets call one such sub-class “Manager“. The value of Manager.Instance would be a UnitySingleton object instead of its own sub-type, effectively hiding all of Manager‘s public members. By converting UnitySingleton to a generic class as seen above, we are able to change an inheriting class’s Instance from the base type to the inheriting type.

When we declare our Manager class, we must pass its own type to UnityManager<T> as a generic parameter: public class Manager : UnitySingleton<Manager>. That’s it! Simply by inheriting from this special singleton class, we’ve turned Manager into a singleton.

There is one remaining issue: persistence. As soon as a new scene is loaded, all singleton objects are destroyed. If these objects are responsible for maintaining state, that state will be lost. While a non-persistent Unity singleton works just fine in many cases, we need to have one additional singleton class in our toolbox:

Persistent Generic Unity Singleton

public class UnitySingletonPersistent : MonoBehaviour
	where T : Component
{
	private static T _instance;
	public static T Instance {
		get {
			if (_instance == null) {
				instance = FindObjectOfType (typeof(T)) as T;
				if (_instance == null) {
					GameObject obj = new GameObject ();
					obj.hideFlags = HideFlags.HideAndDontSave;
					_instance = obj.AddComponent ();
				}
			}
			return _instance;
		}
	}

	public virtual void Awake ()
	{
		DontDestroyOnLoad (this.gameObject);
		if (Instance == null) {
			Instance = this as T;
		} else {
			Destroy (gameObject);
		}
	}
}

The preceding code will create an object that persists between levels. Duplicate copies may be instantiated if the singleton had been embedded in multiple scenes, so this code will also destroy any additional copies it finds.

Caveats

There are a few important issues to be aware of with this approach to creating singletons in Unity:

Leaking Singleton Objects

If a MonoBehaviour references a singleton during its OnDestroy or OnDisable while running in the editor, the singleton object that was instantiated at runtime will leak into the scene when playback is stopped. OnDestroy and OnDisable are called by Unity when cleaning up the scene in an attempt to return the scene to its pre-playmode state. If a singleton object is destroyed before another scripts references it through its Instance property, the singleton object will be re-instantiated after Unity expected it to have been permanently destroyed. Unity will warn you of this in very clear language, so keep an eye out for it. One possible solution is to set a boolean flag during OnApplicationQuit that is used to conditionally bypass all singleton references included in OnDestroy and OnDisable.

Execution Order

The order in which objects have their Awake and Start methods called is not predictable by default. Persistent singletons are especially susceptible to execution ordering issues. If multiple copies of a singleton exist in the scene, one may destroy the other copies after those copies have had their Awake methods called. If game state is changed during Awake, this may cause unexpected behavior. As a general rule, Awake should only ever be used to set up the internal state of an object. Any external object communication should occur during Start. Persistent singletons require strict use of this convention.

Conclusion

While singletons are inherently awkward to implement in Unity, they’re often a necessary component of a complex game. Some games may require many dozens of manager scripts, so it makes sense to reduce the amount of duplicated code and standardize on a method for setting up, referencing, and tearing down these managers. A generic singleton base class is one such solution that has served us well, but it is by no means perfect. It is a design pattern that we will continue to iterate on, hopefully discovering solutions that more cleanly integrate with Unity.

Posted in Programming

Open Multiple App Instances in Mac OS X

Posted on December 20, 2012 by Michael Stevenson — 3 Comments ↓

We do all of our light baking for RedFrame on a beefy Mac Pro, but due to limitations in Maya and Mental Ray we have to run multiple instances in order to saturate the available processor cores.

On Windows it’s very simple to run multiple instances of a single application – this is the default behavior – but we work on OS X which only allows one instance of an app to be running at any given time. We’ve commonly used a messy workaround: duplicating the application on disk and keeping references to its many copies in the Dock.

Today I discovered a much better solution. It’s possible to open an unlimited number of instances of an app through the terminal. To instantiate Maya 2012*, I just execute the following command:

open -n /Applications/Autodesk/maya2012/Maya.app

Using Platypus, I bundled this command into an application that sits in the Dock, ready to spawn additional Maya instances on demand.

You can download my Maya 2012 Instantiator here.

* Why not Maya 2013? Well, 2013 crashes every single time we’ve tried to bake lightmaps preventing us from being able to upgrade.

Posted in Pipeline

The King’s Shroud – A Cool Dev Blog to Check out

Posted on December 16, 2012 by Andrew Coggeshall — No Comments ↓

For the last few months, a friend of mine from work, Oliver Barraza, has been working on his game, The King’s Shroud for OUYA. Like our project, it is being developed in Unity. He describes the game as follows:

“The King’s Shroud is a story based Tactical Action Role-Playing Game designed to give more freedom without sacrificing the elements of strategy and control which players have come to expect from the TRPG genre. Featuring a limb-based damage system and our unique Targeting Arc, players engage in combat with complete control over the weapon’s swing arcs, carefully evaluating situations and positioning strikes for the most damage. King’s Shroud brings a new level of strategy to the already fantastic TRPG genre.”

His blog is updated very regularly, which gives a nice window into his learning process as well as the evolution of the project. Recently he’s switched form Javascript to C# and his post about the transition illustrates the language differences in a very clear way. The concept of the game is also really unique yet at the same time has a scope that is realistic for a small indie effort. I enjoy talking to Oliver about game design/programing at work and we’ve learned a lot from each other. I’ve seen his ideas evolve very quickly in a short time period and I recommend checking out his blog!

-Andrew

Posted in Uncategorized

Advanced lightmapping in Unity

Posted on December 8, 2012 by Michael Stevenson — No Comments ↓

While investigating potential lightmapping solutions for RedFrame, we explored Unity’s own lightmapping system which leverages Autodesk’s Beast. Beast unfortunately is lacking a few more obscure features useful for simulating realistic artificial indoor lighting, most notably photometric lights for reconstructing the unique banding patterns indicative of incandescent bulbs installed in housings. This prevents us from completely switching our workflow from Mental Ray to Beast, though we’ll likely still use Beast for specific locations in the game that are favorable to Beast’s feature set.

Beast is a quite a full-featured lightmapping solution in itself, however Unity’s specific implementation of the tool favors simplicity over customization. Some very useful features are hidden away, and it’s not immediately obvious how to enable them. To give Beast a fair evaluation, I needed to access them.

Unity fortunately is able to accept Beast XML configuration files, opening up nearly the full potential of the system. There are a plethora of additional options recognized by Beast, but only a limited number are documented by Unity. After a bit of digital archaeology I was able to unearth documents that revealed the missing parts of the API.

I’ve created a Unity editor tool called Lightmapping Extended that implements the full Beast XML specification and presents all available (and compatible) options in a user-friendly UI. It’s available both from the Unity Asset Store and GitHub:

Download Lightmapping Extended on the Unity Asset Store

Download source code from GitHub

This tool unlocks a few key hidden features not available in Unity’s built-in Lightmapping settings window:

Image-Based Lighting – light a scene with an HDR skybox, mimicking realistic outdoor lighting
Path Tracer GI – a fast, multi-bounce lighting solution
Monte Carlo GI – a very slow but extremely accurate lighting solution

Keep an eye on the Lightmapping Extended thread on the Unity forum for future updates. If you run into any issues, please let me know either through the blog comments or the Unity forum thread. I’d like to make this the best and most complete solution for lightmapping inside of Unity.

- Mike

Posted in Uncategorized

Poly Reduction Prioritization

Posted on December 3, 2012 by Andrew Coggeshall — No Comments ↓

The central environment in RedFrame is a large mansion. While developing the 3d model of the house I didn’t pay much attention to its total resolution; I wanted to see how far I could push mid-range hardware and didn’t want the design of the environment to be influenced by technical considerations. To our delight the house runs completely smoothly on an ATI Radeon HD 5770 with a gig of video memory. Although this video card is no slouch, it’s also not a high-end gaming GPU.

The resolution of the house model was originally 1,371,298 vertices. We’re going to expand the environment quite a bit and will need to keep the game playable on as many systems as possible, so I’ve started the process of reducing the resolution of the Maya model as much as possible without negatively affecting the way it’s perceived by the player. I realized that a lot of our detail was unnecessary; some of the tight detail even detracted from the image by causing flickering when anti-aliasing was disabled.

The scene is quite large, so prioritizing my time is a little difficult. My first thought was just to go through each room looking for objects that are more detailed that they need to be, but this is somewhat arbitrary. My second technique has been to print a list of all objects in the scene and then order them by how much resolution they have. It is still arbitrary in a sense, but it has been a nice weapon with which to attack the problem.

Because I’m more comfortable programing in Unity than in MEL, I wrote a C# script to sort models by resolution. It’s my first time using Linq, which I still need to wrap my head around. You can download the script here – just import your model into Unity, drop it into a new scene, and attach the script to the model’s root game object.

-Andrew

Posted in Uncategorized