Tag
Development posts tagged asset-pipeline. Tags cut across the categories, so this pulls together work on the same subject from different parts of the game.
10 posts
A one versus one made players wait on 308 MB before anything started. Most of each unit's animation file was a model and a texture nothing ever drew.
An eighty second trailer cut from eighteen generated clips, each one seeded with the game's own splash art so the dwarves stayed the game's dwarves.
A dwarf army, a goblin fortress and the ground under both were built the same afternoon by different sessions. What that buys, and the one rule it cost to learn.
Warships, gyrocopters and steam tanks came back from image-to-3D finished. Anything with legs came back needing every joint placed by hand. One question sorts them before you spend a credit.
Compressing the art seven times harder cut the download and did nothing for the crash. A decoded image costs the same memory whatever file it arrived in.
Four hundred animated units is the worst thing you can ask a renderer to do. Storing the animation as an image instead removes the skeleton entirely.
Every building is generated twice: as a painted sprite, then as a 3D model built from that sprite. No human drew either one, or wrote the brief behind it.
A dwarf versus goblin match downloads dwarf and goblin art and nothing else. Getting there took atlas packing, a format bake-off and a content hash on every file.
Every axe landing, every worker's grunt and every unit that answers when you click it. All of it written out as prose first, then generated from the sentence.
Every unit and building in this game began as a generated image on a magenta field. What turns one into a sprite is five passes of unglamorous pixel work.
