The Fifth Estate

You can expect plenty of high stakes #crypto action from this up and coming stonker! #Assange #wikileaks

I’m hoping there’s some lessons ‘Off Grid’ can learn from this film, there are already plenty of parallels emerging in the game as we build it. Keep your eyes peeled and let us know what you think when you get round to seeing it!

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

Artist-Hacks

Here’s a little trick for those Autodesk Maya users of you who aren’t in the know!

I’m often surprised by how many colleagues I’ve worked with in the past who are unaware of the flexibility of using Maya ascii files. Recently I had a friend working in a different version of Maya ask me to re-export some work for them…

You can always re-export,  but a quicker fix that might be useful to know for future reference is that these are .ma Maya Ascii files which means they are human readable code.

You can open up the file in notepad or some other text editor and the file is fully editable in text form. Some more advanced users are able to use this to fix corrupted files, and it’s often used in automated pipelines to strip out non-essentials from large projects, or create generic lighting setups over multiple files.

For us this provides a win as if you scroll along it has the Maya version requirement on the first line. From here you can either rewrite it to match the version of Maya you are using or delete the entire line. (see photo attached for reference) Hope this helps!

Characters motions

We’re just starting to play around with getting more variations on characters and their motions into the demo to jazz up the security guards and how they react etc.

@Mixamo have a great character prototyping pipeline available, we just used their free auto rigger and python scripts to create a maya rig for an animator who is helping us out.There’s a decent library of motions too so check ‘em out! http://www.mixamo.com

Dynamic building generator/tool

We started prototyping a dynamic building generator/tool for our city recently, and you know what, for an afternoon’s work its starting to make things that look damn-near like buildings!

In fig.1 you can see the test building that we created the tiles from in Blender, then in fig.2 you can see the ‘WallBuilder.cs’ generating a wall with those tiles randomly, but in fig.3 … wait for it … we have it specifying a ground floor, with ground floor tiles, and intermediate floors with intermediate floor tiles.Still a long way to go, but this use of the Unity Editor scripting options and generally component based scripting, should prove a powerful way of letting our production and interior designers come up with clever architecture patterns and rules and play around with generating buildings in the game engine. Freeing us to focus on EVERYTHING ELSE THAT NEEDS DOING, AI, UI, interactions, gameplay programming, the story… yada yada yada!

Let us know if you have any tips for tile based building tools! Look forward to showing you all more as it comes together!

Develop Brighton Conference

We’re gonna be down in Brighton for Develop Conference next week, if you fancy catching up then look out for us, or drop us a line on the contact page, or tweet us @offgridthegame!

http://www.developconference.com/

Look forward to seeing you there!

Off Grid teaser

Here it is, the teaser trailer we showed at Etoo London is finally up and online! Spread it around, share if you like it, tweet us if you want to play it!

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)