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KickStarter Satellite Reign - Syndicate Wars spiritual successor from original devs
- Thread starter Runciter
- Start date
kris
Arcane
They are toys.
Cowboy Moment
Arcane
- Joined
- Feb 8, 2011
- Messages
- 4,407
That's exactly what it should feel like, and it's a good sign that it does. The idea that one of the consequences of human augmentation is the powerful reshaping the weak to suit their desires is very prominent in cyberpunk.
Space Satan
Arcane
Greetings agents,
It has been a while since our last update, but we are all finally in our new office! Yay! We have been having conversations with lawyers and accountants over the last few weeks, as well as looking for an office for us to move into and having a little bit of a break after the Kickstarter campaign. But, we were all rested up and ready for Satellite Reign to consume us, and then all of our bodies decided it was time to revolt, and most of the team fell ill. We have managed to get the majority of us back in the office now but it resembles more of a quarantine zone with all the coughing and spluttering going on. Regardless, we push on!
The office
After inspecting some shoe boxes and some super-fancy places, we found the location that was just right for us, but more importantly, cheap! It’s in a nice area with lots of good food around, a shower (so Mike and Mitch don’t smell after riding their bikes into work) and an amazing pub filled with lots of tasty boutique beers just around the corner. The office itself is a big open plan area with heaps of space that Mitch can use for motion capture (we will have an update on that another day), skylights to let in the outside world, and wonderful aircon to save us from the Australian heat. We are still waiting for the internet to be connected, but for the time being we have Mitch’s phone plugged into the network. We also had a time lapse camera running while we were setting up the office.
What have we been doing?
Searching for an office, talking to lawyers about company structures and copyright law, talking to accountants about all sorts of tax mumbojumbo. We have had a bunch of work started on the backend of the website that will put everyone from the Kickstarter campaign in our system. Once that’s done we will be tracking everyones pledges together and we will be able to offer the add-ons and pledge upgrades that some of you have been waiting for (Most of this should come online in a week or so). We have also started the ball rolling with Russell Zimmerman about the story for the Novella and we already have a rough outline for the story. We have also be getting a few systems started in game: we have some agents walking around and basic weapons and health systems set up so they can shoot each other (well … lines draw from the chest of your agent to the feet of the enemy but functionally it works).
What is next?
We still have a healthy “to do” list to get through before we are all working full steam on the game, but we already have the project set up in Perforce, and are starting to get the basics in so we can started on our stress tests. Over the next few weeks, we will be doing stress tests to determine the size we can make the city in terms of memory and what can actually be rendered. We will also be looking at how many characters we can get on screen, how many polys they can be, how many bones and how many materials we can use. We will also be doing up a first pass production schedule so we can make sure we are all on track. We also get to eat the cake that was sent in by one of our backers … thanks Boon!
Will I ever hear from you again?
More updates are coming! We are all moving from “set-up studio” mode and into “make awesome game” mode over the next few weeks.
We won’t be able to post as many updates as we did during the Kickstarter campaign, however we will be keeping you all up to date with our Dev Diaries and we will be on the backer forums chatting to you all.
- 5 Lives Team
It has been a while since our last update, but we are all finally in our new office! Yay! We have been having conversations with lawyers and accountants over the last few weeks, as well as looking for an office for us to move into and having a little bit of a break after the Kickstarter campaign. But, we were all rested up and ready for Satellite Reign to consume us, and then all of our bodies decided it was time to revolt, and most of the team fell ill. We have managed to get the majority of us back in the office now but it resembles more of a quarantine zone with all the coughing and spluttering going on. Regardless, we push on!
The office
After inspecting some shoe boxes and some super-fancy places, we found the location that was just right for us, but more importantly, cheap! It’s in a nice area with lots of good food around, a shower (so Mike and Mitch don’t smell after riding their bikes into work) and an amazing pub filled with lots of tasty boutique beers just around the corner. The office itself is a big open plan area with heaps of space that Mitch can use for motion capture (we will have an update on that another day), skylights to let in the outside world, and wonderful aircon to save us from the Australian heat. We are still waiting for the internet to be connected, but for the time being we have Mitch’s phone plugged into the network. We also had a time lapse camera running while we were setting up the office.
What have we been doing?
Searching for an office, talking to lawyers about company structures and copyright law, talking to accountants about all sorts of tax mumbojumbo. We have had a bunch of work started on the backend of the website that will put everyone from the Kickstarter campaign in our system. Once that’s done we will be tracking everyones pledges together and we will be able to offer the add-ons and pledge upgrades that some of you have been waiting for (Most of this should come online in a week or so). We have also started the ball rolling with Russell Zimmerman about the story for the Novella and we already have a rough outline for the story. We have also be getting a few systems started in game: we have some agents walking around and basic weapons and health systems set up so they can shoot each other (well … lines draw from the chest of your agent to the feet of the enemy but functionally it works).
What is next?
We still have a healthy “to do” list to get through before we are all working full steam on the game, but we already have the project set up in Perforce, and are starting to get the basics in so we can started on our stress tests. Over the next few weeks, we will be doing stress tests to determine the size we can make the city in terms of memory and what can actually be rendered. We will also be looking at how many characters we can get on screen, how many polys they can be, how many bones and how many materials we can use. We will also be doing up a first pass production schedule so we can make sure we are all on track. We also get to eat the cake that was sent in by one of our backers … thanks Boon!
Will I ever hear from you again?
More updates are coming! We are all moving from “set-up studio” mode and into “make awesome game” mode over the next few weeks.
We won’t be able to post as many updates as we did during the Kickstarter campaign, however we will be keeping you all up to date with our Dev Diaries and we will be on the backer forums chatting to you all.
- 5 Lives Team
This is pretty interesting. Well, if you're into animating and stuffs.
Greetings Agents!
Pre-production is moving along nicely and we are creeping up on that next stretch goal! We’re nutting out the basic building blocks of the world at the moment, trying to create a solid foundation on top of which we can build the actual game. This is an incredibly important part of production, and is often cut short in many project schedules, which always causes issues further down the line. It’s great to finally have the chance to have a really solid pre-production period without having publishers breathing down our necks. We will show a bit of what we are doing in our next dev diary (it will be a much shorter wait this time), but for today, we’ve got something a little more on the technical/informative side for you all. Mitch has put together a run-down on his animation workflow for Satellite Reign. Check out the video, and if you’re still keen for a little bit more detail, there’s a write-up accompanying it too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRqrGl308JY
Animation Pipeline
Hi everyone, Mitch here, the one responsible for all things animation at 5 Lives. Something we’ve seen raised a number of times around the internet is the fact that our game is fairly ambitious for a small team, which is a fair point. Essentially, what this means is we each have to be as efficient as possible in order to achieve our goals. The five of us are currently in pre-production, figuring out our individual pipelines, which basically means we’re working out how we each go about getting our ideas out of our heads and into the game, minimising headaches further down the line. Today, I’m going to give a rundown on how I’ll be approaching the animation aspect of Satellite Reign.
Animating an entire city population is no small task, especially when your entire animation team consists of one person. So, in order to get through the amount of work in front of me, I need a method to quickly create large volumes of animation. Animation is an incredibly time-consuming task, so animation-heavy games often have reasonably large animation teams. We’re on a very limited budget, so that isn’t really an option for us. This is what made me start looking at motion capture.
For anyone who isn’t familiar, motion capture (also referred to as ‘mocap’) is a process in which animation data is captured from real-life actors. You may have previously seen images or videos of people in funny looking lycra suits covered in dots, like this:
This is Andy Serkis performing in The Lord of the Rings as Gollum. The little dots all over his suit reflect infrared light, which are recorded and isolated by an array of cameras (numbering in the dozens) surrounding the entire stage. With this data, a software package can track the dots from all of the cameras in 3D space, which in turn is used to control a 3D character, sort of like a puppet.
The great thing about motion capture is you can get huge amounts of incredibly realistic movement as quickly as it can be acted out. It’s never quite perfect, as the actor’s proportions usually differ from the that of the 3D actor, but an animator can fairly easily make the necessary adjustments much quicker than creating the animations from scratch.
But of course, this sort of setup doesn’t come cheaply. Not only does it require a lot of expensive specialised equipment and software, but you also need a fairly generous amount of room, which is another limitation we have. But, there’s an alternative.
Back when the five of us were throwing around our first ideas for the Kickstarter, I starting looking into what was being done with the Xbox 360 Kinect sensor. Some very clever people had managed to get their PCs to take the depth-data from the Kinect, and use it with standard 3D animation packages to produce homebrew mocap software, without the need for big stages or silly lycra suits.
And so, I jumped on my bike and set off to Dean’s house to borrow his Kinect. I took it home, blew the dust off, plugged it into my PC, pointed it out my bedroom door, and walked down the hallway. The software showed a 3D depth recording of my motion, which it was able to analyse and use to drive a character skeleton. Below is an example of a capture I did at a friend’s place (his house had a little bit more room to move than mine).
I was fairly impressed. The motion of me walking was viewable in 3D on my PC in a matter of minutes. However, there was a noticeable lack in quality compared to a professional mocap package. The feet were sliding around on the ground, and anything the Kinect couldn’t see (e.g. my far arm when turning side on) would flip out and go crazy.
But, the software I used (called iPi Mocap Studio) has the capability of using two Kinect sensors at the same time, meaning I could have a second one offset by about 90 degrees to the first, so there would always be line-of-sight to all of my limbs. Brent loaned me his Kinect to give it a go.
Unfortunately, calibrating the two Kinects to work together wasn’t as reliable as expected, and the final results weren’t much better. Performing actions on-the-spot were fine, but as soon as I wanted to take a few steps, the Kinects would quickly lose sight of my feet and head, due to a combination of the limited range of the depth sensor, narrow field of view, and me being rather tall (I’m 196cm). It was enough for me to get away with for the Kickstarter video, along with a free-for-use mocap library from the internet, but it wasn’t going to cut it for actual production.
Fast-forward to post-Kickstarter, once we’d finally moved into our office. There was another option I had been planning to investigate. iPi Mocap Studio also allows for the use of standard webcams, from which it can analyse regular old video from multiple cameras to extract 3D motion data. It sounded iffy, since the whole reason the Kinect is able to track motion is due to its depth sensor. Regular cameras have no way of knowing how far away anything is from the lens, so how could it possibly produce 3D animation?
Regardless, I decided to give it a try. As it turns out, PlayStation Eye cameras are not only cheap (I got them for about $18 AUD each), but they’re actually significantly better than your standard webcam. They have great light-sensitivity, they record at up to 60 frames per second (many webcams are capable of less than half that), and they’ve got a nice wide (and adjustable) field of view.
Calibration isn’t quite so easy as with a single Kinect (which was pretty much entirely unnecessary), but it still turned out to be fairly straight-forward. Once I placed the four cameras around the office in a semi-circle arrangement, calibration was as simple as moving a bright light around the capture area. The software can easily pick the light out from the rest of the video, and by analysing its movement, it can determine each camera’s position relative to one another in 3D.
The green trail is the final result of the calibration process. It’s a 3D representation of the path the flashlight took around the capture area. The lowest points are so the software can determine the location of the ground relative to the cameras. Below, the grey 3D film-cameras represent the locations of the PlayStation Eye cameras.
And from there, it’s ready to go. The actor (myself, in this case) then performs whatever motions are required, and the video streams are processed by iPi Mocap Studio. It wasn’t all clear-sailing, however.
The lack of depth information means the PlayStation Eyes are much more sensitive to environmental factors. The actor needs to contrast obviously from the environment, which proved doubly difficult for us, since our carpet is dark blue (like jeans), and our walls are white. The actor needs to wear clothes which contrast obviously from both. Either that, or you make the floors and walls the same colour. That was easy enough to achieve by buying some cheap white sheets to lay across the ground. Below, you can see one of my earlier tests. The floor and walls are light, and my clothes are dark, allowing me to contrast well from the environment.
The pink lines over me are called a skeleton. When 3D characters are animated, whether it’s for games or movies, what’s actually being animated is this skeleton, which the polygonal character model is attached to. The bones in the skeleton are placed in more or less the same places as in a real skeleton. As you can see, the software had no issues positioning the skeleton correctly, which it will then do for every frame of video, until you have a complete animation. However, the white-sheets brought on another issue. Sheets on carpet lack friction…
The sheets worked well as long as I didn’t have to do any big, fast movements. But big, fast movements are what we want, so some more experimentation was required. That’s where my “Christmas clothes” came into it.
While the pants aren’t quite as “contrasty” against the floor as I’d like, they get the job done, and with this, there’s no need for the white sheets on the floor. The socks still aren’t ideal, but it still gives enough traction to move around. And with that, I’ve got data to transfer onto our placeholder in-game agent.
With some minor adjustment here and there, the animations are ready for export into the game. This is where animation begins to move from the creative end of the spectrum towards the more technical side of things.
As of release 4.0, Unity has a cool new animation system which they’ve named “Mecanim.” Basically, it gives animators complete control over how and when their animations play in game, rather than a programmer having to manually trigger every animation via a script. Now, Chris and Mike simply just tell the animation system basic bits of information about the character, like current speed, direction, health, currently equipped weapon, etc. I take that information and use it to control animation playback.
So, when the agents spawn, they start in their default “idle” state, which is just an animation of them standing there, looking around. From there, I can transition to various other states, based on the previously mentioned values (speed, direction, etc.) Here’s a basic example:
- Once the “speed” value goes above zero, the agent will start walking.
- If the speed value continues to rise, they’ll transition into a “run” animation.
- If their direction changes while running, they’ll blend into a “turning run” animation.
- If their speed suddenly goes back to zero, they’ll play a “stop running” animation, which then transitions back to their default “idle” animation.
Above, you can see what the Mecanim editor looks like. The boxes represent animation states, and the arrows between them are where I control the transition conditions. This is all handled by me, without Mike or Chris ever having to worry about the animation system. It also means that as they update the way the agent movement is handled, the animations will automatically adapt to their new changes. It takes a significant amount of work off of the programmer’s plates, while simultaneously allowing for much more fluid animation playback. It’s a win-win!
I hope this has been an interesting insight into the animation pipeline, and helps give an idea about some of the things going on here at 5 Lives. The other guys will give a run-down of their processes in the over the course of Satellite Reign’s production, and you’ll likely start to see where our disciplines overlap.
Take care!
Space Satan
Arcane
I am impressed. They managed to make a decent motion-capture without AAA++++ tools.
Sensuki
Arcane
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2011
- Messages
- 97,653
Satellite Reign guys found a way to do cheap mo-cap:
Very early in-engine footage at 6:42
Very early in-engine footage at 6:42
Nice, thanks for telling us Infinitron. Without you, we'd never have known.
Diablo169
Arcane
Awesome video and a really clever way to get motion capture done on a limited budget. Wish more kickstarters do updates like that.
Not much to see, but something still.
Sensuki
Arcane
Just watched it then, pretty impressive for the short amount of time it's been in development ... unlike some other games 
Space Satan
Arcane
My that looks cool! :D
General Maxson
Arcane
Wow. They really managed to capture that Syndicate vibe. 
Weapons need more punch, and have a better sound effects. And those shooting behind the covers at the end... I hope they are thinking about the flanking the enemy and using the higher parts of the map to your advantage. Syndicate was always about using four agents at the same time in the group, it was the most effective way to finish your objective. Now it would be cool if you put heavy gunner for supressive fire, and move the rest of the team to dispose of the danger. They should also try to do something with sniper rifles from the first part, I don't remember using it at all. Destructible terrain would also be cool.
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