Chris Bischoff - Animal Use Protocol

Monke. Rat. Wishlist.

@Rev0verDrive One step deeper - each frame is an array of vertex locations relative to each other and to bone locations. :D gotta remember all the other stuff besides bones that work in animation!

@StasisGame Ask any gamer what an animation is. At the base level what is it? A: Each frame of the sequence is an array of bone locations and rotations.

Something I've noticed when people talk about games performance is a huge focus on things like polycount, or texture size, or lighting (GI vs Baked vs Light Probes, etc) - but not a lot of focus is put on things like AI, Pathfinding, particles, pooling, physics, skinned meshes, etc. Is it because that stuff is just... harder to see? To understand? Or is it too 'disconnected' from the more visual stuff? Honestly the amount of geometry that engines can crunch through now - even without things like nanite or virtual textures - is incredible. I've found that the real bottlenecks aren't graphics - its everything else.

@rohan_mayya Physics,AI, etc are huge bottlenecks in games, especially open world or simulation heavy ones. Draw calls are also one of the best (and trickiest) things to optimize on the CPU side - and they directly impact how well the engine can feed the GPU.

@StasisGame That's because none of those are actually bottlenecks for teams with good systems The biggest bottleneck is shaders / texture sizes This is why upscalers are so popular :)

@WWSGames That and the PONAF forums were a wild time!

@StasisGame I remember Alien:ME! From the Black Isle Studio boards!

I think one of the weirder game ideas that Nic and I had was a space trader called "Alien:ME". You played as a human who was adopted by a peaceful alien race as a child - and you're forced to enter a region of space where humans have become a 'Federation' style government. But more in the mirror-verse sense. I was very 'Mass Effect' (Gameplay similar to Star Control 2) in its story. Then we had one called Outworld - where you played as an alien space pirate named Rex Norad - you could strip-mine planets for resources, buy crew to use as fuel for your ship - trade in drugs, smuggle resources around... it was VERY ambitious - considering we were about 13 and it was made in Multi Media Fusion.

@Snefer I'm assuming its heavy decal use and lots of triplanar mapping! Both Nic and I have watched The Ascent GDC video multiple times - its a big inspiration for how we are building AUP's art pipeline.

@StasisGame Similar but extended. Since it now needs to cover all kinds of surfaces, and a pixel density that can hold up, in an open world with 100x the object density, yet shipping on the same platforms. This game has 10x more tricks, for sure.

Making a large game like this, with only modular parts, and retaining artists control and hitting the artistic quality we wanted has been the most crazy tech art challenge of my career so far. So many tools and shaders!

@BeanJuiceStudio Gotta feed the family!

Game dev question of the day What keeps you going?

All tv shows should only ever be 3 seasons long. Except for Star Treks, which should only start at season 3, and then they get 3 more after that.

@ptacekmartin @IGN Thanks Martin! Hopefully our style of game translates well into an entirely new genre!

@StasisGame @IGN Dude I love your games and your art style. Can't wait to play this one.

Thanks to @IGN for putting the AUP Teaser up on Gametrailers! youtube.com/watch?v=ZvAXG_…

... creepy.

@SebAaltonen I think its a fast Pixel Depth Offset (or something similar) on the AO. Works in screen space - so gonna be fast. I believe its around 0.4 ms-

Anybody knows how they are doing it? Is it some nice trick or something horribly slow and inefficient?

@keaukraine @CaptainGPU VATS animations are uncompressed - but it’s certainly the exception!

@CaptainGPU З міпмапами ще третину можна додавати. Але ж текстури зазвичай стиснені, я не думаю що десь в продакшені використовують RGBA8.

Як би це парадоксально не звучало, але 1 мільйон вершин, займає менше пам'яті ніж 4к текстура. Вершина з позицією, нормалью, UV, тангентом та vertex color = 12+8+12+16+12 = 60 байтів. Мільйон вершин ~57.22 МБ. Текстура розміром 4096 × 4096 у форматі RGBA8, це рівно 64 МБ.

@JussiKemppainen I love his stuff. Its so good.

@StasisGame Thanks this was new to me!

This is hands down the best tech art channel I've ever seen. Its just so good - and really makes me realize how much I dont know. Incredible stuff! @VisualTechArt" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">youtube.com/@VisualTechArt

Deputy Chief of Mission Aaron Snipe recently met with Shoji Yutani, CEO of Weyland-Yutani Corporation, to discuss greater 🇺🇸 🇯🇵 coordination in deep-space exploration. With companies like Weyland-Yutani considering new large-scale terraforming and atmosphere-processing projects on distant planets, ties between government and private industry have never been stronger. #weylandyutani #LV426

Someone asked if AUP will still be similar to our other games... and the answer is 100% yes. :D We love our PDAs - our writing - our lore, backstory, history - world. Players of any of our games will find something to love in AUP!

Save the rat!!!

@ComposerCasey You’re too kind Casey! Thanks for the shout out!

If you love horror games, please give this inventive indie-dev your attention. ANIMAL USE PROTOCOL has incredible potential. So far, visually, it looks captivating, the setting is unique, and most importantly, the Brotherhood devs are well-known for their narrative prowess. 🐵🐀