TL;DRPascal Muller describes starting about a year earlier, supporting UK colleagues on space station work, with his first asset being the ship selection console that quickly made it into the game.
When I started at Foundry 42 it was about a year ago, last September. Back then we weren't really working on the procedural stuff. It was just an idea and a long-term goal. So I did some space station stuff. I supported the guys in the UK because there weren't a lot of environment artists here at the time.
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Brian ChambersDevelopment Director, Foundry 42 Frankfurt
You were telling me the other day, what was the very first asset?
Ian, the art director from the UK, came to me and gave me this white box mesh, it was really rough. He said, okay, dude, you have to make it look nice, that's your job. See how you do with the art style, everything is new. So I did that and I went through it, I finished it, I gave it to Ian, he's like, yeah, this is cool. And normally when you make a game, you wait for a long time till it's in the game. But in this case, a couple of weeks later it's in the game, and it's this console where every player goes to select his ship.
TL;DRWorking with the engine team was tricky at first because art and code think differently, but Muller now bridges them by supplying height maps, textures and art feedback while Marco provides the code.
In the beginning it was kind of tricky because it's like two worlds clashing if you have art and code working together. So it takes some time to get used to how they talk. One dude thinks in pictures and the other thinks in numbers. So it took a bit of time to get adjusted, but basically Marco and the guys provide the code. I'm kind of the bridge for the artist who's in the end going to work with the tools. So I provide all the stuff that's needed like height maps and textures and materials, and just generally give art feedback: if I realize, okay, we want to achieve this quality, I know, okay, we need this and that. So I can talk to Marco: look, this is the visual fidelity we want to achieve. Marco himself obviously has very high standards as well. And together we try to find a way to solve all these issues.
In the beginning it's a lot of R&D, you never really know what the final product is going to look like. Of course, you have an idea and Chris has an idea of what he wants. Then we had the whole V1 thing, which we basically went away from again because we saw, okay, we're kind of hitting certain limits. We cannot continue with this tech. We have to take a different path. So it's a lot of iterating, and you can't really plan much ahead. Also for project management, it's difficult.
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Brian ChambersDevelopment Director, Foundry 42 Frankfurt
Yeah, it gets difficult. I think that's why it was an active decision that you were basically driven and tasked by the tech team. They knew you guys needed that breathing room. They knew the code was there and solid, and we really had to work out how to get terrain to blend correctly and all that.
TL;DRConcept art from the UK team defines each biome and its look, art direction flags blends that look wrong, and tech is checked before production, with very mechanical planets like ArcCorp needing new approaches.
The blending of different height maps in general, if you have mountains and then you have sand next to it, works. Technology-wise, it can be done really well, but in some cases, it just doesn't make sense. For example, if you have a pitch black mountain and next to it you have white sand, it's obviously going to look a bit strange. But this comes from the art direction. They tell you, okay, this doesn't look good, we just have to change something. But basically, in general, we get concept art from the UK. Our concept artist sets up all these biomes, these ecosystems, what they're going to look like. He kind of takes them apart and also shows you how it's going to look on a global scale, also on a detailed scale, what kind of vegetation there is and rocks.
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Brian ChambersDevelopment Director, Foundry 42 Frankfurt
So when you guys are jumping into it, you have a really good idea at least what your target is. And then it's you working with tech to go, cool, how do we achieve that?
Because sometimes we hit a certain limit. What we did so far was very organic. Earth-like planets, we can get them looking pretty good. But now we're thinking of stuff like ArcCorp that's very mechanical. It's a huge cityscape basically. So we had to figure out certain ways on how we achieve that. So before we go into production, we always make sure that we have the tech there, that it can be used by the artists. Because in the end, we always need more than one dude.
We have this plan that the terrain changes if you have big explosions, grenades and stuff like this go off. You can have a hole there, which is not going to be permanent, because there's thousands of people coming there and throwing their grenades. So it's going to go away after a while, it's not going to be permanent. But we were also thinking about, if you want to harvest resources, like hacking down trees and stuff like that, that the resources kind of shift after, say, a couple of months of people chopping down all this wood. And so the density of the forest goes down after some time. So you can notice it, like, oh, shit. And then the landscape does change and you can see it visually.
TL;DRThe ocean looks good visually with tessellated 3D waves, but there's little interaction yet, no known plans for buoyancy or landing, and players won't be blocked at the water's edge.
Yeah, he started a couple of months back and that was his first, his baby, basically. He's taking care of the ocean. So at the moment, visually, it's in a good place. We have all these tessellated three-dimensional waves. Interaction-wise, there's not much going on at the moment. Because we also have to take care of what's going on when you go underneath the water. And you need stuff like buoyancy, what happens if you want to land with your ship, and this type of stuff. As an artist, I don't really know if there's any plans for that yet.
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Brian ChambersDevelopment Director, Foundry 42 Frankfurt
I do know on the design side, we're not going to block people. It's not like you're going to get to the water's edge and hit an invisible wall. We know we're not going to do that, but honestly, I don't know what the design team has come up with or what that roadmap is, but I know there's been discussions of, okay, what would we do underwater and how would it happen? So we'll see.
TL;DRTerrain tessellation can't produce a convincing ArcCorp, so they just started prototyping scattering very large objects like the planet's procedural object scattering, with performance still to be checked.
We actually just started this week to prototype ArcCorp, figure out ideas. Can we do it with the planet terrain? Because if you do something like architecture, it's very different. If it's organic, you have these random shapes and stuff, and in architecture, everything is very straight and angular. And with the tessellation of the terrain, you can get away with certain looks, but you will never get this convincing city of ArcCorp with massive towers and skylines and this type of stuff. So what I would like to do in the future is prototype something that uses the object scattering, because all the objects on the planet will be scattered procedurally as well. So we will do something similar, just with really, really big objects, kind of scatter them over the planet. I don't know how happy Marco is with that. We'll have to figure out, does it work performance-wise?
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Brian ChambersDevelopment Director, Foundry 42 Frankfurt
But then on top of that, that's when level design comes in. They know where the player path is and where they want the gameplay to exist.
TL;DRSo far they've done Earth-like environments, but he most looks forward to really alien planets with exotic vegetation, which stays artist-driven rather than fully procedural so it keeps believability.
Well, so far we've gone with Earth-like stuff. We've been looking at the latest pictures from NASA, from Mars, and they have a lot of cool, inspiring stuff. But of course, I'm looking forward mostly to really alien planets where you just land and you're like... You can go really nuts with things like vegetation. A different atmosphere, there's more oxygen, things grow really big.
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Brian ChambersDevelopment Director, Foundry 42 Frankfurt
In a sense, it gives you guys more creativity. It's also a bit more of a challenge because of the unknown: you still need to create all those elements that still feel like they fit within an environment. Although that environment is make-believe, you still want those things to all seem like they're going to come from that same place.
That's a good thing, because it's still artist-driven. It's not completely procedural. So you still have the control: you can say, okay, this is how a tree looks in our world and I'm just going to modify it, but it still keeps that essence of a tree. You can say, okay, it grows like this, and it still has this believability to it.
Brian ChambersDevelopment Director, Foundry 42 Frankfurt
That was your exact response. And I think that's absolutely true. We may have a certain level that we come up with within the next few months, and those are ones we're working with for the next six or eight months. As we venture into other planets and other systems, and the alien ones, what kind of ecosystem do you have? A snow alien ecosystem? It's going to be interesting as we push it along.
It's going to be cool. We're not really limited by the looks of it. Asset creation and all this type of stuff, it's still the same. It's more just the tech to get it to work on an entire planet. Once this is there, you can really go crazy with the vision.