Weekly Dev Log for February 23rd, 2018
Hello everyone, and welcome to the Weekly Dev Log for the week of February 23rd, 2018. If you haven’t heard, we’ve recently retired our old Daily Dev Log in favor of the Weekly Dev Log, which will allow us to give a broader picture and explain things in plain English, while also including some photos from development. Without further ado, let’s get started.
Tower Unite 0.4.1.0 Update
We’ve been wrapping up the 0.4.1.0 update, finishing some behind the scenes features and fixing some last minute issues. We’re hoping to release this update soon, some additional things being added to the update as well as @macdguy’s surgery recovery has pushed our internal deadlines back.
We have some goodies coming in this update, some which aren’t being announced here quite yet, but we are going to reveal the ??? item.
Condo: Theater
It’s time to come clean, the ??? item on the Trello is the Theater Condo, created by @Lifeless. This condo is a standalone version of the Theater from the Plaza, but with some alterations to give condo builders a bit to play with. The Theater Condo comes standard with customizable floors, walls, and ceilings, and four viewing rooms (the Theater in the Plaza only has 2). The condo comes with the giant media screens, and all the seats you need, so you can start watching some videos with some friends, instantly. This condo is available for 40,000 units.
Theater Condo: Canvas Concession Menu
Theater Condo: Customizable Lights w/ Concession Stand
Theater Condo: Customizable Lights w/ Ceiling Lighting Trim
Plaza Optimizations and Changes
@Johanna has been working hard on making optimization to the Plaza. This week, she’s been going through and converting old models which had large unique textures to having tiling textures. This process reduces the amount of textures in the plaza, increasing performance and the overall visual quality. She has also combined texture maps together to reduce texture space. For example, instead of having roughness, metallic, and ambient occlusion textures that are separate files and take up more space, they are combined into one texture by putting each map into one of the three (RGB) channels. Additionally, she has reduced the texture sizes for many textures that were needlessly large. In doing this, she’s reduced Tower Unite’s texture size by over 1GB. This is just one of the many optimization passes we’ve been doing and will be doing for the game.
Plaza: Updated Game Worlds Port Teleporter Plaza: Updated Poseidon Art Plaza: Updated Arcade Textures Plaza: Updated Plaza Launcher Roof
Wearables Hotbar
Due to the addition of more Condo Tools in this update, @macdguy and @Foohy have changed the hotbar system to add a secondary hotbar just for wearables. The weapon/tool hotbar will retain the number key activators, while the wearables hotbar will just have slots for adding items to your player.
Inventory Hotbar: Now with Weapons and Wearables Hotbars
Crash Fixes
Tower Unite 0.4.1.0 comes with code that will hopefully fix two bugs which had resulted in crashes. One crash was related to a large quantity of projectors in a condo, and the other crash was related to the Changelog window, both would cause the game to crash. We thank the reporters of these crashes for bringing these to our attention. If you experience any crashes, please report them here.
Zombie Massacre
Item Progress
@Madmijk has been working on implementing the weapon items for Zombie Massacre. He created an art test for the Black Hole item, as well as a prototype Turret construction sequence. @Matt worked on creating the model for the Blade Trap.
Zombie Massacre: Black Hole Art Test
Zombie Massacre: Turret Construction Art Test
Art
Blade Trap Art
@Matt has been working on creating the model for the Blade Trap item.
Zombie Massacre: Blade Trap Model (WIP)
Health Bar Implementation
@Madmijk also implemented the health bar that was shown off last week, check the bottom left hand corner in the video.
Zombie Massacre: Health Bar Implementation
Zombie Model
@Wergulz has been working on the model for the zombies for Zombie Massacre. He revisited the zombie in ZBrush, fixing some proportion issues and took some detail that would optimize retopology. He also started testing the rig for import into the Unreal Engine, and started skinning the model rig in Maya.
Maps
@Lifeless continued working on the Compound map.
Music
@donglekumquat continued working on the music, working on Track #3.
Furniture
@joshua has been working on new furniture items this week. He removed the artifacts from the Gamer Desk Color Mask, getting it ready to be shipped. He also started working on a Bar Table item, inspired by the one which was found in GMod Tower. He also started working on a model for a Sake Bottle.
Bar Stool Render Classic Bar Counter Render Classic Bar Counter Work in Progress #1 Classic Bar Counter Work in Progress #2
Minigolf: Kingdom
@Johanna continued working on art in the Market Area, and created two new holes.
Tower Express
@Caboose700 continued working on Tower Express, creating functionality to allow for the mass selling of items, and creating the page which allows the user to see their past purchases.
Art
@krionikal continued working on the first person hand, currently rigging it.
Miscellany
@macdguy was out of the office for some periods of this week due to recovery from his surgery, and @Madmijk was out of the office on Thursday and Friday.
Wrap It Up
That about covers everything that happened this week at PixelTail Games. We’ll see you all next week, and have a great weekend!