Dev Blog - New voxels, Big Box, Major level revisions

Hello you beautiful Patrons!

Time for another bi-weekly update.

Last update we mentioned that we are working on preparing the Patreon Exclusive demo. On October 25th, the Admiral Tiers will be getting their hands on the demo which features one level of the game (lasts roughly 40 minutes). Other patrons will get the demo as soon as most of the issues are ironed out. The past 2 weeks have been all about ironing out the final few kinks and getting things ready. Lets go take a look at what we've done!

Big Box
We have been approached by a well known publisher who is interested in publishing a big box version of Selaco. Unfortunately, at this point in time, I cannot share more than this. It's a big opportunity and once we have an agreed upon deal, I'll let you know as soon as possible with an impromptu blog post! But first we have to wait to see if the deal goes through and we both come to an agreement.

Bare in mind, this does not mean they are going to publish the entire game! We remain fully independent and full creative freedom will persist. They are just going to help us out getting an awesome big box version out there. I cannot guarantee that Patrons will get one for free, but I am going to push for a discount for backers of a certain tier. You deserve it!

New Weapon Pickups
At long last we have proper Voxelized (I'm still not sure whether or not that is an actual word) weapon pickups! In the early days we used poorly converted ''Obj to Vox'' algorithms which made the weapons look godawful. Borion swooped in and recreated all the guns by hand using voxel software. Take a look!
Keep in mind that these are not all the weapons that will be present in the game. Only the ones we have shown so far!

For comparison sake...Lets take a look at the old models.


Now lets move on and never look back at the old models ever again, ewww! Thank you Borion for saving our eyes from these hideous old models!

3D Model Update
Shaping up well! I have already shown a rough WIP shot in last weeks blog post, but things have advanced significantly since then and we are ready to move on to the next phase.
We are finished with shapes and basic colors of the armor. The next step is to apply the texture maps. 
I am currently looking for a professional Blender Rigger to help us rig this model so we can begin animating our protagonist. Finally after all these years we're getting an actual in-game character to look at when standing in front of a mirror. Stoked! Very stoked! No more Cardboard Dawn.
Dawn's face will not remain plastically, that's just because it's a WIP.



Levels revisions
The demo level that you will get to play soon is the first level in the game; the Pathfinder Memorial Hospital. This level was made a while ago, and my experience as a level designer has improved significantly since then. I finally had time to revise all the area's present in the demo which are quite a few. I am not going to show all of them, because I don't want all environments to be spoiled before you get to play the game, but here is one of my favorites.
I always strongly disliked this hallway. It's cramped and the encounters that play out in this area were never engaging. Linear hallways in general are a no-go in Selaco as they make combat boring. We don't do boring! I redid the colors completely, added an additional doorway to flank, made it wider, added some more cover and also did some extra stuff which cannot be seen from this angle. 
I'll be continuing the revisions this week so it's more on-par with the quality of the rest of the maps.

Introducing... CockUI!

(Billy Mays voice) Cockatrice here to tell you about the benefits of CockUI!
Yes, as dumb as the name is it’s a real thing. CockUI is the UI framework I have been writing from scratch in ZScript for menus and in-game interfaces. While it’s being made specifically for the needs of Selaco, the CockUI framework is intended to be released along with Selaco to help modders and GZDoom developers alike create interfaces that can handle varying screen resolutions with a minimal amount of effort.
But first a little history on why CockUI is necessary. Skip most of this if you have no interest in modding, coding or GZDoom in general!

When I first came on board with Selaco I started making interfaces (such as the Keypad and Upgrade screens) using another framework called ZForms. As far as I am aware it’s really the only publicly available interface framework for GZDoom and a number of other projects have used it in the past. Well, the more I used it the more I realized that it was doing some very, very inefficient things behind the scenes. ZForms absolutely chews through memory non stop while a menu is open due to the way it inefficiently creates and destroys hundreds and thousands of temporary objects (depending on complexity of the interface) EVERY FRAME.

ZScript is a garbage collected language (Garbage collection is basically a way of automatically managing memory by collecting discarded objects and later releasing them in batches). In GZDoom the garbage collector is not active while the game is paused. This means that when you have ZForms menu open, every frame you are eating more and more memory and none if it is getting released. When you finally close the menu all of those collected objects need to be destroyed and this would cause some incredible lag in the game for a few seconds, depending on how long you had the menu up.

Selaco being what it is demands a level of polish that you probably won’t see in most Doom mods or GZDoom standalone games. Because of this we hit a limit very very quickly as to what ZForms was capable of, and it required starting over from scratch.

That’s where CockUI comes in. CockUI is like ZForms in that it allows you to create graphical objects to put on screen, such as buttons, images, moving objects etc. without having to worry about how those objects are going to be rendered or configured. CockUI goes a few steps farther than that and creates a view-model system similar to what some might be familiar with when writing apps for tablets and phones. Like those systems, CockUI views can be anchored to other views and to the sides/scales/sizes of their parent view. This creates a flexible system that is largely independent of screen resolution and does not require the coder/modder to manually position objects every time something changes in code (such as screen resolution or view positioning etc.). So far CockUI performs fantastically quick and is not at all a memory hog. In fact while just rendering the interfaces there is almost no noticeable increase in memory usage.

Currently we support standard views such as buttons and tabs, images (including 9Slice), checkboxes, scrollbars, scrolling windows, horizontal and vertical auto-sizing layouts, draggable windows and dropdown menus.

A more complicated feature that is still in the works, is a built in animation system that will handle the task of moving, scaling and fading in/out views in a standard way so the coder has to do very little work to make convincing transitions or movements.
Many more features will be added in the coming months, hopefully making CockUI an extremely robust but lightweight framework. It is my hope that in the future (after the release of Selaco) more GZDoom projects will adopt CockUI as the standard. Everyone needs a little Cock in their UI.

(Editor node: I did not approve of that final line but I want to keep Cockatrice his artistic integrity intact)

Key Cards

While Selaco borrows many modern game design elements, we still have lots of retro influences. Obviously, colored keycards are a part of that. We have updated our keycards to fit our game world better. The previous cards got the job done, but their design was boring.
Here is a picture of the old cards we used:



Conclusion
Steady progress for the past 2 weeks. As you can probably tell most of these are revisions and updates towards existing assets. If a project is in the works for over 4 years, eventually things get old and no longer match a quality standard, which has increased drastically ever since we announced the game. It's immensely satisfying to get these out of the way because they stick out like a sore thumb whenever we test the game. Still more replacing to do, and I will absolutely share more of the updated assets as the time comes!
I love you all, see you in 2 weeks! ❤