Morningstar -- Displaying Items on the Character Body

July was all about setting up visually what will be tackled in August. 

Back at the end of June I took a 3 week trip across the US while we updated Save Our Ship to 2.5 (which as a huge undertaking, and lasted 6 weeks thanks to RimWorld 1.3 swamping us with issues and breakages, and needing to redo some code from scratch.) That didn't leave a lot of time for Morningstar work, but Allegra carried the torch with excellent art on the Scabbards, Quivers, and updating Backpacks, along with some concepts for other items.

Each of our factions call for 4 unique pieces of art, and usually they have a 5th "generic" art that works for any faction. In gameplay, this translates to certain factions getting a mood boost from wearing their cultural items, and the opposite from seeing that of their enemy. You'll want to wear appropriate attire to negotiations to help your speech and persuasion with that group, as characters rank up with a faction, they typically unlock greater wealth and thus better armor and gear from that group. 

Quivers and Scabbards show the character's number of arrows and whether or not they have a sword (or knife or gun.) 

Holstering a weapon will mean a character is in their "run" mode, which is good for crossing a map quickly and exploring. When the weapon is out, they are in "walk" mode and slow down for easier combat (doubletap & hold W to sprint forward in combat). 

All these have color maps with 3 color slots, to allow art to be one solid color, or up to 3 additional colors & materials.  

Each character will have a few groups of images for their Shield slot, Back slot, Head slot, and Body. Together those four will bob up and down independently in a little walk/run cycle that gives their movements a slightly more dynamic appearance and communicates their intention to move better. 

They also have a final layer for Decals on the torso and head, which include Arrows, to show if they have an arrow sticking out of them, and other wounds & effects. 

Displaying all the art on dozens of characters with 8 directions would be a major pain for memory and take a lot of time to render every frame, if we hadn't invested significant time in a rapid sprite-baker which quickly opens up a character's hierarchy of layers and bakes these alpha masked PNGs to a single group of images. We will probably move the format of the images to another, faster format later, and upgrade to the burst compiler for this job later on. That will ensure that, if a big event changes clothes and weapons on many characters at once, then there won't be any significant hitching or hangs.

August will be all about making up for lost time in June & July after the SOS2.5 final update.

The good news is, SOS's update also tested our implementation of the Symbol system, which is how we assign items their unique ID, display name, color mask info, quality and material types, value, etc. Symbol will be used to provide incredible performance gains in load times compared to similar games with so many modular items. 

Symbol will take the XML files readable by a human (us devs future modders) and serialize them at runtime into a single big binary readable quickly by the engine. That is then saved until the list changes. This loads the game in mere seconds, lightning fast, skipping the 30-60 second load times of similar games, and only needs to re-serialize the binary if mods are added or removed from the game. 

The added benefit here is that these binaries are fairly small, and can be saved with your saved games. If you change mods and then try going back to an old save, it will reset your mods to that load order automatically without any fuss. (So long as data like art files haven't been deleted from the drive, in which case it will have missing textures.) 

All these early improvements and safeguards will add up to a performant game that hold up under extreme conditions, avoiding the pitfalls of mod-heavy games like it. 

It's not exactly visually stunning, but it needs to be done long before we can release game-play footage. With any luck, that will be happening soon as we can now use the frameworks Symbol and the Char Renderer provide to start making the game visually click together.