Night Dive Twitch Streams

[66474377e5b91Synaesthesia]

Haha, when I sighed when someone asked me what my opinion of BioShock was, my first thought was "I've been banned from TTLG.com for saying this before." I truly love the art and visual direction of the game. Everything else about it feels like a very hollow version of Shock 2 and it depresses me greatly.

[66474377e5d09icemann]

Chris's latest stream was early enough for me to make it. I happened to ask him about the Bioshock games, and he quite liked the first two and disliked Infinite due to its linearity.

[66474377e5e94sgupta]

It's difficult for me to be unbiased about BioShock vs. System Shock because of my clear preferences for certain themes.

I enjoyed it for what it was (only played 1), and to some degree I liked the environment, but I just can't get as excited about the atmosphere/story as I just prefer futuristic and cyberpunk themes in general, especially when involving things like AI.

That said, I feel Prey was closer to System Shock than BioShock ever was.  (But it checked some of my theme boxes better as well.)

[66474377e5f77icemann]

I remember enjoying Bioshock 2 the most. Especially the DLC. I'll have to play the first two games again at some point.

[66474377e616dsgupta]

09/5/18 Dev Stream w/ Chris (Karlee & Mathilde also present)

* More work on the brown door.  This time he works on UV and texturing.

* Q: Will real-time ray tracing be implemented?  A: They'd like to, but only if it ends up being a nvidia-supported feature in Unreal 4 not requiring any plugins.  They think it's a cool technology.

* He talks a bit about showing off his work on the bulkhead door to Steve.  I could be mistaken, but I think this is a door we haven't seen yet?  (Thinking the big doublewide silver-blue ones after the first few rooms of medical?)

* Q: Will these doors all make it into Adventure Alpha?  A: Probably so.

* Most of the stream is talk about various games and just fun discussion, not really related to System Shock.

* It's interesting watching Chris run into various issues (things not baking properly, etc.) and figure out why something isn't working as intended.

* As someone asked about the elevator door, it was already created and shown.  (Looks amazing, though I still hope there's a gold version on at least executive!  I miss the gold a bit ^.^)

* Door's looking really great by the end.

[66474377e626aicemann]

Much of the off topic talk was about the old school Resident Evil and Silent Hill games + chat on old horror movies. Went on for quite a bit and made for good convo.

[66474377e63abZylonBane]

The elevator door animation is ridiculous. Once again it's "cool" over being even remotely realistic.

[66474377e64b8Synaesthesia]

System Shock itself isn't particularly realistic, nor is the art style we're using. Sometimes it's OK for things to look cool.

[66474377e6edaunn_atropos]

Dev - System Shock - Jonathan Holmes - 08.16.2018

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCDaUHchHGQ

Jonathan Holmes back for another Dev stream!

notes by sgupta
* Work on Medical & Storage, especially lighting & texturing
* The blood decals (Stay Away) aren't in yet, but should be relatively soon.
* Things are moving along a little bit faster than expected.  Hopefully a good bit done for Adventure Alpha.
* Jonathan is working on stuff Chris has also worked on, so there are sort of two versions.  In Jonathan's case, he's modernizing the original textures.
* He shows working on some of those old textures to get them reworked for the new build.
* Nightdive is committed to taking their time and making this the best game it can be, even if it takes a little extra time.
* As touched on by Daniel a few times, doors have zero width in the original.
* The remake will have the same texture size all throughout, something that isn't always true of the original.
* The blue stuff on medical he thinks is padded foam.  I never thought of it like that, but it sort of makes sense for medical.  =oP
* He likes the contrast between the blue and orange when heading down to storage.
* The storage rooms insulation he's trying to make shinier.
* He wants to add lightning to the force bridges to make them look a bit more believable.
* He continues to actively fix and change things he thought were designed oddly/didn't make sense.
* Q: Will elevators close when you select a floor?  He thinks so.

Overall a very cool stream showing a lot and talking a lot about art and design choices. 

notes by iceman

* Work on texturing and lighting Medical
* Some nice lighting added already
* Low poly version of the surgical cart is now in
* He shows an example of him working with an original SS1 texture to get it to work in their game.
* A fair bit of attention to detail to match that of the original game going with with lighting levels. So say you had 4 lights and only 2 were still at full strength then that's the match they go for and so on.
* A work in progress model for the force bridges is now in-game
* Many changes made to the storage level where there was far too much overuse of lights in walls and floors
* Will the elevator doors close once you select a floor (like in the original) - Not sure at this point. Should be.

---
Dev - System Shock - Chris Mansell - 08.16.2018

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fu-VHJyKI-U

Thursday dev stream w/ Chris Mansell.

notes by sgupta
08.16.18 Dev Stream w/ Chris (Karlee present with Stephen joining in the last hour or so)

* Blender modeling stream turning the proxy object for audio logs into the real deal.

* He plans to do the entire thing start to finish on stream, including texturing (though it might take multiple streams).

* He emphasized how they're using the pixellized art style for everything and making assets so that they're consistent accross the world.

* Most of this he's pretty focused as he needs to be moreso here than with fleshing out levels.  Some discussion of geometry and what you can and can't do (and what Blender can handle that other programs can't as well, like engons).

* Q: How many maps will this have?  A: This will be made of a base color map, normal map, material parameters, and a colored emissive.  The alpha in the emissive will be used to have different colors for different audio logs.

* Q: What's the most important thing he wishes he knew about game development before getting into it?  A: Sometimes it feels like you're getting nowhere, but keep working at it hard enough and you'll realize someday your stuff is professional level and you're getting noticed.

* Someone in chat wants SHODAN to be hot in the remake.  =oP

* Someone suggested the audio log display a waveform as something plays (either on it or on the HUD).  Chris is going to ask a programmer how hard that would be to implement.

* Q: Favorite engine to work with?  A: Engine doesn't matter as much as performance specs you're creating the objects for.  He likes both.  He likes the physics tools in Unreal.

* Q: Doesn't Unity make it harder to make anything look like anything?  A: No, actually Unity is more open pipeline-wise to do more things, but it takes more coding to do it.

* Q: Are the stages of item creation: Concept, Initial Art, Modeling, Shading, Animating?  A: Pretty close, but it depends on the team.  Sometimes there are early passes with animation earlier.

* Stephen is a fan of the waveform for when audio plays.  There was a version in Unity but it didn't reflect the actual sound.

* The asset he's working is a slimmed down version of a prop previously made, but this one fits better with the art style.

* After modeling, he began UV wrapping.

* Q: Who does user interface objects like buttons for doors, etc.?  A: It's a combined effort, but they try to use a universal language for the buttons - ie., the player always knows a door button when they see one and don't have to think too much about it (cohesiveness like color).

* Q: Do they have parties after work together or keep work and life separate?  A: They all prettymuch work remotely, so it's not really accurate.  But in Karlee and Stephen's last job, they had things like bars and snacks and meals and would stay there a lot.

* He decided to keep on going and texture too since he was on a roll.

* Stephen had some discussion about IP's (expensive ones) and was floating the idea of doing crowdfunding to acquire those IP's.  They would release the source code if they did.

* Q: Could System Shock be adapted to a movie?  A: Stephen thinks it could be - he'd want to see it all first person like Hardcore Henry.  In the right hands, it could be amazing.

* Stream finishes up with it completely colored and textured and a shot in-world on the floor showcasing the pixellated style.  The top also glows and flashes, and it's slightly bigger than a Walkman.  Looks awesome!

There was also a stream from IndieGameBusiness that interviews Larry Kuperman about the company in general, including System Shock.  I won't summarize that here, but it's good stuff and worth a watch if you like the business end of things:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/298151905

---
notes by iceman
* Chris's first stream in several months.
* Several sections of this stream got muted due to copyrighted music being present.
* Lots of long silences in this one. This is one to have running whilst your doing something else.
* Chris mentioned that they may have the audio logs in different colors.     - Not a fan of that.
* Stephen mentioned he'd like to try crowdfunding to acquire some Interplay IP's.
* Some nice coloring styles for the audio logs showed off by the end of the stream.

[66474377e7390ZylonBane]

System Shock itself isn't particularly realistic, nor is the art style we're using. Sometimes it's OK for things to look cool.

Verisimilitude is vital to an immersive sim. Make the real-world things realistic so you conserve players' willing suspension of disbelief for the things that have to be unrealistic. Nobody in their right mind would design, let alone set foot inside, an elevator with a door that bounced around like that. It looks cartoonishly absurd.

I'm reminded of Cyberblutch's early versions of his excellent SS2 AI model upgrade mod. He put claws on everything. Like, 6-inch Nosferatu claws. Because claws are COOL. This is apparently what happens when you have young designers with talent but an aesthetic sense courtesy of Rob Liefeld and Mountain Dew commercials. It took much feedback from the community to talk him down from the claws (he never did remove the giant bare supermodel breasts on the Midwife model though). So I feel like we're staring down the same issue again here. There are many opportunities for cool things in Citadel Station, but something as mundane as elevator doors shouldn't be one of them. This is a place where people worked, not a theme park. Doors should just be doors.

Anyone know if footage of the elevator door has made it to YouTube yet? Or is it still Twitch-only? I'd like to be able to link to what I'm talking about here.

[66474377e758csgupta]

You can see the door animated in the August KS update: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1598858095/system-shock/posts/2262497

Personally?  I really dig it.  There are a LOT of choices in System Shock that aren't practical.  Even the color scheme isn't what I'd consider practical (not even mentioning the level layout), which is part of the reason I love it - the cyberpunk vibe it elicits.  This door seems perfectly suited to something I can see Tri-Op coming up with, and it's mechanisms make sense to me even though they're fairly complicated for a door.  But your mileage may vary; art style is always subjective, and I will say this door does depart quite a bit from the original; I just happen to think it's a pretty cool departure myself.   

[66474377e772aicemann]

Jonathan - 07.09.18

* I didn't get an email about this video oddly. I can see another video from Jonathan for this same date in the video list. May be a duplicate video. Will check after. Video is incorrectly labelled as being for "Don't Starve".
* Further work on the reactor level
* For a long time there are no questions at all from viewers. So it's all just him working on the level. He gets lost quite a bit around one particular section, that I remember always getting lost in.
* Will there be mantling and advanced movement - (This one got asked in an earlier stream) - Should be, but that's really a question for the programmers.
* Some disappointment by viewers that the source port only works in Windows and is only available via the Steam build and not the GOG one.
* And it turns out there's 2 videos as it got cut off. video 2 only goes for 4 minutes. Something funky is up with the second video as for me you never see anything move. It's just that first video frame for the 4 minutes. Reloading the video fixed it.

[66474377e7829Synaesthesia]

Sorry about the stream last night. Spectrum is having some issues in my area and it's manifesting as poor ping and dropped streams.

[66474377e7c56ZylonBane]

You can see the door animated in the August KS update: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1598858095/system-shock/posts/2262497

Thanks. So here's what I've been talking about:

Yeah, it has a silly number of moving parts, but whatever, that's fine. What kills it for me though is the mid-slide bounces. That makes no damn sense. The door parts are presumably moving on fixed tracks, so what would be causing that? It makes the whole thing feel like it's powered by ropes and pulleys. The design is essentially fighting against itself. It looks sleek and high-tech, but in motion... at best it looks cheap and clunky. At worst it looks like the door is malfunctioning. If all the door part transitions were replaced with straight ease in-out tweens, this would look ten times better.

Now for the other door animation shown so far...

As an animation, I like this. It's realistic and a sensible extrapolation of the original texture. But from a gameplay standpoint, it's too long. Over the course of a game of SS1, the player is going to be opening lots and lots and LOTS of doors, and any animation, no matter how cool it seems at first, is going to get old real fast if it slows the player down. Most room doors should open in like half a second. This animation forces the player to stare and wait for at least that long before the door even starts opening. That's not good.

[66474377e7f58JDoran]

I think Bioshock 1 and especially 2 are great games., when viewed simply as games on their own. When you view them as part of the Shock franchise, then they are undeniably dumbed down, heavily copied but very simplified clones of System Shock 2, that can't hope to please anyone who wants the complexity of System Shock's gaming mechanics. But if you want a first person shooter, then the first two Bioshock games are well worth playing. Bioshock: Infinite isn't a bad game either, but I personally think that gameplay-wise it is a step down from the first two, despite it's often fantastic atmosphere.

I should add though, that not only are the Bioshocks very disappointing as System Shock (spiritual) follow ups, it's actually pretty difficult to believe that Bioshock's makers even wanted to make a System Shock style game, given the glaring differences in the atmosphere of the two games, and their intended audiences. I mean, System Shock 2, for example, has a constant air of danger and loneliness, and deliberately tries to keep ammunition at a premium, though it does fail as the game goes on. Bioshock does seem like it's aimed at a less thoughtful, more trigger-happy audience, especially judging by the way ammunition is left lying about *everywhere*, no matter how unlikely a spot it would otherwise be to find ammunition (in a bath, in the kitchen, on a restaurant table, where ever). Plus in Bioshock you never are short of money - just the opposite, your wallet soon fills up and you end up buying stuff you don't want from the ammunition or general supplies vending machine just to clear space in your wallet for the money you've just found in a waster bin.

You NEVER think, when playing a Bioshock game, "Can I get away with using my wrench here, to save ammunition?", because the Bioshocks are first person shooters, not FPS/RPG games, and as in most FPSs, ammunition is never a real problem. That's fine for most people, but for anyone who hoped (eleven years ago now, how time files( Bioshock would be System Shock 3, it was a huge disappointment.

[66474377e81c7icemann]

Team stream - 08.09.18

* More on playing through SS1 on difficulty 1, starting from the beginning of level 2.
* Daniel is not a fan of the ambush that happens the second you open the elevator door.    - I quite like it. It's quite originally, and makes for a great tense moment in the game. SS1 as a whole has some great ambushes, which SS2 lacks (other than the spider ambush).
* Discussion on changing the Zero G Mutants into something more like a moving ooze.
* Stephen thinks the berserk patches are something that could be trimmed out of the game as barely anyone uses them.  Matt thinks they should stay in to allow people to play the game the way they want  - I'd prefer they stay in, even though I never use them either, but I'm sure there are people out there that do.
* Lots of proposals for changes to rooms, and then counter arguments against.
* Lots of debate on rooms with no discernible purpose. Chris and Matt argue that that is how things are in real life, and in immersive sim games they serve the purpose of making areas look more believable.
* Daniel dislikes that some corpses are not able to destroyed via the sparc gun, if they have an important item on them.     - Well Daniel that's for a specific reason. It's to not create a "Dead man walking scenario" where the player gets themself into a unwinnable state where they can't progress in the game, due to destroying a key item.
* The consensus is that the new cyberspace style will be more like Forsaken   - I'm cool with that.

[66474377e83a8sgupta]

As far as the doors, I really think it's a case of different strokes for different folks.  Things like this tend to come down to personal taste.

Regarding the elevator door, I actually really like that the animation has some mildly quirky behavior.  For me, it echoes real elevator oddities (as sometimes those doors do act strangely), and needlessly complex + sleek and just a little clunky seems very TriOp to me.

In regards to the second door, I like it in suspenseful or horror games when doors take a second or two to open.  Yes, that's a few extra seconds, but System Shock was never extremely fast-paced (at least compared to something like Doom or Wolfenstein), and for me, the anxiety of wondering what's behind that door as it cycles open adds more than it subtracts.  (Plus, some doors are going to be faster than others I'd imagine - it make sense that one with a rotary lock like that one take a bit longer.)

I certainly respect your opinion and can see where you're coming from tho'.  These are both situations where mileage may vary and people are bound to have differing opinions I think.

[66474377e8583sgupta]

09/06/18 Dev Stream w/ Jonathan (& Karlee; Stephen joins a little more than halfway through)

* Working on the Reactor level.

* He's using textures and such to try to add more character to certain rooms he felt looked too bland using the 100% original design. 

* He's also using some TriOp wall icons from the original (but never used).

* Sometimes he needs to make some geometry changes to get textures to place correctly.

* He shows off a bit of the way reflection capture works.

* Q. Does this use static or dynamic lighting?  A. Both. 

* Q. Do both types cast shadows?  B. Yes and no.  He shows examples.

* Lots of talk about Star Trek movies, Star Wars, general games, and random stuff late in the stream.

* He finished a lot of main hallways and such this stream, so some nice progress.

* KickStarter update was posted soon after this.

[66474377e873aJosiahJack]

Elevator door: simple (read cheaper) pneumatic cylinders will destroy their seals if allowed to fully extend at full speed.  Typically for any high-use cylinder, a slowdown setup will be added using a prox and a timing relay to reduce the airflow on the 'metering-out' side of the cylinder's air circuit.  This is why air cylinders have a "hiccup" close to the end of stroke to prevent seal wear and eventual slamming which would destroy the door.   In tjis example, the prox is set too close to start instead of near the end of close.  - voice of experience

[66474377e8851ZylonBane]

And most elevator doors don't even use pneumatics, they use electric motors. So there's literally no in-world justification for the doors to be thrashing like they are in that video. It's the future, people haven't forgotten how to make smoothly-opening doors.

[66474377e8953icemann]

[66474377e8d9bsgupta]

09/07/18 Dev Stream w/ Entire Team (Everyone I think)

(I'm watched some of the stream while exercising, so some of this is from memory - apologies if I forget anything).

* Starts out with the beginning of Level 2 (Research)

* They're considering having the mutants that are in front of the elevator when the doors open come around a corner and through the hallway instead.

* There's a discussion of what patches people use and whether or not they should keep them all.

* A bit of discussion on the more useless weapons like the riot gun and stun gun.  Discussion of possibility of a way to progress through non-lethally.

* They may have Zero-G mutants crawling on the geometry of levels.

* They may add docking ports for some of the robots and have them leave the docking port when they detect you.  They'd like more sensical respawn points (that make sense in the world) in general.

* They may change paper notes to PDAs.

* They're considering doing things like having the Sparq gun charge certain electronic adversaries instead of hurting them.

* They're leaning towards keeping rooms with nothing in them or traps (ie. lots of radiation) with very little help to the player. 

* There's a talk about the On-Line help system.  Not clear if they're going to keep it.  They are going to be adding things to the map like power stations, med beds, etc.; at least on the easier difficulty levels.

* They missed the red doors in their list of doors.  So many doors.  They're getting a bit sick of doing doors and looking forward to working on other things.

* They're considering doing a game trailer featuring just all the doors...so many doors... =oP

* Sparks from dangling wires now hurt you in the game, which didn't happen in the original.

* There will be screens of real-time views of the station with things like the shields up, etc., instead of the prerendered cutscenes in the original.

* Discussion of the cameras you can view vs. SHODAN's "eyes".

* They get the shields up and fire the laser, showing off much of Reactor Level and going to Level 3.

* When you pick up a weapon and go to put it in your inventory, you get a nice bigger side profile look at it.  Chris wants pictures of those to help redesign 'em.

* The laser rapier is the most OP weapon in a game and can kill most things in one hit.  That may get tweaked.  It uses energy now, so they could make it use more.

* A bunch of traps are shown.  Radiation traps, SHODAN's "Death Machine" room, some other ambushes and other traps like an energy station that shocks you - they look at different ways of looking at it; some traps are pretty unavoidable (which I like as it makes SHODAN feel smarter than the player).

* Animation in the remake will be smooth, but there will be parts that move in sections (one bit at a time) to invoke the same feeling as the original game.

* Another elevator door they didn't notice.  =oP  Chris seems...upset.  ^.^

* They run into a cyborg that doesn't attack them.  Daniel notes there are some plant monsters on one of the levels (I think he said 6) that aren't hostile too.

* They want to expand rooms like the room with many monitors of SHODAN's face.

* They really like the way the levels feel real in that there is some backtracking and lots of looping back on areas and areas that connect with other areas in multiple ways without many real dead ends.

* You can make your own notes on the automap if you like.  One of those cool little things you can do.  Those things show on the minimap too.  They want to do that and think they can do cool effects in the UI for it.

[66474377e8ec0icemann]

I think the help system should stay in. Yes its not in SS2 but who cares. SS1 had its own set of things that made it just as awesome. Leaving it in (just as with berzerk patches) gives players choice to play the game they want. That is the nature of an immersive sim (of choice in how to play).

[66474377e8fc6sgupta]

Yeah, I agree with you on that one.  I like on-line help as well as the patches.  I put a lot of my thoughts on this stuff in the feedback channel on the Discord - I tried to just stick with what was said here.