Weekly Update – 9/30/2018 Sep 30 - Tosh

Hey everyone, this week we’ll be doing things a bit different than you’ve come to expect. We’ll be talking more about the technical side of game development, showing some smaller and work in progress models, as well as showing off all the amazing art you share with us over on our Discord. If you haven’t, you should join that by the way… the Discord… do it...

Take Our "Jobs"... If You Dare

Are you a young, talented developer looking to... make some cool Halo stuff?! Well then do I have a place for you! Right here… seriously… apply... please! I won’t lie to you though, we don’t have cookies. Only beans.

Join the i01 Team

What are you doing? Why haven’t you pushed the shiny button yet?!

Praz Attack

Meat's back on the menu boys! We may not have cookies, but beans are apparently enough to get some very talented people to join our team! Praz is the newest addition to my collection to the team here. He’s a fantastic level designer, and lighting/VFX Artist here to bring you some of the amazing maps you've come to love as well as some new ones you've yet to see.

David “Praz” has been doing at least some form of game development and modding as far back as the 90's. He started with Quake 2, and then went onto Source Engine sometime later. You may already know Praz from the large variety of projects he’s been part of ranging from The Phantom Menace TC, Incoming, and Orion to Black Mesa and Firearms. When you’ve been making games for nearly a decade on Source, Unreal, and Unity you tend to get around a lot and we couldn’t be luckier to have him.

We’re really looking forward to showing off all the great maps he makes. But remember, if you dislike any of them for any reason whatsoever, It's Bean’s fault.

All The, Small Things

True care truth brings. I'll take.. one lift, your ride.. best trip. Always... I know… you'll be at my show, watching, waiting... commiserating Coughs Sorry about that, I don’t know what came over me. Someone somewhere once said, “all good things come in small packages.” I don’t know if that’s always the case but it definitely is here.

Bitterbones, one of our 3D Artists here, was kind enough to make us some quality lighting. Now we’ll never have to kill each other in the dark ever again! Unless that’s your thing I guess...

If lamps aren’t your thing, maybe keypads are! Joris, another 3D Artist here, is working on those truly iconic Halo keypads that we all loved, and sometimes hated… don’t ask.

I know these may not be the mind-blowing models you’ve come to expect within these Weekly Updates, but they are a lot of work, and this is just the first step in showing you more work-in-progress pieces in the future.

Kendall's Ramblings... The Return

We're constantly monitoring feedback here and one key point of interest was having us go into the technical side of things more. This week I've invited Kendall, a programmer here on Installation 01, to talk more about the nitty gritty of the engine and systems we use and why.

Kendall: "Hello everyone! So, I am going to make things easier to read under a probably over-simplified telescope and be eaten alive for inaccuracies. But I’d like to thank you for reading my rambling, and hopefully learning something new!

Recently Unity Technologies (the creators of Unity), the game-engine we’re using, released an experimental package called the “Job System” and it utilizes an Entity-Component-System (ECS) model. Which is really cool! But you’re probably asking “Why do I care? Just release the game already!”

Good question, Citizen! It’s because the way we are required to write code in a certain way, the memory needed to be “fetched” for calculations is laid out next to each other rather than scattered throughout memory. This incredibly speeds up the process of doing things. That is, without multithreading. With multithreading, we can now get all the data quicker and manipulate many different “Jobs” across different threads. That is where the performance gain really comes from.

Imagine baking a cake and the following: You need to get the cake mix out of the pantry, get the bowl to mix it in, the eggs, milk, and mayonnaise then mix it. Well instead of doing it all yourself, you have some other people to grab those for you and throw them in the bowl! While someone feeds you mayonnaise so you don’t start eating the cake mix. Great snack.

But what if you then had all the ingredients lined up alongside the bowl? Well, you would make that cake batter very quickly in comparison to having to go find everything.

But what if the ingredients were lined up and people poured them in as you mixed? Even faster!

While there are also issues like people waiting on each other before they could dump their ingredient in (race conditions), Unity is so nice to take care of these issues and many others for us! It takes away a whole big lump of unmixed batter always left alongside the glass of the bowl and it just never gets there. It perfectly mixes.

It's an awesome system and we are trying to stay with the constant updates. Especially if the benefit is very obvious and worth it in the long run. So if there is anything to take away from the rambling: Eat your mayonnaise."

Just want to throw it out there, I don’t recommend eating mayonnaise as a snack.

Community Spotlight

As you all know, you’re great, and with that comes some amazing Artists among you. Over on our Discord, we provide a place for you all to come together, share, provide feedback, enjoy each other's work, and company. So I wanted to take a moment to really highlight the fantastic art you all do, and share it with those of you who may not know.

Art by AssaultCommand#6891, @__Caspar__ on Twitter

Art by Avixxe#5371, @stephen_boe on Instagram and @saboe627 on Twitter.

Art by ThePhxRises#4669, ThePhxRises on DeviantArt.

Art by Rythaze#8229, @Rythayze on Twitter

Art by Iowa#8653

"Art" by Bartley#3992

As you can see, truly all amazing artists… well… almost all. Be sure to come on over, share your art, and join the conversation at Discord!

Blame Bean

See that smug look on his face? You might think that’s because of our feature in GamesMaster. But it’s not, it’s because he just got done deleting every single asset within Installation 01 all because people asked when It’s going to be released. Truly evil.

That wraps it up for this week, I can’t thank you all enough for tuning in week after week as we show you all the cool things that are being made, all the opportunities we’ve been given, and the tremendous amount of support you show us, and our game. Without you, we wouldn’t be here. We understand that, and we love you. See you all next week!

Tosh