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STELLAR JOCKEYS SEPTEMBER NEWSLETTER

Welcome to the Stellar Jockeys newsletter for September. Due to thisedition's length, you may need to click "View entire message" at the footto see everything.
Benjamin, Stellar Jockeys

Explaining Brigador's Art Pipeline
Last month we talked about the game engine's origins; this month we'regoing to expand on that to talk about two main things:
1. What it is you're actually seeing on your screen when you playBrigador and why
2. What we're changing about that for Brigador Killers which we willshow o here with a couple of screenshots[To best follow this entire section, please refer to the glossary ofcomputer graphics on Wikipedia in particular for words highlighted inbold.]
Oftentimes we get feedback about our rst game from players that wish
the camera could be moved to see di erent angles of the various modelsof the vehicles or buildings seen in the environment. We don't wish todisappoint those players but within the game engine this isn't possible
because what you are seeing rendered in the game is not a 3D model thatcan be rotated along any axis. Instead what you are seeing are sprites(more speci cally, you are looking at 2D quadrilateral shapes, and what
you are also looking at is a at, two-dimensional screen upon which is amoving image that is creating the illusion of depth through particulartechniques).
Ironically, how we even make these sprites is initially by creating 3Dmodels, typically through the process of kitbashing (this part of theprocess we won't go into, and we'll ignore animation rigging too, but feel
free to check out this timelapse video for the Pantry Boy vehicle fromseveral years ago that you may not have seen before) usually in 3DS Max.
The part we're concerned with comes after a 3D model has been

decimated, which is a process that reduces the size of the polygon mesh.
Once this happens we can give the mesh a texture map, which is thepoint where the model starts to more closely resemble the nal product.
Before we do that we'll need UV maps rst. A quick way to explain UV
mapping is to imagine an animal that has been skinned: our 3D model isthe animal and the skin that has been removed from it and can be laid at
is our UV map. The program we'll use to do this to our 3D model is called
Houdini.
To give our UV maps texture information what we then do is take themfrom Houdini along with the 3D model that was made in 3DS Max intoanother powerful program called Substance Painter that allows us todetail the materials of the model (for example, how rough a stone looks
or how glossy a metallic surface is). We don't have footage of us working
on Substance Painter but you can get a good idea of what it's capable ofjust by looking at this short o cial video that touches on a lot of what
we've just written.
At this point we have crafted the shape of our model, peeled o its skin,given it materials to make it resemble the nal object, and now we have totake it into a fourth program: Blender. Why we take the textured model
into Blender is to do three things. The rst is lighting, which we only do alittle of. Blender allows us to in uence the light-matter interaction, orhow 3D models are illuminated - a process that is often referred to asbaking. The second thing we do in addition to this is framing the 3Dmodel from an angle of our choosing - in other words we recreate thesame view frustrum that the player will see when playing Brigador. The
third and nal major thing in the Blender step is we also get depth bu er
information, which tells us how far away the model is with respect to thecamera's perspective.
However, we're nowhere near done. We said at the top that in the game
you were technically looking at sprites, not 3D models. The basic reasonfor that is because the game engine is told to display sprites, which in turnspoofs the appearance of 3D models in an apparent isometricperspective. How we get from 3D models to sprites is via open source
software - a version of which comes included with the Brigador Modkit &Map Editor called SJSpritePacker. What this does is takes the original 3D
model and (depending on the model's level of detail) captures up to 64
rotations of all that model's positions and animations at a particularresolution and creates not one but two sheets of sprites along with theXML data for the sheets. Below you will see the sprite sheets for theloyalist infantry NPC (AKA loy_foot_01), which if you own a copy of thegame you can nd in the folder Brigador\assets\units\loyalists\foot.

This is where things start to get complicated now that the models are
getting to the point where they will appear in Brigador's engine as sprites.
In addition, the purpose of the second sprite sheet is it provides z depth
information (more on that later). The XML data that's outputted for bothof these sprite sheets by SJSpritePacker is "pointer data" - this is
information that tells the sprites to face the correct direction but before it
can do so, it's fed into a .json le, which is the le type the game engine
reads for the majority of the game's data.
...Wait hold on - you might be asking - why did we go to all the trouble ofputting together 3D models, give them detailed materials for theirtextures, bake in some lighting and not just use those models in the gameinstead? This question was asked many years ago and was nallyanswered around the winter of 2012. While Brigador does have a 3D look,
it is not 3D. Games that are true 3D are extremely complicated because
once you go 3D, now you really are in a situation where the player canview a model from every conceivable angle in an environment. This is aconsiderable undertaking for any studio's engineers and technical artists
to deal with, who essentially have to gure out a way for models that areexported in a particular format to be understood by their game engine
and also be optimal (i.e. not grind to a crawl and run at single digit FPS). In
other words, everything we've talked about so far took ve di erent
programs alone: 3DS Max > Houdini > Substance Painter > Blender >SJSpritePacker - and that was only for 2D sprites. So, knowing this, andwith respect to the amount of time, people, money and energy it would
take to make a true 3D Brigador game, hopefully it's clearer now whatsome of the reasoning was for Brigador's look.
So Brigador's not true 3D and yet visually the game still looks impressive so what else is going on? Do you recall that second sprite sheet fromearlier, the one that looks black and white? Let's look at another one
that's only ever seen at one rotation - the orbital cannon (AKA battery_01
in the game data).

The variant of the orbital cannon on the left you can think of as thedi use version, while the variant on the right is the Z depth information
visualized as a grayscale image (where the brightness can be considered
as an indication of how close the model is to the camera). The purpose of
the latter is to inform the lighting of the Brigador engine against thesprite, which you can see in the nal version of the game itself.

Or to see it in motion, look at this gif from early 2016. What should beapparent from the above image and the gif is there is additional lighting
being displayed on the sprite itself. As it turns out, the Brigador engine isdoing two speci c things: deferred shading and with it dynamic lighting
and is what we've been building up to this entire newsletter.
We encourage you to read up a little on both to save space on this email,though we will point out here how even for the mid-2010s, applying
deferred shading and dynamic lighting to 3D models was a very expensive
thing to do in terms of hardware... except we are not using 3D models in
the engine! Remember: the sprites are fundamentally just twodimensional quadrilateral shapes - not polygons where every facet would
have to be lit properly and because we are able to decouple a scene's
geometry from its lighting, and because we have the depth informationfrom the Z-depth sprite sheet in the XML data, this e ectively allows us toput in a bunch of lights into the levels without causing major performance
hits and allows the engine to apply dynamic lighting to those sprites. Or,via a quick visual representantion, watch how the lights of this Touro froman early BK demo illuminates the surrounding building and pavement as itwalks past.
What you've read so far is an abridged version of what goes into what you
actually see on your screen when you play Brigador and why it looks theway it does. What we are changing about the visuals for our next game is
we are doubling the output resolution of all sprites from their 3Dmodels. In the next two images you will see the game's masthead TouroLoyalist mech. The image on the left is from Brigador with the camera set
to a 3x zoom, while the image on the right is the Touro at this new 2x
resolution at 1x zoom.

...And together in the same scene within a dev build of BK.

There's a lot to say about the "new" Touro (NB: both images are still based

on the same original Touro 3D model, it's just that one of them isrendered at a greater resolution than the other) but for now the mostobvious thing to point out is that at face value the delity of the image isvastly more detailed and the ligree details and greebles of the mech now
stand out much clearer than before.
We realize upon writing this out that this may not end requests frompeople asking for di erent camera angles, but at the very least with thisdevelopment to our content pipeline we hope players will be able tobetter enjoy a new level of detail that goes into each art asset in oursequel.

Community Spotlight
A short few entries this month. Mexquier made this out of brass while
they were machining...

...Unwelcome Brigador graced us with an excellent Doric...

...and MrUnimport has written a lore entry in the style of Cephei Chat eld
concerning the illusive "Man From Twitter".

The Man from Twitter
As intimate as I have become with this misbegotten server named
Stellar Jockeys, it is sometimes easy to forget about the wider internet.
Man from Twitter is a SNC recruit from Twitter, another social media
platform and the site of one of the early-model 'micro-blogging'experiments. A harsh and ruthless place, it is not unlike the forums
and imageboards from which we spawned, save for its crudity anddamnably character-constrained nature.
He once had a name, but the esoteric rituals in the warrior deathclique to which he belongs stripped him of any identity beyond
violence. His entire being is the posts he makes; to his people, afollowerless man is nobody, without a face, and the replies of thefallen enemy are collected as trophies. High-powered weaponry anddesperate struggle over daily items of discourse are the only things
the population of Twitter know.
Despite the brevity of his guttural speech, I cannot help but feel acertain a nity for this Man from Twitter. There is an immediacy to hisirony that I nd refreshing. Born of necessity, it remains unadorned by
the garish ourishes my compatriots are so fond of. It's a pity they
won't appreciate his artistry tonight.
-m.p.C.C

Want more? Go to the #becks_best channel on our Discord server.
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Next MonthIn October we hope to announce the winners of the Grave to the Ravemapping competition, which will be made part of Brigador's freelancemode in a Halloween update.

Stellar Jockeys

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