Line Of Fire | Free-To-Play

Line Of Fire - Remix Games - 2014
The free to play tactical shooter, update and progress thread.

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New thread currently managed by Christian Bosselmann, please forward inquiries to "Boomsma1995" or post them below.
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29/6/14



Update notes: one of these is around a month old, if you follow us on Facebook you may have seen this content already. ​

 

1/7/14​

Some of you may know the vary talented William Germany, a technical artist with incredible creativity in his shaders and code. His techniques are highly complex and the end result never fails to look amazing:

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From here William is working hard to add in volumetric clouds which will feature heavily in large, open environments.

 

Great to finally see you guys here on the forums and good luck on making Line of Fire

You should put more info about the game on the first post, a few more images and some videos so everyone can see what and how the game is and is going to be.

The game looks very promising and looking forward for future updates

 

Hi there Eskovas,
good to hear from you.

We've been off the radar for a while now mainly because nobody in the team really has time to keep our channels updated but I've started this little thread in order to show off some of the more obscure work (behind the scenes stuff) without having to explain the ins-and-outs to the general public. I'm looking at writing a full explanation of the project later this week but I first want to work out what I should and shouldn't mention (yet).

We'd like to see people getting engaged in the development process by suggesting their techniques and asking about ours. Its a huge project so the more brilliant minds on it the better.

Cheers,
Christian

 

9/7/14​

Although a little low resolution you get the general idea, things are coming together for a big publication, stay tuned!

 

Looks nice.

 

looks dope indeed looking forward to seeing more

 

22/7/14​

 

14/8/14​

 

Beautiful!!! :] I love this game, you guys bring a whole new light to unity's power, and the abilities of indie developers. Keep up the great work!

 

**APPLICATIONS NOW CLOSED, THANK YOU**​

Remix is looking for new member(s) of the team!

If you fancy yourself a creative and diligent 3D artist then why not see if you've got what it takes. We're looking for new and upcoming talent and this is an excellent way to get your work front-and-center in a large scale title. Should you be willing to accept the challenge then you must sit a short examination with which we will gain an understanding of your skills and ingenuity. Provided you pass this test you will take up a contracted off-site position with the team. During your time with use you will be required to:

- Work consistently and passionately on a range of environment art, primarily props and other small items used in set dressing. Generally these will be inorganic (man made) items, but are not limited to them.
- Conduct yourself in a mature and respectful manner, there's no room for ego or inappropriate behavior.
- Be committed to the project in all aspects.
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That said you'll be invited (as all team members are) to suggest ideas and discuss aspects of the title, your voice has a much weight as ours, even the guys who've been working here for 3+ years. Generally we require applicants to use programs such as 3Ds Max/Maya, Photoshop, Mudbox/Zbrush (you may use whichever technique serves you best as long as the results are up to scratch). These are industry standard applications and even though you are not required to use them, its highly recommended.
Prerequisites:

- Applicants MUST have extensive experience in 3D art, you'll be doing everything from the high poly sculpts/HS modeling to baking the maps and texturing. We can't afford to be teaching you as we go so please bare it in mind.
- Applicants MUST work well under time pressure.
- Applicants MUST be willing to sign and consent to a legally binding contract.
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If you've read the above and are willing to come aboard then please read this document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1O4VNA7oJz0pCqI8OCyfnYZ_cQGelKTgKAV8uiPWZxaA/
It contains the next step in your journey to getting your work on the front page of the gaming world.
See you there!​

If you have any questions regarding the position please contact me on skype: "Bosselmannc"

 

Game looks fantastic, as a big FPS and FPS F2P player, this looks like one of the best F2P FPS games out there so far. The command menu you showed in update 5 looks awesome.

My only critique is the game feels to fast-paced, like CoD. I feel like if the game forced you to play slower, like Americas Army 3, you could completely change how the game is played. Players would be forced to think about their actions before taking them, and be more encouraged to work as a team.

Either way, A+ job

 

I'd like to make a suggestion: I saw in a gameplay video of the unreleased home front a live attachment switching system.
that would maybe a really cool addition to your game

 

@LazyPoet91
Sounds like a cool idea. We've got lots planned, be sure to keep an ear out.

 

We reached 2k likes!

First off it's been a over two months since our last status update so we'd like to apologize for that and let everyone know we've been working hard as usual to get things ready for the next steps. Secondly, from all the team a huge huge "Thank you", we reached 2k 'likes' last night which means the world to us, we wouldn't have gotten this far without the support and encouragement you all give us.
As we move towards the end of 2014 we're making an effort to post more regularly, especially as progress has been much faster in recent weeks as we've got lots of new content to show you. In addition to this, we're announcing the return of the "Dev Days" series in which you can join a live stream of us working. It might be a few weeks until we can organize it properly but the next episode should be Chris working in the editor on one of the new levels. You can join in on the twitch stream via a link we will provide.
In addition to all this another thank you for all the applications for the new artist position we detailed previously. Ivan Nestorov a highly creative and hard working artist is officially our newest member, you can check out his portfolio here: http://nestorov.se/​

 

Dev Days Livestream!

Join Chris and Mike this weekend on Twitch.tv as they discuss progress and work on various aspects of the game. We'll be answering questions so don't miss out!

Details: Saturday, 22 November at 8:00:00 p.m. PST
Link: http://www.twitch.tv/remix_games​

 

William, technical artist here at Remix, has been finalizing the SSR and glass refraction shaders. All reflective surfaces will mirror scene objects in real time at a very small cost in performance. The below image is not wholly representative of the final tech as the system is still incomplete. Until next time, Chris.

 

Is there a video of the live stream available?

 

Hi there,
Unfortunately Twitch removes broadcasts older than 2 weeks, keep an eye on our FB page fore the next one, should be coming soon.

 

Its been months since our last update, sincere apologies for that. A lot has changed and moved forward in that time. Richard has tightened up the player movement and the server-side issues we encountered beforehand, in addition the final remaining weapons (of the initial batch) are practically complete, will be showing that off here soon. We came up with a few simple test levels as we await the preproduction for the actual levels themselves so most of our environment art is outdated or place-holder only. William has completed what we're almost sure is the worlds fastest AO which he's rightly very proud of, from here he'll be finishing our real-time reflection solution and volumetric clouds as well as, what he's dubbed "HDR 3.0", a big step forward from the HDR solution currently in Unity.
The player models (some of which you can see below) are in need of some love, that'll come soon, in the mean time we've done some basic colour changes to the base material to distinguish teams.
Until next time!

 

Some of the weapon mockups are here. Keep in mind none of these are representative of final product(s) in any way, for those who aren't familiar with the process we do a bunch of preproduction before the 3D process begins, allowing the artists to cherrypick the features they like best.

 

This looks stunning!
What software do you use/recommend to use for 3D modelling? I'm quite new in the branch but got some very simple beginner skills

 

Hi Sykoo,
We use a combination of 3Ds MAX, Zbrush, Mudbox the vast majority of the time. Sometimes tools like Google Sketchup come in handy for rapid prototyping. I'd recommend MAX for the basics as it covers most of what you'll probably need, hard-surface and so on, on the other hand Zbrush is ideal for organic sculpting, characters, rocks and so on. Mudbox is just a simplified version of Zbrush really.
On a more personal note I'm a big fan of your platformer LENS, really love aesthetic, keep it up.

 

Hey! Thank you very much. I've used Blender until now and I still got some troubles with texturing, whenever I set a texture to my model inside of Unity, the texture gets all blurry. I'll try MAX as you said Thank you very much for your suggestions, I'll make sure to check out all of them before I decide which one to go with

 

Just a quick update. Here's the new Shield Module mockup. As per usual please remember none of this is final. Its just for visualising what these objects might look like. The Aegis PDS16.

 

I've just seen the last update on youtube and it's awesome I love the dead guy at 12:04 that slides to infinity and beyond xD

Keep up the good work!

 

Just a quick PSA guys, our Facebook URL has changed to: https://www.facebook.com/lineoffiregame
So update your bookmarks, cheers.

 

This looks awesome! Was the high poly model done in a sculpting software or is it all 3DS Max? Either way, tons of work put into this. Looks great.

 

Hi @ImAldu, thanks for that. We use a technique called "Hard-surface Modelling" for anything that's, well, hard-surface. Anything organic, rocks for example, are doine in MudBox, ZBrush or a combination thereof. That said, some of the team prefer to use ZBrush alone, although it usually comes down to personal preference and training. ZBR is great for combinations of, for instance, cloth and metal whereas Max less so.
Hope this helped.

 

Very excited to see more of Line Of Fire in action
You guys are probably the group i follow the most, related to Unity Very high potential with this game.

Fantastic work on those mockups by the way
Looks like you guys are going for a futuristic setting. What year is the game taking place?

 

Hey there @eskovas
I've been churning out a lot recently, (not all of them fit for human consumption) but it gives some direction and focus when we design new mechanics, let alone the art its self.

As far as the setting goes, there's not too much I can say yet (don't wan't to be spreading miss-information/shoddy context etc. etc.) but we are changing things up a bit. We'll probably do the full explanation with the video reveal this week and certainly as we ramp up to our funding deadlines in the coming months.

Many thanks for your kind words!

 

Here it is people, the sneakiest of peeks at the update video that is indeed incoming. Its been a while, a long while, but worth the wait we hope. You're going to see a lot of placeholders, mock-ups and so on at the moment, our focus has been core mechanics, server structure (network logic etc.), optimization, shading techniques (standardising our techniques for consistency), fleshing out new ideas and so much more. Actual engine implementation just isn't a priority and doesn't take that long anyway.
We appreciate that you'd like to see how the game assets look in all their glory, especially in conjunction with some game footage, and rest assured that will make its way to your feed very soon.
For now, allow yourself to be teased:

 

Just some quick screengrabs from the update video, on its way to a feed near you.

 

(Disclaimer: this is something we're experimenting with, it may or may not result in the final product, Line of Fire. R&D is an important part of any game, please do not republish without this disclaimer.)

So over the last couple days I've been experimenting with photogrammetry as a process. Weather or not it's now viable in realtime 3D games. Titles such as "The Vanishing of Ethan Carter" and demonstrations such as Unreals "Kite Demo" have proven that yes, in a manner of speaking they are, but the process is expensive and takes a hell of a lot of time.

The Remix art team is looking into streamlining the process for a Unity 5 pipeline. This means using the standard shader that ships with the engine. Keep in mind we employ our own renderer which, among other things will give us slightly different results to what you might see if you followed the same process. The basics are more or less the same however, you'll probably produce the same info maps, have the same rough poly budgets and so on. Hope our finding are useful for you and your projects.

Day 1
We began by looking at standing examples of photogrammetry in realtime games, this isn't a long list. The Kite Demo has the best explanation of its techniques and is pretty much on the cutting edge of this developing method. The first issue we came to is there's a disconnect between handmade assets (or traditional assets) and photo-scanned assets (obviously), this might not sound like a problem but in reality, its massive. I suspect it may be one of, if not the biggest barrier right now. You need to consider the roughness and specular (as well as any other maps you'll need) extraction process, when you scan something, for instance a rock, you're only getting the mesh and colour data. Anything from that point out has to be done by hand. This is problem #2. How do you justify a process which takes a long time in itself? Sure the results look great but at the end of the day you could have done it all by hand, to get the exact intricacies of the material (lets continue to use rock as an example) you have to either dedicate a very long time to getting the roughness maps perfect as well as all the corresponding values, OR you need to use scanned material data from a service like Quixels Megascans.

Day 2
I began hunting through a few thousand pages of forum posts, tutorials, official documentation and my own personal emails to find the best possible software for the fledgling pipeline. I settled on Agisoft PhotoScan. It appears to be the best value (at ~$140 or your regional equivalent) and has a great level of accuracy as well as being super easy to use and, vitally, is GPU accelerated which helps a lot with scans upwards of 10m tris. As it happens Unreal used Agisoft PhotoScan so this made the choice easy. At this point our pipeline looked like this: Source Photo > Agisoft PhotoScan > Photoshop CS6 (for our data maps) and 3DS Max for the mesh info. The composite lowpoly went to Unity 5.

Day 3
At this point I was ready to scan my data, so I began with a rock. Made my own light tent out of card and used a number of reading lamps to light the subject. A link to my Day 3 findings can be found here.
I was pretty confident in the process at this point, after discussing and recording what I noticed I decided to skip the material conundrum and move onto more complex scans to see if a rock was too simple.

Day 4
By this point I had taken about 3 gigs of high resolution photographs and ran them through the software. After cleaning up the mesh and tweaking the normals, diffuse and occlusion maps I made a composite of the 3 scans in Unity 5. Here are my results:



The scene is comprised of roughly 1.3 million polygons. This is obviously unacceptable, but a lot of geometry information was expected. After running a quick retopo operation I got that number down to 1k polys for the bottom leaf and root section of the mesh. I have not gone through the process for the other two meshes (the banks) yet. You may notice these scans were actually taken from different areas (the mosses and leaves are different. This is simply because some areas were more suited to a clean scan than others.
So here is the actual game ready forest floor asset. Its worth noting that tiles like this have little practical use, but for testing they're fine:



As you probably noticed the scan looks excellent in a low-poly bake. It's lost much of its depth detail information but I can easily replicate this with a height map, cavity map or even just a more aggressive occlusion map. When the process is in production high poly information (raw scan data) will have to be retopologized by hand in 3DS Max during which the high poly data will need to be extracted in the form of a good normal map and possibly height map. This process is the same as any sculpt-to-game-ready you are probably already familiar with.

The final and most serious problem with photogrammetry in games is removing baked lighting information. This is a biggie. It might sound simple, there are a few ways in theory you could approach it: key out the blemishes in photoshop? Nope, testing has proven that's not possible, there's far too much to do by hand or by filter. What we need is a tool, much like Unreal Engine's tool, that removes ALL the lighting information from the colour-map. PBR requires a flat look without any light sources in the scene. Without that the assets are pretty much useless.
This is a demonstration of the tool we'll need to develop:
(please skip to 15:50).

(please skip to

My question to you guys, the readers, is do you know of anything which might help with this process, the light removal in particular? It'll take a lot of time and money to create a tool like that, as far as I know Unreal has no plans to publish it, and without it the dream of easy-to-create photoscanned assets is next to lost.
In the next few days I'll be dedicating myself to figuring out a solution, if you have any suggestions, please post 'em below.

Until next time,
Chris

 

You can remove light sources and shadows from subject by making the light appear "flat". In order to achieve this you'll need to make your light sources illuminate your object.

 

This is impractical, recreating the exact light conditions and creating a "de-light map" by hand its too difficult. Light scatters and bounces too much in the real world for this to work. It's not as simple as washing out the dark parts with light. There are micro details and subtleties you'll lose. Furthermore the goal is to keep completely colour-accurate over the whole asset, regardless of exposure.

 

Maybe you could see how people remove shadows from terrain images.
World Composer does this:

Don't know if the same technique can be applied to this, but you could research papers and info about shadow removal. There are many techniques out there

 

Hi Eskovas,
Unfortunately this process is basically lightening the sections of the texture that are dark, it causes a lot of inconsistency in the material because what you're doing is overlaying another light version of the same texture. The goal is perfect un-blemished textures remember, for big stuff its fine but for rocks, bark, dirt and anything else that's studied up close, its not a good option.
In the last couple hours I've discovered that creating a 360* cubemap of the lighting environment at the location of each scan is necessary for the removal of lighting data. You need to direct the custom program to key out these values.
Will keep you updated if there's progress.

 

Well, that's the only solution i see
I did a very quick test with two images of your post.
It didn't affect the lighter section of the texture and only the dark part, while also applying the color back to the dark areas. I think it turned up okay, but maybe that's not the solution you're looking for.
It's still a bit noticeable the dark area in the first image, but it could be improved.

 

Yeah in theory its a good idea but you lose a lot of the value this way. Photoscanned data needs to be really crisp and non-uniform. In addition it needs to maintain its real-world colour values (I place a reference card next to my subjects to make sure the hex values stay the same). If you remove the shadows with an overlay you lose that value in the texture. Take a look at the video in the main post, François from Unreal explains it well.
If you like I can send you the source files and the resulting mesh and texture data to play with?

 

Yeah, i see what you're saying. I need to have a look at that video when i have the time.

No need to send me anything Good luck with this

 

Try converting your textures to albedo. They will remove all sorts of lighting and shadows.

Check this video:

 

Hi @elmar1028.
Yeah that the process the custom tool has to preform. To make sure it removes all the light at the exact vales though, you need to capture a light environment near the subject of your scan.

 

In order to do that HDR panorama needs to be taken before each shot. The issue is that there are no known sources on how to use HDR panorama to remove lighting from the subject.

The closest thing we're gonna get is Epic's custom made scripts (which are not available to public).

 

Thats the conclusion we came to. I sent an email to Epics lead artist on the Kite project, Francois Antonie, asking about any plans for this tool. Photogrammetry will become a huge part of games in years to come and it seems odd they'd let the tool gather dust.
Short of getting our hands on that I'd like to know how it works, I'll be looking into commissioning a tool which does essentially the same. No-one on the team has the free time at the moment. If this is something that interests you shoot me an email.

 

I've been wondering how to create 3D models using photometry for quite a while since I saw the "Kite Demo" article.

If I find something useful will let you guys know.

 

Please do

If you have any, or know anyone with experience in creating standalone tools like this please let me know. Chances are we'll have to get one made.
Thanks

 

So we looked into the light removal process as well as the engine implementation aspect. We will still need to develop a tool which removes the lighting info based on an HDR cubemap but for now the standard albedo creation process works just fine. (Ignore the backdrop, its a cubemap. This is in Unity 5).

 

That looks awesome! Even with albedo textures look good!

Did you guys you TopoGun or Zbrush to do retopologizing of mesh?