City of Brass is Now Available on Steam!

A first-person action adventure, inspired by Arabian Nights, from senior BioShock developers.

Become a daring thief in City of Brass, a first-person action adventure from senior BioShock developers. Armed with scimitar and a versatile whip, you’ll lash and slash, bait and trap your way to the heart of an opulent, Arabian Nights-themed metropolis – or face certain death as time runs out.

A recent update to Google Chrome had the unfortunate side effect of muting audio for a vast array of web-based games and interactive projects.

Developers have taken to Twitter to call Google out for the sudden and unprompted change, noting in some cases that their HTML-5 based projects are essentially dead in the water with audio forcibly muted.

While it’s unlikely that Google will let these changes remain in the face of such backlash, the fact that a major web browser has all at once muted audio for the many, many projects that fall outside of top websites that feature audio elements understandably has many developers concerned.

Developers like VVVVV and Super Hexagon creator Terry Cavanagh and Stephen’s Sausage Roll creator Stephen Lavelle are some of the people that have already noticed that their content has been affected by the change, while numerous other web developers and artists have spoken out against the ill effects of the new policy as well.

The issue itself looks to be rooted in a policy change that came with the most recent update to Google Chrome. Earlier this year, Google rolled out a Chrome update that allowed users to mute audio based on individual websites, aiming to counteract the minor annoyance of unwanted, auto-playing videos. The latest policy update takes that one step further by automatically blocking audio and video from being played on most websites, save for those on Google’s list of 1,000 or so sites where a high percentage of videos opt to play media with sound. 

Chrome additionally doesn’t display any sort of notification to a user that the page they’re viewing has had its audio muted, something developers have also taken issue with in the wake of this change.

Ah fuuck sake. I had just in the last year started to begin to trust that I could reliably use audio in the browser (after years of reticence). So much for that…looks like the chrome update broke all of the audio in my html5 games as well. https://t.co/gT6n9pz0VT

— Stephen Lavelle (@increpare) May 7, 2018

This article was originally posted on the Joy Machine blog; maybe check it out too! <3

I tend to do a major iteration on the overall scene composition in Steel Hunters every month or two and since the public trailer is now approaching, I decided to just did one six-seven hour block fo sitting at my computer until I was happy with the results. It should be obvious that this iteration started like most: “just a few quick tweaks.”

The Problems

• I wanted heavier atmospheric haze/fog. The reasoning for which is two-fold:
• The general feel of this area is a barren “post-apocalyptic” wasteland. And I don’t mean that in the traditional post-apocalyptic Mad Max sort of way; the world of Steel Hunters wasn’t ever decimated by nuclear war but, rather, the slow depletion of natural resources (unrelated) and the onset of, basically, the worst possible nightmare version of climate change that could be imagined (and is almost certainly scientifically… non-scientific). In short: every environment has a unique feel/setting and the goal of each of these sandboxes is to fully embrace a worst-case scenario of what that environment in the game’s world.
• More practically, it’s way easier to handle the blend for the unbelievably intense sand storms (literally, they can not be believed because it’s not also, likely, scientifically non-scientific) that can crop up mid-mission — requiring players to adjust their approach entirely.
• Along that same line of thinking, there is entirely too much blue sky if you catch a glimpse of the sky through the clouds — and just adding more cloud-cover would obscure the actual sun vector all the time (instead of 75–85% now).
• To adjust this, I have to modify the rayleigh calculation coefficients just enough to reduce the blue of the end result without blowing out the scene’s lighting and composition in the other direction (trump-orange).
• There is a lovely issue with the volumetrics rendering light blue light shafts if you happen to end up in an along the edge of an occluded area (this is unrelated to the sky color, as I discovered).
• This gets worse if the directional light is completely obscured, at which point the resulting composition ends up with a light blue screen area where the light would normally be (not super obvious/ugly, but it annoyed me. A lot).
• I don’t tend to update time-of-day during gameplay, but I still ran into an issue with the volumetrics and sky/cloud/light settings getting out of sync at night (meaning the moon ended up with red/brown-ish volumetrics despite a component white light color) — and time of day can make for a nice demo sometimes (and I may eventually have a very, very subtle progression of time in a mission at some point).
• The eye adaptation has issues maintaining a consistent exposure level as you go through the map.

The Nevada Scene Composition (Before)

The Iteration Process

I’ve done iterations on all of these various systems/components in the past, but generally I’ve focused on one or two aspects of the composition at a time. I wanted this iteration to focus on the entire gamut of influencing factors.

Ideally, I’d tackle each problem in that list one at a time. And, for the most part, that’s what I did. The issue is how all of these various systems exist in relation to each other. Which brings me to:

The World Simulation

The entire world state is managed by my “world simulation” — anything that related to or occurs within the environment is in some way or another related to this system. In the case of lighting, volumetrics, atmospherics, and relevantpost-processing data, the relation to the world simulation is direct: the simulation manages each of these explicitly.

• The Plus Side of This: I don’t have to jump back and forth between all sorts of entities to tweak properties.
• The Down Side of This: The world simulation is a simulation in every sense of the word. Simply changing one value can have a ripple effect that affects any number of other data that influences the final scene composition.
• I make this sound bad, but it’s actually a great thing. This design and implementation ensures internal environment consistency and, for lack of a better word, “synergy” between what could be setup as disparate entities. This will also be helpful for ensuring future environments are bound to the same rules.

The Iteration Process (Remix)

The process, basically, goes like this: start a problem (almost in the order described above, except the sky simulation and resulting coloring was the first problem I took on), work towards an acceptable result, and move on to the next problem.

By the time I started on the second problem, that process was pretty much gone. Changing the sky simulation data resulted in some dramatic composition changes that affected the overall scene exposure, the lighting intensity/colors, and the look and intensity of the haze. Really, the only thing that wasn’t affected by this was my volumetrics solution (based heavily on NVIDIA’s Volumetric Lighting research/implementation advice) as I was previously manually managing the volumetric light color/intensity.

So, obviously, I updated the world simulation’s code to ensure that the volumetric light color/intensity to also be managed by the world simulation in respect to its various light entities (a directional light and sky light). THERE. Now a single change affects ALL THE THINGS. I sure showed that what’s what. Admittedly: this also addressed the problem I was having with the volumetrics being out of sync with a dynamic time-of-day (especially at night), so that’s neat at least.

Note: Unfortunately, I didn’t properly create screenshots of each specific step along the way, but I do have a few iterations that I used to compare each tweak round. So those will appear shortly.

First Pass

With the exception of the odd issue with the “sun” showing as a large blue halo when obscured (and the volumetrics coloring when in an obscured location relative to the sun), I ended up with this first-pass result:

This is definitely a step in the right direction compared to the starting point. And I remember this first iteration being worse than it actually is (in retrospect), but looking at it now, I remember my issues with it:

• The lighting and shading is fairly flat and trends far closer to orangey-orange than I want (even the mech shading was fairly flat).
• The “sun” (which I use in quotations constantly because it’s just a directional light that is treated as an atmospheric body) is somewhat non-existent. There is a somewhat brighter spot in its place, but it’s far more understated than I want.
• The haze is over-saturated and really drowns out the shading of distant buildings more than I’d like.
• Finally, though it’s not obvious here, but if any view other than the composition I’m using throughout this post, the eye adaptation was… Not happy. The histogram for the composition shot is fairly even, but anywhere else the overall exposure trends lower (which, since the composition I’m showing is potentially in the brightest areas in the environment).

Second Pass

I really should have written this post yesterday after doing all this work because, looking at this pass’s screen shot looks, basically, like “… why did I just make everything worse?”

This pass’s goal:

• Start addressing the auto exposure so if I turned around I wasn’t blinded by the adjusted exposure for darker areas.
• This entailed lighting color/intensity (and volumetrics color/intenstiy which has its own modifiers based on the light color/intensity it gets from the directional light) adjustments. This succeeded in evening out the overall composition exposure throughout the environment, but it also made the lighting even more flat (and the composition somewhat darker).
• An attempt to change the haze distribution so it wouldn’t affect ground-level areas as intensely as it did in the first pass (also attempted, and failed, to fix the coloring).

Third Pass

I call this pass “lighting, volumetrics, and composition exposure adjustments that made everything worse”.

Which is mostly true; I can’t remember the specifics of what I did in this pass, but I was focused primarily on getting the lighting in the final composition to be more complex (not flat).

AND I SUCCEEDED. If you ignore the fact that the entire scene is now grim-dark and the mech details are basically completely lost.

Fourth Pass

I focused primarily on light intensity values, the brightness of the trueSKYbrightness levels (which were pushing the composition’s exposure histogram far outside the range of the rest of the scene), and getting the haze to cooperate.

Problems now:

• The composition’s contrast was way too heavy — even for me (and that’s saying something. I knew this wasn’t an issue with the post-processing stack, so I blamed the auto exposure. And turning off auto-exposure confirmed that… To some extent.
• The lighting intensity adjustments worked for most of the scene, but the smaller-scale details of the mech (which, by the way, is why I like this composition; it has foliage, large-scale meshes, and detailed smaller-scale meshes) weren’t benefitting from any changes to the intensity. Meaning that while most of the scene benefitted, shadowed areas were still suffering a bit.
• The haze was getting even more exaggerated from adjustments to the auto exposure. Which is neat.
• The “sun” still had an underwhelming compositional presence (and you can see the out-of-place blue halo here more clearly than in other images, despite not being occluded).

Fifth Pass

I did another round of light intensity modifications in conjunction with the trueSKY light wavelengths and yet-again-more haze tweaks. AND THIS TIME: THEY WORKED.

Oh, and I changed the entire volumetrics simulation settings from being Mie-based scattering to using a Henyey-Greenstein phase function for scattering. This iteration, in particular, took the most time to really get right-ish because it so dramatically impacted the entire composition

Note: I’ll show some debug shots of what the volumetrics themselves look like in the final composition later.

The overall composition still hasn’t quite hit the overall exposure level I’d like and the “sun” still had no strong presence in the composition. And so I decided: unacceptable. The “sun” must bend to my will.

The End Result

After more volumetrics, eye adaptation, color grading, and light intensity passes, I ended up at a result that I’m pretty happy with. It’s still leaning a bit too close to orangey-orangyness-orannnnge, but at the moment I’m not entirely convinced that’s a bit thing for this environment (especially since, once I started adding VFX to the scene, that will have a pretty dramatic effect on color variation).

AND THE SUN BENT TO MY WILL.

And since I promised some debug screen shots, here is the resulting composition exposure:

And a debug visualization of what the volumetrics look like on their own (you can probably tell where I went to give the “sun” a bit of help in the prominence department):

Conclusion

I really enjoy doing iterations like this. And this was fun enough to help me maintain sanity in the twelve hours of camera system work that followed.

Fun Fact: The Steel Hunters “announce” trailer release date is not too far away.

Addendum

By reader demand, here’s a quick-and-dirty slideshow GIF of the progress (it loops so the beginning/end are, uh, hopefully recognizable):

Welcome to Next Week on Xbox, where we cover all the new games coming soon to Xbox One! Every week, the team at Xbox aims to deliver quality gaming content for you to enjoy on your favorite gaming console. This coming week we’ll have the first-person action adventure game City of Brass, the arcade baseball greatness of Super Mega Baseball 2, and the return of an iconic sci-fi tank shooter in Battlezone: Gold Edition — and these are just a few of the excellent games coming to Xbox One next week! Read more below and click on each of the profiles for pre-order details.

Games

May 01, 2018

Xbox Games with Gold / Xbox One X Enhanced – One of the most fun baseball games on Xbox returns with Super Mega Baseball 2. With improved visuals, deeper league customization, and online multiplayer modes, this arcade baseball sim has a lot to offer the fan and non-fan alike. SMB2 is also available for Xbox Live Gold members from May 1 to May 31.

Games

May 01, 2018

The reboot of the iconic 1980s sci-fi tank shooter for a new generation is here! Battlezone Gold Edition features all additional content ever released for Battlezone, including all tank skins, bobbleheads and horns, as well as the Classic Mode that recreates the look of the arcade original.

Games

May 02, 2018

Journey deep into the forest in this third-person psychological horror game about a mother and her missing son. Playing as the parent, you will experience her retelling of the events surrounding her missing child in a setting influenced by Norse mythology and Norwegian folk tales.

Games

May 02, 2018

In this challenging survival horror game inspired by classics of the genre, monstrous beasts and a city engulfed in flames have forced you to seek refuge inside a large manor estate. Now its up to you to survive and seek out supplies to make your way through this nightmare alive.

Games

May 04, 2018

Xbox One X Enhanced – Become a daring thief in City of Brass, a first-person action adventure from senior BioShock developers. Armed with a scimitar and a versatile whip, you’ll lash and slash, bait and trap your way to the heart of an Arabian Nights-themed metropolis.

Games

May 04, 2018

In this jet ski racing game that combines extreme speed, stunts, and state-of-the-art water simulation, speed above waves big and small across 10 different environments in this fun-filled racer with split-screen and online support.

Games

May 04, 2018

From the makers of Battle of the Bulge comes another tactical turn-based strategy game where you can choose to defend the homeland as the Soviets or lead a push on the Soviet capital as the Axis. Features online or local competitive play, as well as a challenging AI opponent.

Games

May 04, 2018

In this challenging side-scroller full of action-packed gameplay and puzzles, you will be a member of the skillful Bounce Rescue team as you take on the Evil Devil and his minions to stop them from taking over the world. Featuring 50 challenging levels across a variety of worlds and modes with local co-op and competitive play.

The news that Nintendo’s new online service for Switch will include cloud save support has been met with plenty of praise, as with the current system, all game data is tied with the console on a hardware level. If you lose or damage your Switch, you lose your save data, too.

It’s great that Nintendo is finally adding this much-requested feature to the Switch, but there are hints that not every game will showcase cloud save support – very much like not every Switch game currently supports video recording.

The official Japanese Nintendo Switch Online website states that “some software” will not use cloud saves. It’s worth noting that this text has been obtained using Google Translate, so some of the meaning may have been lost. 

It’s also worth stating that “software” on Switch can mean a range of different things; Nintendo may not be referring to games in this case, but apps. The worst case scenario is that cloud saves have to be enabled at a software rather then system level in each game, and that some developers may choose to restrict this feature to avoid anyone altering save data and cheating in certain games.

Hopefully, this won’t be a massive issue and the vast majority of games on Switch will support cloud saves – we’ll no doubt find out more as that September launch approaches. In the meantime, let us know your thoughts with a comment below.

Nintendo thrilled Switch owners today with hard details about its new Switch Online service, which includes NES games that can be played for free and feature modern elements, such as online play and voice chat.

We’ve known that retro games would form some part of the mooted online package for a while, but many were hopeful that the Virtual Console service – which launched on the Wii over a decade ago – would be included somehow. Through the Virtual Console platform, players have been able to gain access to some of the greatest games ever made for a reasonable fee, some of which are either exclusive to Japan or incredibly hard to obtain in their original form these days.

Sadly, Nintendo has confirmed to Kotaku that the service will not be coming to Switch in the near future:

There are currently no plans to bring classic games together under the Virtual Console banner as has been done on other Nintendo systems.

It would therefore seem that the vast majority of the retro content supplied via the Switch Online service will be part of your yearly fee – which, if that ends up being the case, more than makes up for the fact that the Virtual Console is effectively no more. 

While we might not see all of the games that had previously launched across Wii, Wii U and 3DS under the Virtual Console banner, the notion of a flat yearly fee for online play and cloud saves which also gives access to some of Nintendo’s best titles from the past few decades as a bonus can’t be bad.

The Nintendo spokesperson added:

There are a variety of ways in which classic games from Nintendo and other publishers are made available on Nintendo Switch, such as through Nintendo Entertainment System – Nintendo Switch Online, Nintendo eShop or as packaged collections. Nintendo Entertainment System – Nintendo Switch Online will provide a fun new way to experience classic NES games that will be different from the Virtual Console service, thanks to enhancements such as added online play, voice chat via the Nintendo Switch Online app and the various play modes of Nintendo Switch.

They also refused to give any information regarding future platforms appearing on the Switch Online service, such as SNES and GameCube. However, we’d be amazed if Nintendo didn’t add more machines to the service in the future.

Juicy Realm is Now Available on Steam and is 10% off!*

Juicy Realm is a roguelike game in which players must square off against bizarre fruits all across the world. The line between the animal and the plant world has become blurred, and the food chain has been completely disrupted. Humans, upon making this incredible discovery, have set up outposts along the border of the aggressive plants’ habitat for investigations, defense, and in preparation for what may come. You take the role of a soldier on the front lines charged with confronting this strange new enemy.

*Offer ends May 10 at 10AM Pacific Time