Changes in graphics

People following the project with interest in its technical aspects know that the L.B.A. Tribute runs on OpenGL. This graphics API was introduced in 1992 and by some, it is loved while by others, hated. These days you may hear an opinion that it is inferior compared to DirectX.

In reality, the answer is more complex. OpenGL evolved from its original form and these days the current stable release carries version 4.6 which was released in 2017. I mention that because on the internet, you can still find tutorials and people using OpenGL 1.4 from 2002  and claiming that it is inefficient and not modern. 

In reality, if you look at the API that OpenGL 4.6 offers, you will see that it is closer to the Vulkan API than OpenGL 1.4. We ourselves used multiple versions of OpenGL and in these 18 years, we learned how to use it efficiently, grew fond of it, and these days have a large sentiment for it. But even we understand that in the game industry, nothing stays the same. Things moving forward, GPU architecture evolving, API changing, and modern tooling focus more on supporting Vulkan and DX12.

This was visible when we recently tried to improve our shaders compilation pipeline. Our goal was to combine SPIR-V which is us for Vulkan with OpenGL. Based on documentation it should work without any problems but in practice, our attempt was only partially successful. We managed to use it for shader compilation which gave us uniform errors across different vendors. But it also failed to load the SPIR-V shader in OpenGL which was our goal. All our attempts to use it resulted in not passing some data to the shaders. We even tried examples from other people. But even they failed for our machines which was a sad discovery.

Another example of issues with OpenGL was when we were tracking graphical issues. Each of them was a small issue with the API usage that potentially could be caught by the debug layer in Vulkan. In the end, all the tools for OpenGL did not give us clear information that something went wrong and we needed to spend a significant amount of time to track them down. For people interested in graphics we are currently using RenderDoc and Nvidia Nsight Graphics. Looking only at them we have a feeling that OpenGL lacks debug tools compared to more modern APIs. In some way, this makes sense as the current focus of the vendors is on the modern API and not on something used by a few. 

That is why we decided to start the process of switching all our tooling to support:

Now, don't worry. We do not plan to drop everything. We plan to do things in stages and the first one of them is to prepare code for the second graphics API and display a triangle on screen. This effort will be driven by Alex while I’m continuing our Little Big Adventure project. Things are slowly coming together and last week was the first time when we felt that we finished with only fixing stuff and doing something that moves us closer to the finish line. 

Tribute

When the announcement of the original project (https://twinsenslittlebigadventure.com/) was published, our work was thrown into chaos. We quickly needed to figure out what to do. There were so many questions in our minds: Drop the project? Continue original plan? Adjust to a new reality? What about the name? We could no longer use word "Remake". At the same time, we needed something to distinguish our work from the official project.

This is where the name "Tribute" came. It was a word that describes perfectly what we trying to do, why we do it, and on top of that nicely distinguishes our work from any other projects. This was the essence of all these years spent on development and all these changes we were doing. Everything to give a tribute to the games that all of us love and the people who created them. 

Six months later we believe in all of that even more. Official developers (https://www.2point21.com/) work hard on bringing us more LBA content. To avoid issues, a fan project like ours should never be mistaken for what they do. That is why we plan to shift some of our "branding" (if you can call it that way) to make it more clear for people that this is just a tribute, made by fans. Results of this work can be seen below. What do you think? 

 

Little Big Adventure 2022

The last two months are pretty interesting ones for the LBA community.

• We learned about the new name for the official games
  (https://twinsenslittlebigadventure.com/lba-new-name-twinsen/) 
• We got a message from Didier Chanfray regards the plans for the IP
  (https://twinsenslittlebigadventure.com/a-message-from-didier-chanfray/).

In meantime Coffemonsters is silent ... Some may think that because of the announcement of the official project we gave up on ours. The reality is that we know we cannot compete in terms of news from [2.21], they are the creators of the official project. Members of Coffemonsters always were and will be supporting them in their work to bring us games from Twinsun's universe. 

But this also does not mean we gave up. While reading the message from Didier Chanfray we can encounter the sentence: 

"If you wish to create something around the original games yourselves, we've open-sourced the code for the original games and will support any fan project/mod to the maximum of our capabilities."

This makes us believe that there is a place for a project like ours. What we doing is not a competition to the official game but a tribute to the original games and people who created them. This is our reimagination of them and answers to the question: What if ...? 

This led us finally to the topic of our "LBA: Tribute" project which still moving forward. Like always we spend a lot of time on technology and tooling but we also try our best to never neglect the game. We recently added our first, rough version of the skeleton:

We have some nice use cases for it in the scope of the tribute (1st island). While iterating on camera and character movements we also created new clothes for Twinsen. 

From other important announcements, we plan to be a little bit more open about our development processes. This should translate into more development news at our discord channel (https://discord.gg/Tc9Hs5h9), more news about work in progress stuff, and our long-term goal is to release development builds to everyone. This should allow you to look into the newest changes and explore the world we created while waiting for the official game. The reasons why this is not happening right away, are technical issues that we need to resolve before releasing builds.

We believe that right now we have really exciting times for all fans of LBA. I know that we all wait for more news from https://twinsenslittlebigadventure.com/. But I also want to believe that news and progress from our small fan project bring some joy to your life. So, till the next one.

27th Anniversary of LBA 1

Finally arrived LBA 1 release anniversary. This year it is a pretty weird one. On one side it is a happy one because we got the announcement that a new entry to the universe will happen. On the other hand a little bit sad because our celebration stream was canceled. I initially planned to replace my stream from it with another dev update, but then life happened. 

I got super busy, partially upon my own request. Specifically, I work on a presentation for the GiC conference where I will be talking about a custom resource management system. I think that this will be an interesting lecture, mostly because I will be talking about the engine that powers the L.B.A. Tribute. If any of you will be there somewhere around and see me don't hesitate to come by and say: hello. 

Now after this long intro, let's focus on the project. From the last update, nothing really changed. The plan is to work on this nice small demo containing only Citadel Island. I will release it when I will be done with it (Sadly there is still no release date). 

Currently, I am focusing on AI. I was not really happy with my previous solution and decided to improve upon it. A few AI-related presentations later I felt like I'm still lost. I understood what they talking about but still did not sorted stuff in my head to make a final decision regards my approach to it. This came later after few beverages (alcoholic and non) and discussions with friends. The last one probably helped here the most.

I decided to use behaviors graphs. How they work for those who don't know: when designing AI you building different states and defining conditions that need to be met to transfer between them. A simple example can be seen below.

Little did I knew, how this decision will backfire on me. The next weeks were full of UI work. Not a lot of AI but mostly thinking about how to make the creation of graphs possible in the toolkit. This was important for me because I would spend a lot of time using this tool later.

Right now I think I'm done with most of this work. It took forever, lead to some interesting discoveries, performance fixes, bug fixes, UI improvements, changes in the workflows, and generally a lot of boring topics that I will spare you. What is important, now I plan to continue work on AI with the new tools I designed. How this will go we should see soon.

Announcement of official LBA so what now ?

For those who missed it, official work on the next LBA project has begun. This probably lead to some questions about what will happen with the project I working on? 

I always knew that something like that could happen. I was working on it after hours, learned how to model, sculpt, do textures, make animations, built tools to create the whole world but in the end, never really delivered a playable game. Now that we have an official project coming I feel mixed feelings. I'm happy as a fan that there is finally this light of hope that will be one day play next installment in the series. On other hand, there is this frustration that after all that years of work I would need to drop everything without delivering anything.

Because I would like to avoid it. I will do something different. I plan to continue work on the project that will change a name from LBA Remake into LBA: Tribute to avoid any confusion that it will recreate the game. I will also stop worrying about any other islands and will just focus on recreating gameplay and story from the first one. When this will be done I will just release it so you could see the world the way I imagined it.

There is also a chance that I will be asked to completely stop working on the project. If ever come to this I will be worrying then and for now, focus on the stuff I was doing normally: adding another piece to the project which brings me closer to the day I will be able to share it with you. At the same time like probably most of you I will be waiting for more news about the official LBA project. 

April - 2021

I know I'm not too active the last two months but don't worry this is only because I was pretty busy working on all kinds of stuff: game content, graphics improvements, sounds improvements, optimizations, bug fixes, and tooling.

In a month (29-30 May 2021) we will also have an LBA2 anniversary stream. This time I picked 2 slots, one hour each. 

The first one named "LBA remake art creation" will be working on a clay sculpture of one of the LBA characters (Not a digital one but IRL). I still did not decide which, so if you have some preferences then drop them in the comments.

The second one "LBA1 remake Project update stream" will be showcasing the project. I will be showing some new locations that you have never seen before. I'm already working on this new content which I will just skip in this month's dev update. 

This brings us to the last topic: April Dev Update:

I will be streaming 28 April 2021, 6PM CET at https://www.twitch.tv/coffemonsters

Where I will try to cover changes in the project, will share some news about it, and generally will try to be entertaining for one hour.  

Greg

Update June-July 2020

Time flys by ... we have already July. This means, time for another update. But before we will move to it I noticed that I forgot to post a link to June update. Let's fix it now:

For this who are not so much into the topic, this update was part of LBA2 anniversary event. This is an event where fans of both games doing some LBA related streams across two days. If you missed it don't be worried you can still watch recordings at  Unofficial Official Little Big Adventure Channel.

There is also good news 10-11 October 2020 there will be another one. This time Little Big Adventure 1 anniversary event (schedule you can find at https://lbabirthdayevent.com/). I would of course not skip this occasion so at 18:00 UTC 10th October I will be streaming the "LBA1 remake Project update stream".

I normally would just do a standard update: Show what I worked on, show game footage, and talk about development. Well, as you may notice I don't like to do stuff a normal way. This time it will not be different and I plan something special. 

Whenever I entering this "special" mode things never go easily. This kind of stuff requires an extra push and what comes with it: extra efforts, focus, mental and physical exhaustion. To limit a little bit burden of this all on me I decided to enter a silent mode. This means more or less no updates from me for the next three months where I will focus on the content for the anniversary stream. 

If this is the right way to do it? I don't know. What I know is that I want to turn this year's anniversary stream into something special. This reason is enough for me to do it.

In this place, I will end this post and return back to doing stuff. Till the next time.

GiC, new video and stream

Game Industry Conference is behind us and it was great. I meet a lot of cool people, some of them even knew about Little Big Adventure. One of the more awesome meetups was with Jasiek from https://forum.magicball.net/ :]

Two "rivals" from the past in one photo (He was doing another remake of LBA when I was starting). I had occasion to show him what I working on and talk about my plans regards changes inside the game. It was cool to hear his opinion as a fellow developer.

I had also an occasion to show the game to other people. Most of the reaction was really positive but there were also some less positive ones. One of them was the opinion that I should not be doing a remake of this game. I'm really curious what do you think about this?

Now after all of that excitement, I'm really tired but also really happy and I returned once again to work on wrapping up movie content. And there is still work to do: fixing lighting issues, finding bugs here and there and improving workflow so I could do more with less stress.

In the end, the project is already in a good state and should be ready for the video next week :] As I mentioned in the previous post I will also do:

 Twitch stream 20:00 CET on Thursday 31 October 2019. 

What I will be doing I'm still not really sure :] I thought about showing some of the game, maybe doing some drawing, modeling or maybe just talking for the whole time. Well, we will see in what mood I will be when the time will come.

So till the next week.

Greg

Little Big Adventure 25th anniversary

I know that it was a long time from last updates but this time I'm not even sorry for that. I spent countless hours working on new content, improving tech and implementing game mechanics. I know that waiting is not easy but I can say that working on this stuff is not easy either. In the end, all of us know all of this already and there is no need to talk about it more. But hey here we are in the year 2019:

25 years after releasing Little Big Adventure.

This is not a big thing for a lot of people but LBA fans organizing streaming sessions for the whole day to celebrate this event. You can find more info here. I probably will watch some of them.

This year is also special for me because December will start the 10th year of remake production. Now that I think I'm really insane that after all this long time I still didn't give up. I could have this normal life without extra worries, without countless night hours spent on making content and tech for game. I would not need to read all these negative comments about how bad my work is and generally have easier life. 

Sounds like a tempting vision ... but then I would also not read all these great comments from people that love original games and support what I do. I would never learn all of these skills that I need for this game. I would also be a different person ...

.. well enough of this drama and let's move to the point: 

How Coffemonsters plan to celebrate the 25th anniversary of a game? 

The schedule is pretty short: 

• 18/19 October 2019 - I will be at GIC in Poznań where I will have my laptop with the current build of game. I will be more than happy to show what I have and discuss what I'm working on.
• 31 October 2019 - New video release in celebration of 25th anniversary which will also reveal remake. I'm sure that some of you may be surprised by what you will see :] 

I was also thinking about doing some stream 31 October where I could answer some of your questions. Would anybody be interested in that?

 And that is all for now. Times to go back to working on the project.

Greg

Where is TD3 ...

I know that it is already past the original date of Tech Demo 3 release but please wait for me a little bit longer. I had busy time and not everything went the way I wanted... but this is not necessarily bad thing. I can say with confidence that the content finally taking form but more about this in next post that should be longer have more details and contain TD3 link ;)  Till then have faith in me and if everything will go right it should be pretty cool release.

What is the plan ?

Inspired by comment under youtube video:

When will the final version be released?

Past 

TD1 (Tech Demo 1 - which you can download here) was spontaneous release without bigger plan. Like I mentioned in "Tech Demo 1 + Postmortem" whole release was successful even with its issues and relatively small amount of people downloading it (at this day 68 people). The most cool think about whole TD1 is that I finally could share my work and hear what you think about it. The most complain was about : Mouse & Keyboard support.

And here good news folks : I finally took care of it and implemented new input system. I also started testing game with gamepad and Mouse & Keyboard to verify that both controls delivering the best experience they could.

Present

Currently I work on TD2 (Tech demo 2) which is a lot different than TD1 because it have theme: "Movement".

Plan is to tackle as much issues related to player control as possible. Bellow list of things that in 99.9% will land in this build:

• Improved movements 
• Better control over character.
• Additional interactions (climbing small obstacles).
• Climbing ladders.
• Elevators and platforms.
• Better Mouse & Keyboard support
• Interaction with environment - levers
• Item placements - Fixed issue where coins sometimes move around when they shouldn't
• Improved animation system - I rebuild way how I handle animations
• Bigger and nicer  level
• And like always a lot of bug fixes and internal tool improvements.

This may look like small amount of improvement but it isn't. Also this is not final list and will probably grown with time.

Another thing that I need to take care of is how to protect myself from breaking any of engine/tools functionality. I'm one guy and it would be wast of time for me to iterate over all of functionality each time I do any update. This is why I will follow example of Unity Technologies and start making more test for my code. This may not sound like a big work but it will consume time from my development. Good thing about this is that when I will have good test coverage it should save me a lot of time.

ETA for TD2 : Middle of October 2017

Future 

Hard to say for sure what will bring future but this is my current plan.

Theme for TD3 will be "Story telling" and it will contain:

• NPC characters
• Story system - records progress of story and make player choices matter
• Dialogues system - you can talk with other characters 
• Quest system - there are quests which may influence story 
• Saving/Loading - game progress

ETA for TD2 : End of December 2017 or Begin of January 2018

Theme for TD4 will be "World in War" and it will contain:

• Enemy NPC with AI
• Melee combat
• Magic ball
• Firearm combat
• Traps
• Breakable objects

ETA for TD2 : April 2018

Ok but this is not everything I will be working on. My plan is to work in background on:

Developing:

• PBR rendering 
• Animation system
• Terrain system
• Movie system
• Sound system
• Music system
• Clouds system
• Particle system
• Decal system
• Gui system
• Unit Tests
• Build system 
• Mac build 
• Converting all resources to new compile system

From more artistic things:

• Modeling characters
• Modeling environment
• Creating both islands
• Improving animations
• Create new postrocesses

There probably few more things but I don't remember them right now. 

So if you ask me when game will be release sadly I still don't know :( But I can say for sure that not this year.

Greg

Break ...

First half of the year is already behind use and I need to say that this was really intense time. Unplanned release of "playable(*)" tech demo, a lot changes in technology driving the game and finally seriously approaching to the story. From things not related to project I started work in Unity Technologies and generally there is a lot happening in my life.

All of this combined put some stress on my body and mind so I finally decided that it is the best time to slow down a little bit and recharge my batteries. Probably in the end this will not help with my head which never was really ok (I working on this project for 7 years nobody normal would do this) but at least body will rest.

What this "slow down" mean? This mean I will stop coding in home for some time.  

What it don't mean? It don't mean that project is dropped. It still developing just in a little bit different way. I'm more writer and designer now.

So far this going pretty well. Thanks to youtubers who published play thru of game I could easily write down whole story from first game and based on that recreate it in the way that new version tackle the problems I seen in original story. This step is almost done for this remake scope but ... (why there always need to be "but" :/) 

We have two games that build whole Twinsun Universum and I want people to see consistency between them even if I work just on remaking of first one. That is why now I checking Little Big Adventure 2 story and make some adjustments to my story based on Little Big Adventure 1. This is not simplest thing but we will get there. 

Now you know what I do for project: a lot of story telling, watching games walk thru and doodling around L.B.A related stuff. I'm getting more and more excited and terrified about project. All of this in the same time :)    

Greg

(*) A lot of people found game hard to control so it's kind of playable and not in the same time. 

Tech Demo 1 + Postmortem

So came this day when I release something :) Here you got link to tech demo:

Little Big Adventure : Remake - Tech Demo 1

Now that this is behind I think it the best to right away summarize what went right and what not so much :)   

Postmortem 

When last weekend was starting I didn't even thought about releasing anything soon. It was just another weekend like every other. But well ... one thing to another and I ended with announcement : I will release small tech demo.

Whole idea behind Tech Demo 1 is: you get what you seen. In this small demo there is no hiding of issues that game right now have, there is also almost no hacking stuff. This past week I was mostly improving UI and preparing whole build. This of course may dissatisfy you especially after MonsieurKakis released his fully playable game but well I cannot do too much about this.

In a 1-3 month I will release Tech Demo 2. This should show you how game improving and what direction I want to take it.

Tech demo - update

Tech demo start to look kind of interesting but in the same time I see so much problems with movement system. I really want to fix all this issues that is why I trying to wrap this whole release as quick as possible. You may expect probably daily updates.

Whole idea or releasing tech demo may of course look like easy task but from my perspective this is first release to bigger audience. I need to prepare package which take into account that not everybody have technical knowledge. This will test my whole release pipeline. I need to verify all my debug functionalities to have way to diagnose issues when somebody will have crash or problems with starting game.

There is also option menu which I always delayed because I never really need it. Now I need to make it to give you some control over game. And like always there is a lot of this small stuff that I need to do. But well in the end I giving you game the way it is right now with all good and bad stuff that are there. And I think that this should be good start. 

Greg

Movement - the beginning

This time something different but first I will point out culprit behind idea you will read in this post:

In this forum thread Polaris wrote message containing:

"eh another cool-sounding project that will never see the light of day"

Now lets move to point. I will probably really regret this later but well maybe it won't be so bad. As you know 7 years passed. Game looking a lot better, technology improved a lot, we slowly moving in right direction but non of you had occasion to even try of stuff I working on.

Some people would say I could just share what I have but I don't think this is so easy as it sound. I don't want to give you game right now because of few reason:

1. When I records Video Preview I try not to show everything I have done in levels so when you will finally play game you had fun of exploring.
2. This is work in progress which change sometimes from day to day. This results sometimes in stability issues.
3. I test game on one machine which is convenient because I don't need to switch between multiple ones. But may results in some problems on different configurations.

You may agree with this or not. Of course I still want to share somehow work I doing. I had this idea of some kind of "Tech demo" which you could download and see some game mechanics. And I think we getting really close to it. I will try to wrap this:

Into playable version :) Thanks to that you will be able to see how game work and I will be able to check how engine behave on different machines. But this is not the end of story. 

Because this is my starting point and I will be improving movement system I would release from time to time newer version so you could see all changes that I done :) 

What do you think about this ? I really would like to hear your opinion :)

L.B.A. Preview 19

When I writing this it's late afternoon but sun still shines nicely, lighting up clay figures standing on my windows. In background there is sound of yet another random song that is played from YouTube and smell of coffee from Montreal.

One of my friend Joël send it to me recently and its taste as good as I remember ... this brings back a lot of memories. But memories are not only thing that it's bringing. There is also reflection how long making of Little Big Adventure Remake takes. Three years ago I thought that I getting closer to finish line. But well from change to change, improvements after improvement and whole idea of finishing went somewhere faraway... this fill my heart with hesitation mixed with grief.

This thoughts cross my mind only for second. Compilation finishes, time to test another improvement that I done. Taking slip of coffee in meantime of waiting for load and ... crash. Why? Nervously looking into debugger trying figure out what happen. 

One of features done yesterday crashed. Didn't expect to crash there but well with code base growing so much in recent years its getting harder and harder to manage and predict everything. Quick cleanup around this part of code, fixing crash, adding additional validations so it never occur again, quick compilation and another slip of coffee.

It's works ... Smile showing on my face when I see game on my screen.

After while of testing time to check in new code and move to another task from my long list.

To be continued ...

Greg

L.B.A. Preview 18

Well it took one month longer than initially planned, some of you in meantime probably give up on me assuming that project was finally dead. Well I need to surprise you here: it's still alive. This is almost like @IsLBA3outyet. Always the same answer.

In the end I cannot say that road to creating this video was easiest because of amount of changes that was done and generally the mood I'm in recently. But here you have it :) I want to believe that next one will go better and on time.

What you guys think about idea of making next Video Preview in form of Twitch or YouTube live stream ?

Greg

L.B.A. Preview 17

So this time I skipped you pleasure of looking on my face :] I didn't done this purposely but when I finished recording it was already evening and when I checked result: strong shadows made my face look like somebody beat me up and in some shots even worse :/ so next time I will fix this. Well with this I will end my prolog speech and  here you have new video:

A little bit longer ...

We have some break in posting and we are fully aware of this but we are in middle of really big milestone on which we try to fully focus so you will need to wait a little bit longer for proper update. For now we will share with you some sneak peek of current progress:

This is still begin of work and a lot need to be done but finally all pieces coming together and we should have really interesting next video preview :D

Thanks also for all support that you give to us it give us strength to continue this ambitious project :)

Greg

L.B.A. Preview 15

Yep it's this time of year, were we have new preview. This time number 15 which by coincident is exactly the same number as internal build number :)

As you can see this time there are some visible new gameplay elements which give slightly impression that this may be even game :] Just slight of course but as you see project going forward and we don't lying saying this all the time.

But well this milestone is behind and we can move to next one: Recovering some basics of movie system with editor to bring back moving platforms in sewers and prison. When it will be done I don't know but we try our best :)

Greg