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Dev Console Tools - General Information
- These tools help us visualize and identify various things.
- Sometimes the tools require a lot of CPU usage and can make the game lag.
Developer Console - Quick Look
General
- Not as useful for Tech QA.
- Profiling information as well as JS5 Usage.
Bloom
- Mainly used for environment via the Map editor and messed with by artists.
- Make the game more moody or bright/vivid.
- Controlling the options affect the exposure and illuminations within the game.
- May allow players to use in the future.
- Allows you to easily focus on objects by blurring out the background information.
- Able to control the focal point at which something comes in and out of focus.
- Debug tools to display how it messes with the area.
- Fog was introduce to improve performance and reduce the dizziness effect players felt.
- On NXT's initial release players felt dizzy as there was too much visual information to take in.
- Contains the ability to completely remove fog
- Increased performance as with fog everything doesn't have to be loaded in.
- Tools to control the fog distance, color, and other factors.
- Allows full control of how lighting affects the environment.
- SSAO Settings
- You can see a realistic shadow effect being applied.
- We have a tool that allow us to see the effect without all the textures cramming the image.
- Tools to debug the minimap.
- Allows us to isolate aspects of the minimap to be analyzed.
- The minimap updates every 15 seconds and takes a top-down snapshot of the area.
- Allows to downscale items or models in the distance to save on memory.
- Things in red are on high detail and things in green are in low detail.
- The radius can be changed so you can see how it has an impact on CPU.
- No need to show the player everything if they are no where near it.
ObjType icons
- It changes object icons.
- Occlusion is about things being hidden behind other things.
- If you can't see an object the game remove that object.
- Downsampled GPU depth buffer is used for performance by showing a downscaled version of the game.
- AABB Depth Buffer - shows how far things are away from you.
Particles
- Tools to allow us to easily identify problems with particles.
- Doesn't allow us to change the particles themselves as they are done by the artist.
- Tools to show what something is casting a shadow on.
- Map Depth shows what's close and far away.
- Map Translucency
- Tools to work with light-bouncing off something else.
- Checks to see that colored light retains the color.
- Allows us to change the sun position.
- Shows us the size of a model compared to how big its texture is.
- A tiny model with a really big texture it will display red.
- Quality
- Good - Blue
- Okay - Green
- Bad - Red.
Visibility
- Allows us to tweak what you are viewing.
- Tools to interact with lighting features and colors.
- Goes hand and hand with lighting.
- Tools to show visualizations without textures
Water
- Tools to adjusts water settings
Developer Console - In Depth Look
Atlases
- Displays all the textures within a given area in boxes displayed on the screen.
- Green square represent alphas.
- The blue icon in one of the squares is the skybox.
- This is the in-game login screen and all the bank item icons as well.
Show sprite atlas usage
- Information displayed on the debugger.
Debug Overlay
Show Debug Overlay
- More tools and displays than what players have access to.
- Useful for analyzing overall performance and making sure everything works after updates.
List of Options
- Expand Sections on Mouse-Over
- Show Graphs
- Graph Duration
- Display/Keep FPS Counter/Expanded
- FPS Sample Count
- FPS Update Delay[s]
- Logic-Loops-Per-Second
- CPU Usage
- Memory Usage
- Disk Cache
- Allocations
- Shared Pointer Pools Info/LayoutInfo
- GPU Usage
- Render info
- Detailed GPU Stats
- Shader Info
- Audio
- Script Usage Info
- Picking Info
- Network Info
- Occlusion Info
- Game Connection Status
- Preload Status
- World Build Status
- Player and Mouse Coordinates
- Camera Info
Debug Rendering
- Ability to see the outlines of Polys.
- Helps identify what requires a lot of usage to load in something.
- They help show which way a face/plane is facing
- It's useful for Shadows, Ambient Occlusion, and things like that.
- Every plane will have a color to show the orientation of a model/plane.
Fresnel
- Only works with Volumetric Lighting
- Things that create light.
- Something you add to a model to make it glow.
- Shows the parts of objects/objects that shine.
- Shows the objects that have a light-sources and and where shadows are cast.
- It isn't about how shadows are cast just the impact of pointlights on models.
- Allows us to see the different geometry instances of objects.
- Colors help identify and differentiate whole models.
- Allows us to see the parts of the player/NPCs are their own model.
- Colors help identify and differentiate whole models and clipping issues.
- How we do shadows.
- Adds a capsule to show the influence of light on all objects in the game.
- Shows the bound box model around objects.
- Furthest part of a model to the furthest part of a model.
- Displays a box around flat 2D plane objects that rotate with your camera.
Particle/Terrain/Water AABB
- Self Explanatory
- Turn off/on specific parts of the game from being displayed.
Entity
Players, NPC entities, OBJ Entities
- Shows name, animation sequence number, and other details related to the entity.
- Tools to help identify combined locations, places that are connected together.
- We combine locations so everything will pop up at the same time.
- The reason why objects don't appear one by one to a large extent when loading in.
- Projectile animations also have their data tracked.
- Helps identify routing issues and how it is working.
- Shows the routes of players and NPCs as well as force walk tiles.
World
Something players interact with on a daily basis.
Show Min/Max Level
- Shows the different levels of the game, like when you are in a dungeon/in a tall building.
- Polypore Dungeon is a good example of where players can see multiple levels.
- Not as useful anymore since we have improved tools.
- Shows a number representing the height of every single square and its connecting square.
- Pointed numbers have objects on that tile.
- Anything that's 0 is water unless otherwise specified.
- It's useful for locating random tiles that throw you up in the air.
Show Remove Roof/Roof Labels
- Players have access to this option already.
- Decides and shows the objects you are clicking on by highlighting their click-box.
- Shows what the camera is trying to look at and whether the FoV feels right.
- Primarily used for cut-scenes.
- Displays the tiles/grid of the game.
- Wanted to give it to the players, but instead we gave the terrain blending option.
Tool Testing
- Contains and displays a large number of devices with different specs and operating systems.
- Great for being able to test the game for specific device issues.
- Naming: CPU + GPU + Bench Mark Score + (OS - if it's running something else)
- Every engine change will be ran on tests through each of these devices to compare results.
- Windows XP & VISTA is still supported since players still play on it.
- We don't want to support it anymore.
Map Square Checker (old clip) + (new clip)
- It teleports my character to every map square, takes a screenshot, and stitches them together.
- Then it does an image comparison -
- If it's more than a certain % of difference from the previous version it will flag it for us to look into.
- Increases the rate of testing as we can run it on all different machines and easily notice problems.
-
Animation Debugger - Easily automates all animations so we can check if anything is broken.
- Bosses are important to test to make sure animations are synced up correctly.
- Removes environmental influences to determine if an issue is with the animation or something else.
- Currently only have one for Telos, Nex, and Jad.
Other
Current Issues
- Loot share while bossing bug
- Being looked into, and a fix has been made. Planned to be hotfixxed this week if all goes well.
- Clients not being able to close.
New Animation system
- Currently being worked on, with animators already interacting with it.
- MIRA should be in their hands very soon.
- The new animation system should be released some time this year.
Weather
- Weather implementation depends whether you want to do it by engine or in-game.
- Doing stuff in engine is more optimal than in script.
- Players may like a weather feature but there isn't a large benefit for the amount of work needed.
Priority
- What determines what we work on when and how quickly we deal with it.
- High Priority - Things that impact the player's ability to play the game.
- Invisible item issue.
- Mobile is also in high priority.
- We have a good understanding of when something needs to be higher/lower.
Other
- The cutscene making tool creates routes/splines for the camera to follow.
- Forced Camera Changes - Prevents certain places from causing the camera to go out of/beneath the map.
- Why the camera changes when teleporting to Prif (since it's on a upper level).
- Water goes up in the air at the end of a map square as it defaults to 0 as it doesn't have a value.
- TzHaar City places an environmental Diffuse map which gives it a reflection.
- Diffuse map are up the the artist whether to put them in.