Open World Gamedev 2023/007

Hi and welcome to the seventh issue of this newsletter! Today's date is 2023-11-01.

You may have noticed it's been a while! Just over three months. Details of what and why in the video! It may be a while before I do the next one too - I've got life stuff going on - all good! - but I think it's unlikely to happen before Feburary 2024.

For this issue I chose a simple and vague theme duo: movement and organics.

📘 Newsletter Video!

Yes, I put this section first this time! This time I have something really special! An interview with Robert Alderman, the author of the book I'm reviewing. What an absolute pleasure it was! Definitely a joy to hear him talk about his process and thoughts on various open world topics relating to making a TTRPG campaign.

• Gods of the Forbidden North Volume 1 (opens in a new tab). Mini-review: Very inspiring open worldy TTRPG setting and campaign.
• Gods of the Forbidden North Volume 2 (opens in a new tab). Upcoming Kickstarter.

📺 Videos

• [AI] Evolving AI Life (opens in a new tab) by MakingFromScratch. ✨
• [Animation] Animation Bootcamp: An Indie Approach to Procedural Animation (opens in a new tab) by David Rosen.
• [Animation] Character Control with Neural Networks and Machine Learning (opens in a new tab) by Daniel Holden.
• [Art] Stylized trees with Houdini and Unreal Engine 4 (opens in a new tab) by Kris - LucenDev.
• [Game Design] 10 Video Game Fast-Travel Methods We Didn’t See Coming (opens in a new tab) by WhatCulture Gaming.
• [Game Design] 7 Weirdest Fast Travel Systems That Still Beat Walking (opens in a new tab) by outsidexbox.
• [Game Design] Analyzing the Aiming in Zelda TOTK (opens in a new tab) by Walaber Entertainment. ✨
• [Game Design] Fantasy Archery: holding your bow sideways (opens in a new tab) by blumineck. ✨
• [Game Design] Horizon Forbidden West | The Ultimate Retrospective (opens in a new tab) by LongEaredFox. ✨
• [Game Design] How Gamers Killed Ultima Online's Virtual Ecology (opens in a new tab) by Richard Garriott.
• [Game Design] How One Programmer Created Gaming's Most Complex Ecosystem (opens in a new tab) by ThatGuyGlen. ✨
• [Procedural Generation] Starfield's Procedural Tech Ideas Are built on Daggerfalls Success - Walking the Walk (opens in a new tab) by ACG. ✨
• [Programming] Let's remove Quaternions from every 3D Engine: Intro to Rotors from Geometric Algebra (opens in a new tab) by Marc ten Bosch.
• [Programming] Rendering Engine Architecture Conference 2023 (opens in a new tab) by REAC. ✨
• [Rendering] DF Direct Special: Starfield Tech Breakdown - 30FPS, Visuals, Rendering Tech + Game Impressions (opens in a new tab) by Digital Foundry. ✨
• [Rendering] The rendering techniques of Path of Exile (opens in a new tab) by Alexander Sannikov. ✨
• [Worldbuilding] Creating a Living World in Horizon Forbidden West (opens in a new tab) by Espen Sogn. ✨
• [Worldbuilding] Games that Make You Part of the Ecosystem (opens in a new tab) by Curious Archive. ✨
• [Worldbuilding] How 'Alien' Should Aliens Look? (opens in a new tab) by Curious Archive.
• [Worldbuilding] How Many Legs Are Best? (opens in a new tab) by Curious Archive. ✨

📜 Articles

• [Animation] Delivering the Facial Animation for Call of Duty Modern Warfare II (opens in a new tab) by DI4D. ✨
• [Animation] Skeletal animation in glTF (opens in a new tab) by Nikita Lisitsa. ✨
• [Art] Guerrilla Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores Art Blast (opens in a new tab) by Daniel Wade. ✨
• [Art] Tutorial: Eight Ways To Improve Your Pixel Art Characters (opens in a new tab) by Daniel Burke and Ben Chandler. ✨
• [Math] Polynomial Interpolation (opens in a new tab) by Tom Forsyth. ✨
• [Math] Properly Doing Camera Interpolation Through A Target by Zalo.
• [Math] Quadrilateral Interpolation (opens in a new tab) by Nathan Reed.
• [Math] Vector Curves (opens in a new tab) by Nic Tringali. ✨
• [Rendering] Day Night Cycle using LUT in Fragment Shader of Materials (opens in a new tab) by Shahriar Shahrabi. ✨
• [Rendering] Developing a Real-Time Solution for Rendering Trees (opens in a new tab) by Yixin Hu.
• [Rendering] Octahedral Impostors (opens in a new tab) by Ryan Brucks.

📦 Assets, Code & Tools

• [Book] A Complete Guide to Character Rigging for Games Using Blender (opens in a new tab) by Armin Halač. ✨
• [Book] Kickstarter: How to Make a Fantasy Sandbox (opens in a new tab) by Robert Conley. ✨
• [Book] Shadowdark Combat Afflictions (opens in a new tab) by Anders Elfgren. ✨
• [Book] Tricks, Empty Rooms, and Basic Trap Design (opens in a new tab) by Courtney C. Campbell. ✨
• [Fonts] Not Jam Font Pack (opens in a new tab) by Not Jam. ✨
• [Library] Clatter (opens in a new tab) by Esther Alter. ✨
• [Library] Hello Worlds (opens in a new tab) by Kenneth Pirman. ✨
• [Tool] Tree It by Evolved. ✨
• [Tool] Instant Impostors (opens in a new tab) by Alex R Heskett. ✨
• [Tool] The Dolmenwood Overloaded Encounter Generator (opens in a new tab) by Josh. ✨

😍 Cool Nuggets ✨

• Alternative to Adaptive Virtual Texturing (opens in a new tab)
• Bow aiming in TLOU2 (opens in a new tab)
• Breakdown of the bloom effect in Wicked Engine (opens in a new tab)
• Cave System Requirements (opens in a new tab)
• Cliff shader (opens in a new tab)
• Compute shader debugger (opens in a new tab)
• Compute vs fragment performance (opens in a new tab)
• Compute vs fragment performance followup (opens in a new tab)
• Developing a real ocean (opens in a new tab)
• Dragon flying over mountain (opens in a new tab)
• Drawing 737M triangles using Mesh Shaders and hierarchical LOD graphs (opens in a new tab)
• Dynamic shadow maps in Wicked Engine (opens in a new tab)
• Ephemeral Rigging resources (opens in a new tab)
• Finding game funding (opens in a new tab)
• Foliage breakdown (opens in a new tab)
• Fractal, ambient occlusion and shading in 571 chars (opens in a new tab)
• Game design is unexplored (opens in a new tab)
• Human Shader (opens in a new tab)
• Marching squares with interior vertices (opens in a new tab)
• Math for Rounded Corners (opens in a new tab)
• Mech walker (opens in a new tab)
• Medieval Building Generator (opens in a new tab)
• Mountain climbing on a Ceres-sized planet! (opens in a new tab)
• Move Game Asset Builds To Linux (opens in a new tab)
• Non-pixel-art-fonts in pixel-art-games (opens in a new tab)
• Open-source graph-based dungeon generator (opens in a new tab).
• Particle cubes (opens in a new tab)
• Physics-based Motion Retargeting from Sparse Inputs (opens in a new tab)
• Precision loss witchcraft (opens in a new tab)
• Pub with an inverted normal map (opens in a new tab)
• Quick trick to generate a random-looking grid maze (opens in a new tab)
• Rivers in hex-based terrain (opens in a new tab)
• Simulating heat and element interactions (opens in a new tab).
• Soft body physics in Jolt (opens in a new tab)
• Spline Guide (opens in a new tab)
• Spline-to-spline conversion chart (opens in a new tab)
• Starfield smiles and eyes (opens in a new tab)
• Tesseract - Open World Planetary Engine (opens in a new tab)
• Triangle/hex/square and mixed grids (opens in a new tab)
• Voxel town square timeline (opens in a new tab)
• What is an actually controversial game design opinion you hold? (opens in a new tab)
• Window-avoiding ivy (opens in a new tab)

🎁 Bonus Stuff

• [Art] Drawing particle effect sprites (opens in a new tab) by Kenney. ✨
• [Management] How men can help stamp out harassment of women in games (opens in a new tab) by Ashley Blake, Anya Combs and Chantal Ryan. ✨
• [Management] Open Salaries: Ensuring Equitable Pay Through Pay Transparency (opens in a new tab) by Matt Schembari. ✨
• [Math] Car Physics for Games (opens in a new tab) by Marco Monster.
• [Misc] Ending Copyright Could Save Art & Journalism (opens in a new tab) by Benn Jordan. ✨
• [Misc] Kindness as a signifier of intelligence (opens in a new tab) by Muhammad. ✨
• [Misc] The Entire History of Video Games (opens in a new tab) by NeverKnowsBest. ✨
• [Production] How to be your own producer (opens in a new tab) by Grey Alien Games. ✨
• [Production] Video game pitch decks: how you get them 'right'! (opens in a new tab) by Simon Carless. ✨
• [Programming] How to Build Software From Source (opens in a new tab) by Andrew Kelley. ✨
• [Rendering] Behind the Pretty Frames: Diablo IV (opens in a new tab) by Muhammad. ✨