Hard Light Productions Forums

Off-Topic Discussion => Gaming Discussion => Topic started by: General Battuta on June 08, 2016, 10:40:03 am

Title: HLP made a new, FS2-style space shooter!
Post by: General Battuta on June 08, 2016, 10:40:03 am
IN THE HOUSE OF THE DYING SUN (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=92029.0)

(it's out now) (you can buy it here (http://steamcommunity.com/app/283160))

House of the Dying Sun is a mission-based space sim in which you play as the ghostly commander of the Empire's Elite Guard, on a mission of revenge against the traitor lords who killed your Emperor. Lead from the front with Diaspora style flight physics, swapping instantly between atmospheric and Newtonian flight. Command your fleet of destroyers and frigates in Homeworld-style tactical view. Outfit your ships with drones, kamikaze charges, betrayer modules, gap drives, and other selectable gear.

House is primarily the work of ex-Bungie dev Mike Tipul, but it's got a number of HLP alumni on the team! I did lore/story writing and MaX of Beyond the Red Line contributed drums to the superb dynamic OST.

I think it's super cool that talent farmed up on HLP is helping to put new space sims out in the world. There's a thread for the game already but I wanted to draw attention to how dope it is that HLP's got legacy.
Title: Re: HLP made a new, FS2-style space shooter!
Post by: Firesteel on June 08, 2016, 11:03:32 am
Congrats! I'll definitely check it out! Does it have any procedural music? My team on the project I posted yesterday was trying to get the system used in the new Tomb Raider to work in Unity and couldn't manage it with the time constraints.
Title: Re: HLP made a new, FS2-style space shooter!
Post by: General Battuta on June 08, 2016, 11:26:42 am
I believe so, yeah! The drums are procedural.
Title: Re: HLP made a new, FS2-style space shooter!
Post by: Firesteel on June 08, 2016, 11:57:11 am
I'm enjoying it so far. I haven't been able to pay too close attention to the audio, but I'm very happy that a new mission to mission space game has been created! For reference, this was the system my team and I tried to get working:

http://intelligentmusicsystems.com/index.html (http://intelligentmusicsystems.com/index.html)

I think we're going to try and patch it in once we get in touch with the tool's creator again. Fun fact, he was a PhD student at UCSC where I'm graduating from in a few days.
Title: Re: HLP made a new, FS2-style space shooter!
Post by: Darius on June 08, 2016, 07:05:28 pm
Heck yeah MaX!

I thought he had disappeared from the internet.
Title: Re: HLP made a new, FS2-style space shooter!
Post by: 0rph3u5 on June 09, 2016, 03:13:15 am
(it's out now) (you can buy it here (http://steamcommunity.com/app/283160))

I wish there was a more precise term than "out"... it's still in Early Access. The term "out" was become a lot more fluent in recent years because of Early Access and made it very deceptive...
Title: Re: HLP made a new, FS2-style space shooter!
Post by: FrikgFeek on June 09, 2016, 10:49:34 am
It's supposed to be feature complete but not fully tested. If you want to pay to be a beta tester you can buy it now. If you think beta testing isn't something you should be paying for you can just wait a few weeks until it's officially released.
Title: Re: HLP made a new, FS2-style space shooter!
Post by: General Battuta on June 09, 2016, 11:01:28 am
Yeah, it's basically in open beta. Though I don't know if I'd say feature complete! Hopefully Tipul has a couple more tricks up his sleeve (including the already announced wave clear mode).
Title: Re: HLP made a new, FS2-style space shooter!
Post by: RangerKarl on June 09, 2016, 02:22:10 pm
purifier bombs are so good

PURGE CLEANSE KILL IN THE NAME OF THE DEAD EMPEROR
Title: Re: HLP made a new, FS2-style space shooter!
Post by: procdrone on June 10, 2016, 08:11:25 am
wait a sec.

You say HLP made it, so you were involved in developing of this cool game ?
Title: Re: HLP made a new, FS2-style space shooter!
Post by: The E on June 10, 2016, 08:25:16 am
House is primarily the work of ex-Bungie dev Mike Tipul, but it's got a number of HLP alumni on the team! I did lore/story writing and MaX of Beyond the Red Line contributed drums to the superb dynamic OST.
Title: Re: HLP made a new, FS2-style space shooter!
Post by: __MaX__ on June 10, 2016, 11:08:41 am
Hey nope Darius ! Pretty busy with my projects... i still have some leads for Diaspora to finalize also :]

@Firesteel All the soundtrack is procedural. I prefer how General Battuta put it : it is a dynamic score.
Every single action in the game changes dynamically the music. I wrote all the score ( Ambiant, suspens and battle ) and i did the whole integration on FMOD. Mike just had to send events back to FMOD api to drive the soundtrack.

Someday i'll release a post-mortem explaining how everything works. It is kinda dense when you see the sequencer, but it is not so hard to understand : https://twitter.com/033MaX/status/740991465464160257. Looking back on the way i did the FMOD implementation, i would definitely make some things differently and improve even more the possibilities.

Hope you enjoy the game :)
Title: Re: HLP made a new, FS2-style space shooter!
Post by: Firesteel on June 10, 2016, 03:35:27 pm
I'd agree that I think dynamic score is a better way to describe it. I was curious to know if you'd done something similar to what we tried integrating into the project I posted a few days ago. It sounds like you wound up with something similar.

Congrats again to you guys! I've been enjoying it quite a lot now that I have a bit more time on my hands.
Title: Re: HLP made a new, FS2-style space shooter!
Post by: Ace on June 10, 2016, 11:51:15 pm
_Max_ you should replace those bells in the intro with some nice taikos and synths like your trailer music :)

Really enjoying it, and I've been following this for a while. I do hope that he does some mission packs and maybe a few other fighter types. :)
Title: Re: HLP made a new, FS2-style space shooter!
Post by: NGTM-1R on June 11, 2016, 12:46:08 am
So is anybody actually going to, uh, describe how the game plays?
Title: Re: HLP made a new, FS2-style space shooter!
Post by: Colonol Dekker on June 11, 2016, 02:35:43 am
The game thread is linked in the first post.

This thread is highlighting the HLP staff involvement.
Title: Re: HLP made a new, FS2-style space shooter!
Post by: __MaX__ on June 11, 2016, 04:56:42 am
Thank you ! I'm glad you're enjoying it guys !

@Firesteel Interesting approach for IMS, but i'm pretty sure that it's not going to become a game changer. For several reasons :

- The audio is bundle in the game datas, if you need high quality samples and you are using a lot of instruments, there is no way it's going to be good for low memory systems (aka consoles)... and since most of the market is designed around consoles... well you know where i'm going with this. It could work for percussions, but there isn't many games with "percussion only" score.

- Even with high memory systems it's gonna be hard to replicate some of the percussions i can use on my DAW. For instance, i have some loaded percussions for HotDS over 100mb, and if you combine every single percussion instruments it can go from 500mb to 1gig in memory. If you optimize audio and reduce the number of samples, you are definitely loosing quality and details. I'm not sure musicians and composers are going to like that. (I'm not linking it just thinking about it)

- Since the audio is driven by midi files, you can indeed play with the tempo. That's the strength of this system, but besides that, you don't have much more possibilities. Yeah you can analyze the midi and do some fancy snapshots with audio levels and creating dynamically transitions between them, but you can replicate that with FMOD.

- You are always artistically limited when using this kind of techniques. I mean : fillers between themes, human variations and details in the instruments, really odd rythmic schemes extending from one measure to another... and so on. Music is really difficult to replicate and that's why there isn't a lot of middleware in the industry for that.

- Why trying to replicate something with a procedural system if you can do (almost) the same thing with less memory usage and high quality audio.


Basically what i'm saying is : use FMOD if you have a musician in the team. NOPE i'm not here to sell FMOD, but the tool is insanely flexible and allows you to do whatever you want with your music. Monolith nailed it a long time ago with NOLF2. You can do a really cool dynamic soundtrack with no creative limitation and really good quality. FMOD allows you to do exactly the same thing as in NOLF2 but with better tools and a gorgeous sequencer.

The only problem is : you need the composer in the team... there is a bunch of work to make a dynamic soundtrack work.


@Ace yup i thought about that. Mike deals with everything related to the sound design, i didn't discuss much about the potential changes atm.
Title: Re: HLP made a new, FS2-style space shooter!
Post by: Firesteel on June 13, 2016, 01:31:13 pm
Thank you ! I'm glad you're enjoying it guys !

@Firesteel Interesting approach for IMS, but i'm pretty sure that it's not going to become a game changer. For several reasons :

- The audio is bundle in the game datas, if you need high quality samples and you are using a lot of instruments, there is no way it's going to be good for low memory systems (aka consoles)... and since most of the market is designed around consoles... well you know where i'm going with this. It could work for percussions, but there isn't many games with "percussion only" score.

- Even with high memory systems it's gonna be hard to replicate some of the percussions i can use on my DAW. For instance, i have some loaded percussions for HotDS over 100mb, and if you combine every single percussion instruments it can go from 500mb to 1gig in memory. If you optimize audio and reduce the number of samples, you are definitely loosing quality and details. I'm not sure musicians and composers are going to like that. (I'm not linking it just thinking about it)

- Since the audio is driven by midi files, you can indeed play with the tempo. That's the strength of this system, but besides that, you don't have much more possibilities. Yeah you can analyze the midi and do some fancy snapshots with audio levels and creating dynamically transitions between them, but you can replicate that with FMOD.

- You are always artistically limited when using this kind of techniques. I mean : fillers between themes, human variations and details in the instruments, really odd rythmic schemes extending from one measure to another... and so on. Music is really difficult to replicate and that's why there isn't a lot of middleware in the industry for that.

- Why trying to replicate something with a procedural system if you can do (almost) the same thing with less memory usage and high quality audio.


Basically what i'm saying is : use FMOD if you have a musician in the team. NOPE i'm not here to sell FMOD, but the tool is insanely flexible and allows you to do whatever you want with your music. Monolith nailed it a long time ago with NOLF2. You can do a really cool dynamic soundtrack with no creative limitation and really good quality. FMOD allows you to do exactly the same thing as in NOLF2 but with better tools and a gorgeous sequencer.

The only problem is : you need the composer in the team... there is a bunch of work to make a dynamic soundtrack work.


@Ace yup i thought about that. Mike deals with everything related to the sound design, i didn't discuss much about the potential changes atm.

As I wasn't the main audio person on our team, I don't know the ins and outs of the tool IMS built or how much memory it eats, but based on what the tool's creator said, it isn't intended for more than percussion. He also mentioned that it wasn't intended to replace traditional scores, only help blend them between game states more effectively. I think it also requires FMOD to do something, as I remember seeing an FMOD plugin to Unity after we tried to integrate it.