Techland has now developed two Dying Light games, or at least one game, where the "digits" is an unknown number. Dying Light 2 come out.
Its developers are first-person parkour experts, and learned that the focus of "free running" is on the "free" part. There is no way to build a great parkour game that gets you hooked and refuses to respect where you want to go. Instead, the game is led by runners, and developers are downgraded to safety cars, driving alongside them, making sure nothing interferes with the brisk joy of power.
To figure out how they did it, Bartosz & # 39; Glova & # 39; Kulon (the man responsible for parkour and the accidental invention of its grapple) They talked about some of the issues the studio addressed.
Too many ledges
The longest staircase in the world is side by side with the Swiss Nissen Mountain Railway, with a total of 11,674 steps. But bringing two countries to Poland, Techland staff will tell you it's okay. When they tried to place a climbable surface by hand in Dying Light, they ended up with 50,000 ledges on a map-still more was needed.
Glova said at the 2018 GDC: "It's scary to deal with so many objects and it's impossible to manage." It's also a technical issue: these ledges engulf the limited memory of the previous generation of consoles.
The solution is to detect the ledge at runtime during runtime. As you jog in Harran at Dying Light or the sequel to an unknown city, the game keeps trying to find potential platforms in front of you. This means that you can climb any surface you have, whether or not the developer intends.
Of course, for level designers and artists, this is a nightmare, they must ensure that the final roof and backyard are arranged for the players who visit, but now they are old. Nowadays, ledge detection algorithms have become cleaner.
"This is our first attempt, and I made a lot of mistakes in doing so," Glova told me. "In Dying Light 2, it can be better optimized, more precise, and actually more complicated, but it can help us in different ways we couldn't reach in the first game.
Mario is not real
First-person perspective has an interesting way to set your brain to "reality mode". Imagine if the belief in Edge of the Mirror jumped to the same height as Mario. For reasons that are difficult to elaborate but indisputable, this would be a very serious mistake.
Before Techland's new sequel came out, Glova decided that the work still needed to be done to meet those expectations. "When I play a lot of Dying Light 1, I don't think the character's bounce is so realistic."
As a result, developers updated their physics engine. "I spent 6,000 hours in Dying Light, so I saw a lot of things that ordinary people can't see," Glova said.
Runners do not blink
The grapple in Dying Light is essentially a short-range, long-range teleporter-Glova created it this way after his algorithm happened. Players love it, but it also eliminates the need to participate in parkour games at the core of the game.
When starting development on Dying Light 2, the team decided to create a grappling hook that would work in tandem with running instead of replacing it.
"It's more based on physics," Glova said. "It's like Tarzan or Spider-Man. It won't be abused because you must have something to escape."
You can still move yourself forward, but its range is limited to a few meters. The idea is to use it in combination with parkour skills: jump out from the ledge full open and then unhook when you are close enough to the next roof.
Visionary is hard
"If you want to become a professional truck driver in Poland, you will get a perspective test," Glova said. "If there is something nearby, you need to know that it is close to you."
The Polish government has not designed a similar test for citizens who want to start a first-person platform. However, there is a similar problem of conquest-when you play Dying Light, you will manipulate large objects in a limited field of view. You don't see the entire height or width of the character, which can cause problems.
For starters, there is no reference point when judging jumps. "You expect to jump farther or closer," Glova said. To make matters worse, you may often not find objects in front of you. If they are less than a meter high, they are likely to fall into your field of vision, waiting for you to trip.
Techland addresses these issues in several ways. First of all, the studio uses "coyote time", a trick from developers that gives you more time to press the Jump key after you leave the platform. Technically, you should fall, but it feels good.
Second, they cause your character to automatically climb onto small objects to avoid interrupting your activities. Finally, they can predict where you intend to land in the jump and change the speed slightly to help you reach your destination.
"We did a lot of tricks behind the scenes," Glova said. "Players feel like they're actually doing these crazy stunts, but we're actually helping them a lot."
Techland may have to do all the hard work for Dying Light to work. However, since falling in love with traversal, the studio has become the forefront of the FPS genre. When Glova watched the trailer for Doom Eternal, he saw a first-person parkour game.
"At the moment, this is an industry standard," Glova said. "The edges of the first mirror show that it can be done. But we have proven that it can be done on a larger scale. We are the benchmark title."
For more information on "Death Light 2", check out how to use zombies to fall, what happens when you spend too much time in the dark and why Techland promises at least four years of post-release support.
