Chris' recent work include Molor's sword and mycelium weapon.
There's actually some difference between cutscene version and player's one for mycelium weapon, as it had to be adapted to be usable, as initially Westin cobbled it together from various pieces of other powers.
Chris mostly works in photoshop and only minimally in 3dsMax.
Most of Chris' work consists of realizing that he did it wrong compared to what he tried to achieve and hitting undo button.
Chris worked on TV before, particularly on "Battle 360°", although he was more on an editor.
According to Chris, "making a lightsabre" is basically an intro to rotoscoping.
By now, Chris as in Cryptic for more than 10 years, and for all that time he was VFX Artist.
Originally he joined to Champions team, but then moved to STO just before it launched and were here even since, with the exception of lending a hand to help with Neverwinter launch.
Chris' first work for STO was fixing gorn rock throw, because it stubbornly wasn't working, and team copied it from Champions where Chris was the one who designed it initially.
Among problems was the fact that STO names had underscore in them, while Champions didn't. Another that initially rock failed to scale, so he's throw "hamburger-sized" pebble.
As the one who actually makes the effects, Chris is aware that every time the power he's making right now would be running alongside with "97 other" and the result would be seizure-inducing glowy mess, but hes bossed just see shiny and want it to be shinier.
Technically grenade throw animation works like that: script glues grenade to the hand, starts timer and plays throw animation, and upon timer expiration despawns grenade in hand and spawns another in the air.
They're testing making melee weapons scaling with character size, for now they'll be tied to hands' size.
"Gorn throw a wrench into everything."
In STO weapons are technically an effects, while in Neverwinter weapons are parts of costume, which causes STO weapons to sometimes disappear when they shouldn't or fail to do so when they should. "It's kind of bad decision that we're stuck with."
The biggest thing that happened to engine was Lightning 2.0 that allowed a lot of new effects.
That also allowed them to have more true colours, because initially they'd just have to adjust RGB channels, separately, and resulting colour would always look wrong, particularly red would always look ping or orange.
At this point 30% of item library in STO is legacy items that aren't used anywhere.
Chris actually already made most of the Star Trek effects he wanted to put in STO.
Genesis device for Foundry creators were made by Donny and Chris in spare time.
Impulse trails were made from the very beginning to be as universal as possible, just different colours, with the exception of special cases like vaadwaur.
Cover shield was supposed to have all those hexagons crumble upon destruction or expiration, but it didn't work out.
Chris said that technically they can work in colour change for weapons, but CBS persistently says that this is forbidden thing to do.
Chris said that while he can't recall it fully, he thinks that, at least at the time, they were unable to make pulse phasers to look like they did in Wrath of Khan.
Cryptic is usually good at crunching, although historically they had some big ones. Worst one was 3-month while preparing for release, and it made Chris hate "Una Mas" because that's what producer who loved it constantly mass-ordered and team started complaining about the lack of variety too late.
Last big crunch was while preparing for Delta Rising release.
Current policy discourages crunches to avoid burnout because there would always be some new content to do and thus pacing is important, and if crunch is unavoidable, they last for a week or two, but then participants get downtime to relax.
Because of Mike's position he is exempt from the crunches and feels guilty for leaving on time while others are working and there was a time when he returned and bought everyone some candy and soda.
There were time when beam misses were shooting into weird direction. That's because there were some rounding error that would result in offset coordinate would be way too big and engine would default coordinate to this map's 0.
Initially DIS had huge lens flare, but then got rid of it, so Cryptic have to modify it eventually.
They can't make Nemesis-style hull-hugging shields because of some issues with Dx11 that too many people are still using. Chris just had meeting about that earlier this day.
Post edited by baddmoonrizin on
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rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 59,174Community Moderator
Interesting... so they know the Pulse Phasers don't quite look right...
And the guy worked on Battle 360. Huh... cool. I think they had a whole set following USS Enterprise during WW2.
I can't take it anymore! Could everyone just chill out for two seconds before something CRAZY happens again?!
The nut who actually ground out many packs. The resident forum voice of reason (I HAZ FORUM REP! YAY!)
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And the guy worked on Battle 360. Huh... cool. I think they had a whole set following USS Enterprise during WW2.
normal text = me speaking as fellow formite
colored text = mod mode
For clarification this was in reference to the transporter effects
Alcohol in the workplace is typically not allowed except during special parties and such. I'm with you on the pizza though.
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