Arbiter - Monthly Recap - June 2024
Greetings Whispers!
Finally finished Rebirth the other week and it critically hit me with so much psychic damage that I just had to rant about it, so I did! If you're interested, you can give that a read here.
While the game kinda falls apart in the last act, I was able to snag a few hundred references throughout my playthrough, so that was fun. Such is the curse of becoming a level designer~
The Gates of Hell
June actually kicked off really well! I commenced my deep dive into Substance Designer and started remaking my environment textures with the new workflow. I followed a bunch of fundamental tutorials (shoutouts to Johnny M), purchased a few premium guides, studied other materials, and just tried to build as much foundational knowledge as I could before getting crazy with it. Honestly after a month of using the program, I really have nothing negative to say about it. It simply Just Works ™.
My main goal with learning Designer was to speed up my workflow, and I'd say it's been pretty successful. Being able to build up a texture really quickly, with tons of variation, all in a single app is truly mind-blowing, and it genuinely feels like magic when you're doing it. I'm at the point now where I've remade most of my architectural textures, and next I'll be moving onto more organic stuff like stone surfaces and tree bark.
Now sadly I did not become a Substance God in a single month, but I'm pretty happy with where my textures are landing. Substance does a really great job at building 3D detail from 2D information, and as a result I'd say the textures have all seen pretty significant visual upgrades from where they were before. The level of detail is higher, there's way more color variety and depth, and they react to lighting much more realistically. The best part is that due to the roundtrip workflow between Substance and Unity, I can iterate on them quickly and easily. I truly can't complain.
But the real power of the app is its long-term versatility. For example, my brick texture was the first thing I remade and I was able to set it up in such a way that, in the future, I can tweak a few values here and there to change it from standard bricks, to round bricks, to messy bricks, circular bricks, destroyed bricks, etc. I can change their offsets, level of damage, colors—all within the same general "brick material."
Previously, in order to do that I'd have to make unique high-poly models of each individual brick type and then build their textures separately, hopping from Zbrush to Substance Painter to 3ds Max to Photoshop and finally back to Unity. Long-term the new workflow will truly be an astronomical time saver, and it makes a lot of my goals with the scope of Arbiter (god help me) a lot more manageable. Yippee!
Smoldering Inferno
All of that said, Substance reminded me of something that's been bothering me for a while. I started to notice that as my materials got more and more complicated, the program got progressively slower. Pretty reasonable, and definitely manageable, but it resurfaced a truth I had ignored for too long. My PC is fucking old.
I built my PC back in 2013/2014, and sure I've replaced a part or two here and there, but I've never done a full upgrade. I figured between Substance slowing down and the Elden Ring DLC on the horizon, it was better to do it now than wait until my old one craps out and dies on me. If I'm gonna improve the speed of my workflow, then I might as well go all the way. It was time.
For context, I am not a PC builder. The one I built 10 years ago is the only one I've ever built, and I did so firmly holding the Newegg Tutorial Man's hand. This is not my world, but I am a prideful, masochistic fuck who (as you've read over the past few years) will absolutely trade sanity to learn how to do something myself. Besides, I've already done it before! What could possibly go wrong?
Well, I started by doing my research. I checked opinions on good parts, made sure everything worked together, conferred with people who know this shit, and did everything I possibly could not to fuck up. Once I figured out my parts, I considered getting express shipping, but opted against it only to get it the next day anyways. I felt it. Luck was on my side.
One thing my resident expert told me was to make sure my AIO cooler worked with my motherboard, so I double checked to make sure it did. When the parts all got here however, I immediately noticed that while it does technically work with the mobo I got, it was going to need a separate mounting kit from the manufacturer. But I'm no fool. I know how slow that process can be and so rather than fucking around with adapters and separate mounts, I instantly returned the AIO and bought a different one locally that already had it. Within 2 hours of receiving my initial package, my first error was already corrected. I was fully locked in.
From there, everything went perfectly. Like with Designer, I followed guides for putting my specific parts together, learned how my case works, found all of my headers on the mobo, and everything went together nice and smoothly. I did forget to buy case fans, but they got here the next day and I installed them without hassle. Pressed the power button and it came on without issue.
I installed my drivers, rebooted several thousand times, made sure everything was up to date, and then did some final checks to make sure everything was solid. As I put my hand to the case fans however, I noticed I had put them all in backwards. A simple fix, I thought.
And it was! I flipped the fans, taking out all 12 SCREWS per set before putting them back in. Time consuming, but it was my fault so fair enough. I figured since this would probably be the last time I was opening up the case that it'd be a good chance to also put in my extra HDDs and SSDs, so I threw those in there too. All was well.
And then I booted it up and got the red light of death. CPU error. Insane, I wondered, since all I did between the time it worked and the time it didn't was flip the fans and add a couple drives. As far as I was concerned, there was simply no logical reason for it to just stop working like that. That devilish red eye appeared out of nowhere, as if the god of this world itself had descended upon me to remind me that life's never that easy and I was a fool for thinking it would be. My fault OG.
I started to panic a bit, so I told my friend what was going on and he helped me start troubleshooting. Several hours later, I knew it wasn't the fans, case, cooler, GPU, CMOS, loose cables, incorrect cables, bent pins, drives, or literally any other normal troubleshooting step. Aside from the backwards fans, I had built this fucker perfectly. There was simply no reason for it not to be working, especially since it WAS working before. But god's unblinking red eye stared back at me regardless. Not directly at me per se, but at my soul—challenging my will to live with every press of the power button. I was completely defeated.
I took a moment to have a brief mental breakdown before I resolved to start sending parts back the next morning. I was pretty sure it was just a faulty motherboard, so I put the packaging back together and went to bed. Still felt like shit the next morning, but I slowly picked myself up and decided to spend one more day troubleshooting. Surely there were still things I could try, right?
Well after an entire day, I had nothing. Absolutely nothing worked nor did it push me towards a solution. All I knew was that it had to be the CPU or the motherboard, so I'd return both and hope for the best. But I wanted to try one more thing before I did.
Just to make absolutely sure it wasn't the CPU fan not being detected, I uninstalled my AIO and opted to try the default Intel cooler instead. But it was here that I noticed something. The pins on my motherboard were fine, but the plastic beneath them had... melted?
I have absolutely no idea when or how this happened, but I'd been so careful throughout the process that I assume it was whenever the motherboard was initially manufactured. I noticed there were bits of debris in the same area (which likely got moved around as I put the case on its side), so I cleared it all out with some tweezers and made sure none of the pins were impacted. Put the default Intel cooler on just to give it a shot and put everything back together, and sure enough, it fucking worked. I immediately switched back to my AIO to make sure it wasn't the cooler, and thankfully it turned on without issue. God finally blinked.
I'm not the biggest fan of having a mildly damaged motherboard, but I've done several diagnostics and have been using the PC for about a week now and haven't had any issues. Worst case I've got an extended warranty so it's all good, but man, it was a frustrating week to say the least. On the one hand I wish I had just forgotten to plug in a cable or something, but on the other it does feel good to know it took a cosmic being's interference to thwart my PC building genius. Next time (which is hopefully a minimum of 10 years from now), I'll be ready.
Return to the Surface
With that, aside from a wonky headphone jack on the front panel, everything's working perfectly! I got to end Hell Week on a relaxing Canada Day celebration with family—the horrors of Rebirth and my PC now firmly in the past. This week, I'm excited to start getting back into Substance and FINALLY get into the Elden Ring DLC! We made it gamers!
Something else I've been doing lately is condensing my initial GDD (Game Design Document) into a much more digestible look at the overall game—an Arbiter Bible, if you will. As I ramp up on the environments over the next few months, I'm hoping to loop in my art lead (the lovely gravity) much more directly so she can help me hone in the game's visuals. I've never actually shared the entirety of the game's lore, mechanics, etc. with anyone before, but I'm realizing now that I really need somebody to bounce those ideas off of to make sure it all works as I finalize the details. This will hopefully give me a means of doing that while also kicking the visuals up a notch, so I'm excited to really see how far we can push this thing!
Anyways, that's it for me this month! Probably one of the more stressful months I've had in awhile but god damn, we made it to the other side. Big thanks to my friend Vinnie for helping out with the PC issues, and of course to all of you for your continued support! Stay based gamers!
Cheers,
Jordy
