Factory models

Part of the issue has to do with the expectations based on what was communicated not matching the reality of the changes. For perspective, the structure terrain interaction stuff was posted and discussed on the forums by mid January, with pictures and details. If that level of communication had been done for the proposed new factory designs, I think the result would've been a lot clearer and there would've been enough negative feedback to prevent the factories from being changed to this new version, without so many complaints about a lack of communication. Additionally, it probably would've resulted in more feedback and more interest regarding the factory changes, and it might've even resulted in additional volunteers to make better new versions of the factories.

I understand that this is late, but I wasn't aware of when the designs were finalized and ready for feedback. Anyways, here's some:

This LOD level has very dominant team colors and it looks odd.

Which one of the factories is t2? The factories on the right have more visual emphasis (larger, more impressive, size), but they are significantly less powerful than the t2 support factory on the left.

Ie. The t1 factory is the least powerful, it should have the smallest visual footprint, then in order: t2 support, t2 hq, t3 support, t3 hq

However I don't think the stripping away parts route is the right one, because the stripped away versions look strictly worse than the old counterparts. The worse looking models simply have a much bigger negative visual impact than the transition from Blinn-Phong to BRDF, fixed textures and tech up animations have a collective positive visual impact.

I also think that the (cybran land) factories are harder to distinguish from each other, even with the stripped down support facs.

Aeon factories and pgens appear too bright. They stick out compared to other factions. The pgens look overexposed. This is probably easiest changed in the aeon specific shader since the issue seems to apply across the board (@BlackYps )

Aeon t2 support fac: this LOD level looks weird. T1 fac LOD levels look fine.

Aeon facs also have the problem as cybran facs with the support fac models being stripped versions of the hq model.

This bug (black factories) occurs sometimes when zooming from very close distance (looking somewhere else, not at the facs) to where the LOD changes. Can't reproduce 100% of the time though.

Similar issue when zooming top-down rather than bottom-up. Replay: https://replay.faforever.com/19388204

As a sidenote, despite the many issues the original art was made by the pros at gpg and they look pretty damn good. I don't want to be too discouraging in saying that the change was a net negative (when playing aeon/cybran, uef looks sick), at least in its current state.

the new hq's are the original factories made by gpg the only changes made to them were to allow for proper anims to support facs and stripping parts away for the support factories the only real change was adding some spec team to the cybran land hq's and t1 to differentiate them

@jip said in Factory models:

I think that it looks a lot better, and this topic is the proof that people look at the game up close.

This is in my opinion not an entirely correct conclusion.

The thing that worked really well in terms of design for some of the old HQ factories, is a distinct change in silhouette (the outline). Silhouette is really important when designing anything, because apparently humans are specifically good at recognizing different silhouettes expecially at larger (!) distances.

Im speaking mostly about Cybran/Aeon Land and Cyrban/Aeon Air here, were the old ones were notably better in this regard. For the rest, they are on a similar level, including both good outline changes and ones were outline changes are severly lacking.

All in all i think you guys did incredible work and im looking forward to PBR, and of course my tip for designing better distinguishable HQs in the future is to think about the outline at larger distances. Of course, changing the outline is more animation work than just adding "details" (like additional arms for UEF), but that is imo what moves or would move HQ designs to a professional looking level.

There is a bunch of different issues to unpack here:

Communication
Yes, the pbr work in general was communicated basically everywhere. The plan to change the factories specifically a lot less. I can see that it could easily be missed. I think nobody of the involved people expected such a strong reaction to the changed models, so they got the same attention to advertise them like most other changes did.
Of course there is a certain responsibility to communicate planned changes, but there is a sentiment sometimes where people simply refuse to keep themselves in the loop, but then are up in arms that we are "forcing" unwanted change on them. That's a bit unfair. If you feel so strongly about the game, please play some faf-develop once in a while or at least read the planned patchnotes. In general we make it really easy to get involved into testing upcoming changes. Almost nobody does, so it feels like wasted effort to speficially promote all kinds of changes as the turnout simply isn't there.

I don't want to dwell on who is responsible for the communication problems too much and I would rather talk about the

Factories
Yes, the original HQ models have a lot of technical issues (no animations, stretched textures etc.) and it is necessary to change them. I think during the development process we made the mistake to to conflate these technical problems with the concept of adding elements to the models. So we tried to only remove elements for the support factories and leave the "normal" models as the HQs. While it was worthwhile to explore this direction, reality showed that this is extremely hard to pull off with good results.
It has worked really well for the aeon air facs, but for others not so much.

It's challenging to come up with good solutions, as we can only reuse the exisiting textures, so we have to kitbash something out of the existing parts. And it gets even more complicated because the ambient occlusion is baked into the textures. Which means when we move parts they can look out of place. However, we will still have this problem to an extend when we remove parts of the model. At some point we will have to make compromises.

I think the way forward is to experiment more with adding or removing elements to find something that works best for that particular factory. We learned from the feedback that it is important to easily distinguish the factories, so we should have an emphasize on changing the outline of the factories to make this possible. Again, the aeon air facs do a good job here in my opinion.
We should also work with closer feedback loops, as creating all these changes does take a lot of effort, so we should seek fast feedback on model ideas even before all the animations are done.
A lot of people participated here, so I expect you to provide that feedback, so we have something to work with and this situation doesn't happen again in the next patch.

The reasons of the changes were:
(1) The old HQs have no upgrade animations
(2) The old HQs are poorly made
-> "HQs were made by improperly re-using bits of texture and mesh and as a result they look bad."

Correct? It was a mere cosmetic reason? Even the animations do not matter that much, yeah (I say that as a sucker for animations)?

In other words: what would have happened if you had not changed the HQs/factories? People like me who zoom in to the max would be like "hm, texture seems off when looking up close"? Is this the reason, the motivation behind the change?

I think in 10 out of 10 times I would prefer a super easy to recognize factory - no matter how clumsy the ONE TIME animation - for the rest of the game over a shiny new perfectly aligned model which makes me either zoom out in order to see an HQ icon or get frustrated and annoyed with the game for missing the HQ when looking up close.

It's as if the Cybran ACU looked almost identical to the Cybran SACU models. Total nightmare trying to click on the right unit when zoomed in (kinda like finding the ACU icon when SACU icons look the same when zoomed out).

Maybe I am missing something bc so far I fail to see the trade-off working in favor of this change.

My ideal solutions would be:

1. leave the old models but with new shaders (not sure if that works)
2. new shaders with newly build models (looking like the old ones - not sure if/how that works)
3. roll back the changes/allow for players to play with the old models

@blackyps said in Factory models:

If you feel so strongly about the game, please play some faf-develop once in a while or at least read the planned patchnotes.

I cannot remember a visual change that was THIS drastic. I think what you ask for would work better if there was an initial kick-off making this a hot-topic. I do read patch notes, but did not see this piece of information since it was "lost" in a t4 level wall of text (which reflects the hard work you guys do!):

I read the initial notes - and saw all the images about the terrain. I think such drastic changes to models would be easier detected when getting a top spot when presenting planned changes. This time, it was put almost at the end of the list.

I think this is just a case of a well intentioned improvement going the wrong way. I saw the pbr shader posts and all but it didn’t mean anything to me and I would not have known it would lead to this outcome like many have expressed their dissatisfaction for. Sadly we can’t judge the pudding til we taste it… The question is what should be done now? Make the pbr shaders into a mod like RKX explosions for those who like it, or force people to make a mod to undo it who don’t like it? What about ladder players who don’t have the choice to play modded games?
I think ladder players are not concerned about shadows looking nice while playing but do care if they can tell an HQ apart from other buildings without having to use yet another mod that highlights HQs…

I've made various topics on the forums to give you all the opportunity to discuss the factory designs. They are bundled in the overview topic. You can continue your feedback in the dedicated topics, it would be a lot more streamlined than what we have here.

@Blodir and @Katharsas thank you for your constructive feedback, I've used them as examples on how to give proper feedback.

Now to debunk some stuff.

A lot of people mentioned that they feel surprised by these changes, and asked us to be more open about them. I'd like to turn this around: if you're that interested in what changes are coming then why didn't you:

• (1) Play on FAF Develop
• (2) Join the discussion on Discord
• (3) Join the discussion on Github

(1) is by far the easiest approach to know what is coming, while also providing us with valuable data to find bugs and performance issues. To mimic the terminology in the topic: it is a net-win for everyone involved

(2) (3) Everything we do is in the open, as promised when I took on the position of Game Lead (councilor) at the time. All the game development related channels on Discord can be read, only some have write restrictions to limit access to testers and game developers. The same applies to the work done on Github, where all it takes for you to join the discussion is to have a Github account of your own. A surprisingly large amount of people look on Github:

Those are exciting numbers. Some people that visit also joined in on conversations, and some even started contributing.

Changes that we make are usually promoted through the news, and at times even by Gyle with an average audience of 20.000 to 40.000 views per video. But those numbers turn pale when you know that the developers iteration topic has been viewed for 130.000 times!

To drive home the point: some people in this topic have a strong opinion with a on average negative attitude. Yet, those people did not or barely played on FAF Develop. Yet those people did not participate in discussions on Discord or on Github. And now these same people are here shitting on me that I did not manage to reach you

To hand-pick a few quotes and respond to them

@penguin_ said in Factory models:

but I think this should be reverted

We won't be reverting the changes because of a set back. FAF wouldn't have existed if we would revert every set back. I think 4 out of the 6 factory line ups that we've done so far are quite good. We're open to feedback and suggestions to improve all of them further

@biue said in Factory models:

the power to upset thousands of players

I'm very much aware that we last year we had 75.000 unique players according to our database. That is all I'll respond to of your (shit) post (ing)

@ninrai said in Factory models:

These changes just make it an overall worse game experience imo. Identifying the HQ by quickly looking at them is much harder now - forcing the player to zoom out more often in order to see the icons.

We're open to constructive feedback on how to improve them. See also this topic that acts as an overview to gather feedback.

@penguin_ said in Factory models:

Part of the issue has to do with the expectations based on what was communicated not matching the reality of the changes.

It didn't match our own expectations either, to quote myself:

@jip said in Factory models:

We ran into this issue, so we had to make a decision. Which we did: we're going to need to re-think how we tackle the HQs / support factories. The models have been on FAF Develop for months and we received no feedback on the factories during that time.

This is how development works - it takes a lot of experience to be able to properly see through a solution and all of its consequences. Our communication was still based on our initial assessment which applies to all units but the HQ factories. We only found out about that later though

@ninrai said in Factory models:

Not a fan of the "they'll get used to it" attitude in this case. Overall, the changes feel like a net-loss to me.

Objectively one part of change is to 'get used' to the changes. I do think the alternative needs to be equally good or better, which for some line ups is of course not quite the case yet

I actively read the forums and skim most of the discussion in the discord's ~100 channels so for something this big to take me by surprise is something else.

But regardless, we move on and discuss ways we can improve.

So the new HQs are all base FA with the support factories being stripped down. This might work for some of the designs but doesn't for others which have very little to remove to begin with. Is it possible with the new shaders to add parts to increase the distinction (and flare) of the HQs?

The shader change is unrelated to this in so far as the shader doesn't change what textures it uses. It just makes some of the problems more obvious. So it prompted the rework, but the shader change doesn't add any additional constraints to the new models.
Yes, it is possible in principle to add things but in practice you have to reuse existing parts because the textures are already filled with parts of the original mesh. We can't really fit in new UV islands as I tried to explain already

It seems to me like it would be desirable to use the models we've been using prior to this patch, and make some reasonable changes to fix/improve the related issues. However, you said:

@jip said in Factory models:

And we can't fix any of these issues because they re-use bits and pieces of the texture, fixing it here would make the model look bad at another location. All of the factories have issues such as these, which will be made a lot more prominent as we migrate towards PBR shaders.

Why/how is this an unsolvable problem? Why can't we just make and or generate new texture bits and pieces (or whole textures) that fit the old models?

(3) The old HQs are not compatible with our intention to introduce PBR shaders

Why/how would the old HQ models be incompatible with the intention to introduce PBR shaders? Please elaborate on the technical details.

go back to the 9th post jip explained it there

@madmax said in Factory models:

go back to the 9th post jip explained it there

I was literally quoting that post and asking questions regarding what was said in it...

@jip said in Factory models:

A lot of people mentioned that they feel surprised by these changes, and asked us to be more open about them. I'd like to turn this around: if you're that interested in what changes are coming then why didn't you:

(1) Play on FAF Develop
(2) Join the discussion on Discord
(3) Join the discussion on Github

@jip said in Factory models:

To drive home the point: some people in this topic have a strong opinion with a on average negative attitude. Yet, those people did not or barely played on FAF Develop. Yet those people did not participate in discussions on Discord or on Github. And now these same people are here shitting on me that I did not manage to reach you

We were happy with the game the way it was, and did not ask for PBR or different factory models. You go out of your way to change the game that we were content with. You think we should all go out of our way to keep up with the all the latest news and changes and beta test them for you? You could make all your changes as UI/SIM mods like a normal FAF citizen has to, but you were granted the game councilor position so you have the privilege to push whatever you want to the main game. All the criticism comes whenever you want to use/abuse that privilege.

alot of people here are wanting a roll back to the old design (engi mod models) i think we should go one step further and remove engi mod so no more hq's and only the pure gpg factories then the only thing needed to do for pbr would be adjusting some textures (normal and spec team)

The old design proposed new models and new shapes and I'll rather have them even with all their bad textures and bad lights than the new design which just feels bland and boring. The new design is paradoxically not an improvement to the visuals of the game.

I ll just ask again:

1. The reason for the changes was of mere cosmetic nature, correct?
2. Will it be possible to play with the old models (e.g., with a mod)?

This feels like a "sunk-cost fallacy" to me. People invested time and effort, and now are committed to invest even more instead of just rolling it back - no matter what the "community" says. I can understand this motion yet don't agree with it (implementing changes and categorically ruling out a roll back for imo unconvincing reasons given).

If you insist on remodeling I think it would be a good idea to lay out which options are available. Can new elements be added? Any shape? Any restrictions?

I think Jip is one of the best things that has happened to FAF in terms of development. We can't always agree on everything though.

@krapougnak the designs are just garbage tho, like they are badly made. They are way too big and they are the only things that just look wayyyy out of place. I mean the biggest is that they have 0 animations so the structure just pops out. Looks super unrefined and unprofessional.

@Ninrai these are primarily cosmetic changes. One could make a sim mod and play with the old models. But that mod would not be rated.

This feels like a "sunk-cost fallacy" to me.

There is no sunken cost dilemma. This direction started in 2021 with the aim to improve the immersion of the game for the average player. See also my second post on being game lead:

• https://forum.faforever.com/topic/2827/game-councilor/3

The initial prototypes were looking good, all we needed at that point was more general interest in the subject because the project is too large to tackle alone. It took a few patches, but slowly and surely people joined in and we're taking more and more steps into this direction. As we do this we found some bad apples, some bigger than others. The HQ factories are the bigger bad apples so far.

@ninrai said in Factory models:

no matter what the "community" says.

I feel slightly frustrated that you write this.

We're always open to feedback. In this particular topic I've mentioned that multiple times, let alone that we've even opened up a topic where you can give feedback on specific line ups.

@ninrai said in Factory models:

If you insist on remodeling I think it would be a good idea to lay out which options are available. Can new elements be added? Any shape? Any restrictions?

We can try to do so, but there aren't that many options in practice. Take for example the Cybran naval factory:

It already takes up the entire texture space, there's very little room for something new. Therefore the only thing we can do when we add parts is to re-use the texture space with respect to the dimensions of the individual shapes. If we don't, then they get all stretchy and things just look bad, which is exactly what happened:

This applies to essentially all factory line ups, which is exactly why the average HQ factory has so many visual issues. They re-use parts of the texture, but they forget the dimensions or what the texture represents and therefore it looks skewed and various properties (reflections, spec lighting, lighting) look off, breaking immersion.

@penguin_ said in Factory models:

Why/how is this an unsolvable problem? Why can't we just make and or generate new texture bits and pieces (or whole textures) that fit the old models?

I feel like I've already described it in this topic, but for the sake of it I did it in another topic too.

@thomashiatt said in Factory models:

We were happy with the game the way it was, and did not ask for PBR or different factory models. You go out of your way to change the game that we were content with. You think we should all go out of our way to keep up with the all the latest news and changes and beta test them for you? You could make all your changes as UI/SIM mods like a normal FAF citizen has to, but you were granted the game councilor position so you have the privilege to push whatever you want to the main game. All the criticism comes whenever you want to use/abuse that privilege.

There is no 'we' here Thomas, there is just 'you'. Stating I abuse the privilege of being game lead is pretty disgusting when I announced that these were my intentions from the very start.

@jip said in Factory models:

I feel slightly frustrated that you write this.
We're always open to feedback. In this particular topic I've mentioned that multiple times, let alone that we've even opened up a topic where you can give feedback on specific line ups

Not my intention to frustrate you. Probably more of a question how to get which information across in the future. I tried to explain how "it was written on page 76 of the proposal - how could you not have seen it?!" most likely is going to cause friction.
Alternative: have the most important/impactful changes listed at the top of your post, and even on the whats news page in the client
"New things coming up/which can be tested in FAF DEV:

1. Remodeled factories!
2. Improved sim speed
   ..."
   Then link to the forum and people can jump into discussion.
   I wrote "community" in quotation marks bc I don't want to imply that my opinion is representing the community. Several people in this thread, however, seem to have issues with the direction taken.

I read your 2/3 post you linked to. Did not see any reference to immersion/remodeling.

The feedback options now are good. Just want to point out that I felt like initial pushback from the devs here ("you didnt read", "you didnt play FAF dev" etc. which felt like blaming, nothing constructive). The feedback "let's roll it back bc the changes caused bigger problems compared to the texture issue before" will not be considered from what I understand.

The game was shipped in 2007 - I can live with imperfect textures I barely ever see. What I need to see instantly is which factory is an HQ. The old models served their purpose just fine imo. It does feel feel a little like "the back of the fridge texture looks messed up, even if we hardly ever see it - let's remodel the entire fridge".

Fingers crossed the final result will work well.