Debrief

Debrief Blog

  • Half-Life 1 Custom Map – Chaocity3 by Sulsa

    This map was an important map for me and my friends during our LAN days way back in the 2000s. It took me some time to uncover it again so I am mirroring it here. Download it here Note that this map was made for Half-Life 1 GoldSource (NOT the newer “Source” version). Author’s Notes…

  • Migrating to Google Shared/Team Drive

    We recently needed to move about 500GB of data over 5 years from a ton of people we no longer work with into a Shared Drive as part of our Gsuite. This move is intended to give us more full control over ownership and management of files. Unfortunately Google provides no way to migrate files…

  • Using ‘git sync’ to automate common Git commands

    At Brightrock Games about 5 of us actively use Git hourly to commit and pull work all day from the same branch. Doing this often means that every time you want to do a git pull or push, there are several manual steps you have to take to stash any outstanding changes you haven’t yet…

  • Migrating your project to Git LFS

    For the past 4 years we have been using Git as our repository for our game War for the Overworld. This includes 18,000+ commits totaling to a massive a 35GB repo. Its huge. So huge that our host, BitBucket, falls apart if one tries to clone the repo anew. I don’t blame BitBucket for this…

  • Creating a cutout shader for doors and windows

    For the game I’m currently working on is a 3D isometric management game where you build rooms on a spacestation. The rooms and spacestation are made up of a series of tilesets so the player can effectively paint out the rooms in any size and shape they wish and the wall tiles are snapped together and…

  • Improving the FBX workflow between 3ds Max and Unity3D

    As some of our artists swear by 3ds Max we must support it and ensure the workflow between it and Unity3D is as seemless as possible. Unfortunately even though 3ds Max and among the top few 3D modelling applications there are still some serious workflow issues with it. One of the common tasks one performs –…

  • Why is Physics.UpdateBodies using up so much time? 20ms to 2ms

    As part of performing some initial prototyping and load testing for our next game we had to determine how to implement the physics system. For our game we required a dynamic world and the ability to simulate 100-500 agents. That kind of target is right on the edge of needing to write a bespoke system so as…

  • Important Tips on Hiring a Video Games Writer

    I’m Scott Richmond, the Producer and a programmer at Brightrock Games. I am lucky enough to have been able to go through the experience of Kickstarting and, as of April 2015, successfully releasing our game War for the Overworld. WFTO had a considerable amount of writing in it as well as voice acting, and in this article I…

  • How to Improve the Performance of Unity3D Animations

    In our game War for the Overworld we make pretty heavy use of animations with users being able to potentially see 25-100 units on screen at once. This means that the Animation Renderer takes up a considerable part of our frame time, and as such any tuning there can create a noticeable performance improvement. Recently I decided to…

  • Tuning Git for large binary repositories

    Git isn’t particularly well suited for video game repositories where you want to version binary files such as art assets and at some point it will start to crack at the seams. Currently there is no 64bit Git build for Windows and at some point your repository will begin to crash with Out of Memory exceptions…