The Unreal Forest: step 26

Development Log, The Endless Forest,

Motivated by bug reports and criticism of players following the release of beta 4, I started to tweak the remake of The Endless Forest so it would resemble the original game more. The two areas I focused on were controls and aesthetics. I’m happy with the changes I made to the controls but ran into a lot of trouble trying to make the game look in Unreal Engine the way it does in Quest3D. Part of the reason for this is that we painstakingly adapted the look of the game to the rather primitive rendering capacities of that old engine. In my frustration I decided to just make the game look good in Unreal and not worry about whether it resembled the original or not.

I started with the material used on the floor. Since the view of the game is top down most of the time, the floor has a great impact on the overall look of the game. I reused the textures from the original game but increased their resolution through an AI-driven process in an application called Topaz Gigapixel AI. I was quite impressed by the new detail in the high resolution textures. There’s textures for dirt, grass, light and shadows that were blended in a very specific way in Quest3D, unavailable in Unreal Engine. Instead of attempting to mimic that system, as I had before, I started over from scratch, with the same textures, but using blending methods specific to the new engine. I also added some relief and detail through normal maps generated by NormalMap Online based on the original textures.

The new material graph for the floor shader. UV maps for different areas and layers on the left. The column of textures are parameters that are changed for types of floor. The light gray rectangles are for special areas: ruin and pond.

It took several days and several start-overs to get a result that I liked only to realize that now seams were visible between the tiles that make up the floor. I discovered these were not only caused by the uprezzing of the textures, but the new shader also made visible UV mapping errors that had not been visible before. So I corrected these in Blender.

In beta 4 the shadows were colored by three extra lights shining in the opposite direction of the sun light, imitating the natural effect of bouncing light. I replaced this by a Skylight element.
None of Unreal’s built-in methods for simulating fog was capable of hiding objects in the distance. As a result, geometry popped in abruptly when crossing forest borders. This was fixed by replacing the fog by a shader on a plane in front of the camera that colored objects based on distance. Sometimes primitive methods work better that attempts to simulate physical reality.

To complement the increased resolution of the floor textures, I also uprezzed the textures of the ruin, the playground, the watering hole and the trees and added generated normal maps.

The camera angle was also tweaked slightly to resemble the original game more. And the controls for walking, jumping and interacting with obstacles were also fine-tuned for smoothness.
The strange error of the swimming frog floating in the pond was also corrected.
I tweaked the shader of the tree foliage to become transparent when it is in front of the camera in order to have a better view on the deer.

At the end of this process the overall look of the game was actually similar to the original when I reduced the contrast in post processing. So I added a slider in the game’s options to change the contrast. Personally I think the goal of making The Endless Forest look better than the original has been achieved. But I will let you be the judge of that.

Phase One, near the ruin with the old oak in the distance. At the top the original game, at the bottom the remake.
Phase Three, on the playground. At the top the original game, at the bottom the remake.

Note that trees and plants are placed in a very different way in the remake. Instead of the wonderful system available in Quest3D that allowed us to manually place threes and decor, I created a system in Unreal that places trees randomly within certain parameters. This is why they don’t appear in the same locations. The advantage of the new method, while we lose some of the deliberateness of the original, is that the forest can change in the future and that the density per area, similar to the original by default, can be increased by the player. The resolution of many textures was increased through AI but the 3D models remain the same as in the original.

I didn’t feel ready to release a new beta version because there’s still a number of bugs and issues I want to address first. And because I’m going on honeymoon.

Let me know what you think!

Auriea Harvey: My Veins Are the Wires, My Body Is Your Keyboard

Event, Faith, Personal

From 2 February to 7 July there will be a giant exhibition about Auriea’s artistic career in the New York Museum of the Moving Image, starting with sketchbooks from the early 1990s all the way to new digital sculptures created for the show. Since during a large chunk of that period (from 1999 to 2019) we were working together, a lot of the pieces in the show are collaborations: web projects by Entropy8Zuper! and videogames by Tale of Tales.

The exhibition will focus on her contributions to our work, which have always involved digital sculpture. While mine (interactivity, atmosphere, soundscapes, etcetera) have become somewhat of a lost art. After the web was ruined by social media we stopped creating art for the web and switched to videogames. And when those were ruined we quit videogames too. Initially in favor of Virtual Reality but that seems to be over now as well.

Auriea was able to make the step towards the world of contemporary fine art and continue her artistic activity in that context. But I have not. Digital art has, from the beginning, been a way for me to stay away from the world of modern art in favor of direct contact with an audience made possible by the internet. I was also seduced by and am still very fond of the unique possibilities of the realtime medium that cannot properly be experienced in the traditional fine art context and for which no other platform was ever developed.

But the most important reason why I stay away from the art world is me. I don’t respond well to the challenges posed by the contemporary art world. I don’t like who I become in confrontation with an environment that I experience as cynical, shallow and driven by money and power and dogmatic politics. But above all, I’m afraid I don’t like most modern and contemporary art. And I don’t enjoy being in an environment where I dislike the work of most of my colleagues. It was fun for a while when I was making games but I guess I feel too old for that kind of easy rebellion now.

For me, Auriea’s exhibition crowns my new faith. Three years ago I converted to Catholicism. Christianity has taught me a way of living and loving that has made me a much happier person. As an atheist I would never have been able to tolerate the injustice of an exhibition of our collaborative work presented as hers alone. I would have been so angry. It would have probably lead to a divorce. But as a Christian I’m happy to disappear. It’s the eagerly desired response to my many Litanies of Humility. And it makes me profoundly happy to find myself capable of enthusiastically supporting my wife. We recently got married in church. And this exhibition, or at least my modest role in it, extends our holy matrimony: she is the Bride, the Holy Jerusalem, adorned and pure. I am her servant. I lay down my life for her. This is all I want. This is who I am. Finally.

Michael.

The Endless Forest II beta 4

Development Log, The Endless Forest,

I was hoping to release this version to the public at large. It worked well and looked good on my computers. But to be on the safe side, I decided to release it to the community of players of the current game first. Just in case some minor issues needed tweaking before a public release.

Thanks to the diligent research of several Endless Forest players, a flood of bug reports rolled in, making it abundantly clear that this build, even for a beta release, is by no means ready for the public at large.

Many issues, sadly, seem to be related to performance. Apparently the 2005 engine of the old game runs better on many computers than that latest Unreal Engine 5. That’s a disappointment!

I know I’m getting older and might be slightly jaded after half a life time working with computers, but technology seems to evolve in a direction away from what we used to call the “personal computer”. Creative software seems to be geared more and more towards large commercial corporations and big budget projects. I like using Unreal Editor but, especially for an mmo-type game like The Endless Forest, it’s an unwieldy monster. To simply make a build of the game takes a week because of all the steps the process entails, and the massive amount of data generated. Even in the end, the compiled game which is exactly the same as the old one, is a ZIP file of 270 MB and requires a bunch of runtime prerequisites. While the old game is slightly over 50 MB. No need to say that this slows development iteration down. Especially in a one-man operation. I’m sure big companies have all this stuff streamlined and distributed over several departments. But for single creators making anything other than a drawing, a piece of music, a video or a 3D model, has become extremely challenging.

The Endless Forest, however, is beautiful. And I believe it deserves to exist. More and more so, even now. So I’m grateful for the effort that many players have put in. Pray for me that I can figure out how to fix all these issues.

The Endless Forest II beta 3

Development Log, The Endless Forest,

With any luck this will be the final closed beta version of the remake of The Endless Forest.

Some major networking errors were fixed in this release. Hopefully it all works well now. Because I really only half know what I’m doing or how Unreal Engine is supposed to do networking. So development is going through a bit of trial and error.

In this version a lot of small bugs were fixed, notably relating to some Abiogenesis features.

I also figured out what was making the previous build so huge: a completely unnecessary file over a Gigabyte in size! Each time I build the game, the process is different, even when I use the exact same version of the engine. The old way didn’t work anymore but the new way is fairly smooth, except for the hours that Visual Studio takes to compile things. I have to reserve the better part of a week just to make a build.

A download link has been sent to all backers. Thank you for your support!

Life & work in 2022

Cathedral-in-the-Clouds, Compassie, Development Log, Personal, The Endless Forest

Even though it feels like I spent most of my time exploring my new faith in 2022, I also got a lot of other things done. I released software, wrote books, started a new online identity, studied music and languages, traveled, interacted with my family and improved my health.

My ongoing remake of Tale of Tales’ first game, The Endless Forest, saw three releases this year: an alpha and two beta’s. That’s right: the game is in beta stage now, which means that, after five years of work, the remake is complete, barring bugs and errors.

I also created a new virtual reality piece called The Viriditas Chapel of Perpetual Adoration for our other ongoing project Cathedral-in-the-Clouds, the website of which I revamped for the occasion. And I launched my own personal website. I haven’t had a personal website since 1999, when Zuper! merged with Entropy8. New Twitter and Instagram accounts accompany this new online identity. Although I’m not very active on social media.

I made two books. Ex-Atheist is a series of confrontations of my thoughts on many subjects before and after my conversion to Catholicism. Some of these were published during advent. And Weekends in Gent is a book I made for my children with notes I had taken when they were young. I gave them a hard copy for Christmas.

In the beginning of 2022 I had serious doubts about playing music because I could not manage to free up the time required to reach the technical level I desired. But, also thanks to playing together with other people, I gradually accepted to just do what I can. This actually helped to improve my technique and culminated in a concert in January 2023. I also started studying a new instrument. Next to the viola da gamba, I’m trying to learn the cello. My guitars, however, have been a bit lonely this year.

I continued to study Italian, especially through online video conversations with two teachers. But I also read a bunch of Italian books. And I have started learning Latin too, to help me figure out what all those texts mean on buildings here in Rome and said during mass.

In total I spent almost three months alone this year as my partner traveled for work. On some of these occasions I visited my home country of Belgium to see my family. But we also traveled to Belgium together (for Christmas), and to Venice, Palermo, Firenze and even the nearby Eur, which we had never seen in person. All but one of these trips were made by train, which can be quite an adventure!

My daughter visited us in Rome in the beginning of the year. And we swapped houses with her mother in the summer. During an unexpected trip to Belgium because of a death in the family, I had the pleasant experience of reconnecting with several cousins. My son caught Covid on his birthday, my mother in summer and I soon after, in spite of three vaccinations. Hopefully that’s over now.

I continued Alexander technique lessons, this year finally without a face mask. Next to not smoking, not drinking alcohol and eating very little meat, this year I have stopped drinking coffee and quit watching pornography. I did manage to get a nasty cut in my thumb after it got caught between the front door and its frame. Going to bed early, getting up early and napping in the afternoon has been the perfect rhythm for me that I will continue in 2023.

Happiest year of my life

Faith, Personal

That two thousand and twenty-two might have been the happiest year of my life may not be saying much since for most of my life I had been a cynical latently depressed atheist like almost everybody I know.

But 2022 was my first complete year as a Christian. After accepting the Catholic faith last year, this year I regained access to the sacrament of holy communion through a general confession. In 2022 I have been consistently happy uninterrupted by anger or sadness. And I owe it all to faith.

Since we cannot prove nor disprove the existence of God, faith has been a matter of choice. And it’s a choice I continue to make as doubts attack me from all sides. One thing however is objectively true: my religious practice has made me a better person. And faith has been a necessary aspect of this practice.

A day with faith

Every day I get up, relatively early, often before sunrise, to read a hour or so during breakfast. This way I have read Augustine’s confessions, the catechism, the life of Saint Theresa of Avila and now John Paul II’s Theology of the Body. Then I go to my studio and pray the rosary on my knees in front of the window. Preferably during sunrise, or with the moon shining on my face. Praying the rosary is like taking a mental shower. It’s the basis of my day. After that I listen to something on the Hallow app. Then I’m ready for work.

I only work on the morning. The afternoon is reserved for music, language learning, bible study, exercise, naps, walks, chores and occasionally adoration, vespers, mass, and so on. Before going to bed I listen to the gospel of the day and say some evening prayers. Every Sunday and feast day I attend mass. And every Tuesday the weekly catechesis hour at my church. Every month or so I talk to the priest, lately combined with confession. And in Rome, where I live, there’s many opportunities for special masses, for example on the feast day of the saint to which one of the hundreds of churches here is dedicated. I enjoy immersing myself in the crowd that attends such festivities. I have also participated in several processions.

This faith routine forms the foundation of my joyful mood. I feel weird and somehow not really alive without it. I have had to unlearn working intensely for long hours because the concentration away from God makes me cranky and annoyed. But I have also experienced the strange paradox that if I devote sufficient time to faith, everything else I want to do gets done as well. Without having to watch the clock or schedule.

Out of the closet

This year I stopped hiding my faith. I hung a rosary visibly in my studio, and a crucifix on the wall. I got jewels and t-shirts with Christian iconography. And most importantly, I confessed my faith to my family. I was raised an atheist and I raised my children atheist. So I was a bit anxious about this but they responded much better than I feared. Especially after the interview with Sim D’Hertefelt that was published, in Dutch, our mother tongue, on Kerknet to very positive reactions from parents: they were pleasantly surprised to learn things about me that I had not managed to tell them in person.

The launch of the first work of art I made as a Christian, The Viriditas Chapel of Perpetual Adoration, was accompanied by declarations of my faith, including a blog post and a novena towards the feast of Saint John Paul II when the project was released. For advent I published a selection from my little book Ex-Atheist in which I confront my ideas about certain topics before and after my conversion. And I revived an old Instagram account to dedicate it to my life with faith.

Christian YouTube

It surprised me that, even here in the very center of Catholicism, while the reduction in the number of active believers is often lamented, it is in fact not easy to learn about the faith. Even once I had decided to be Christian and attended mass, I didn’t really know where to go with my questions. I read books to educate myself (Abigail Favale’s Into the Deep has been crucial). But the thing that probably helped most was the very active presence of Christians on YouTube. Even hardcore protestants like Jackie Hill Perry, John Piper and Tim Mackie, general Christian channels like Premier Unbelievable? and atheists like John Vervaeke have helped me on my way. But most important were of course Catholic channels such as Journey Home, Pints with Aquinas, Bishop Robert Barron, Ascension Presents, Daughters of St. Paul and That Black Catholic Chick. Most of these are American. In Italy I appreciate Bella, prof!, Francesca Parisi, 5pani2pesci, Robert Cheaib, Anita Baldisserotto, Un corpo mi hai dato, Francesco Maria Marino and Achille Boccia‘s strangely obscure liturgy of the hours.

Work and life

For several years I had written down everything I would otherwise have posted on Twitter in a separate file and published all those “tweets” in a little book at the end of the year. This activity has now morphed into writing about the faith, except that I write five times as much. I have no idea if I will ever do anything with all that material.

I took lent, the 40 day period in which Christians fast and pray to prepare for the feast of the resurrection on Easter, very seriously this year. I canceled everything but work and devoted a lot more time to prayer, including walking a Via Crucis every week and climbing the Scala Santa, the stairs on which Christ walked to be condemned by Pontius Pilate, on my knees, as is the tradition. Later, assisted by the Hallow app, I consacrated myself to the Holy Virgin Mary in the Capella del Santissimo Sacramento in Saint-Peter’s Basilica.

A huge part of this year’s wonder has been growing even closer to the person I have already shared 23 years of my life with, thanks to the faith, both hers and mine, and embracing the concept of chastity which has put us on an adventure trail towards a Christian marriage.

The key to unlocking the joy and peace that I experienced this year has been humility. Perhaps an unintuitive concept in today’s culture, I believe humility is the source of happiness, with or without faith. I myself have been so arrogant and prideful that God was the only one for whom I would kneel. And I’m so glad I did! It hasn’t been easy. Ridding oneself of pride is a process. Especially because pride is often hard to recognize in oneself. I still have a lot of work to do. So chances are 2023 will be even more spectacular!

Books read in 2022

Faith, Personal,

I’m always thinking that I don’t read enough but I was pleasantly surprised after lining up all the books that I have read this year. Granted some of them I had started in the previous year and others I haven’t finished yet, but still I’m pleased with myself.

Since 2022 was my first full year as a Christian, it comes as no surprise that the large majority of these books are related to religion. I even read some bibles in comic strip form to see if they might be suitable to share the story with less enthusiastic readers. But of course I read in the regular Bible too. Preceded by The Bare Bones Bible Handbook which gave me an overview. Then I combined a recent Dutch translation (my mother tongue) with extended commentaries, with the Italian translation, reading backwards starting at Apocalypse in order to read the Old Testament with the New in mind. But that will be for next year. I also read quite a bit of the Catholic Catechism, and commentaries, also in Italian.

After reading Jackie Hill Perry’s autobiographic conversion story in Gay Girl Good God, I read her Holier Than Thou, which really helped me understand our relationship with God and sort of forced me on my knees in front of His majesty. But it was Abigail Favale’s conversion story and especially her theologic reflections in Into the Deep that made me appreciate the profound beauty of the Catholic concept of Christianity, especially in the way in which it provides answers to many issues in contemporary secular culture.

After attending Tridentine Mass I started investigating what the mass was all about. And I even began learning Latin because it frustrated me that I couldn’t understand the gospel readings. And I read up on Vatican II to learn what some American schismatic fantasies were all about.

I “read” C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity by listening to the excellent CSLewisDoodle on YouTube and Chesterton’s Orthodoxy in a similar way. And I listened to the Daughters of Saint Paul podcast which lead met to their bundle Millennial Nuns about how a very diverse bunch of women decided to devote their lives to Christ. I also used the Hallow app a lot, for instance to listen to the autobiography of Thérèse de Lisieux read by the beautifully moving voice of sister Orianne Petra Rene.

I realize now that I my old preference for female authors doesn’t seem to have changed. Next to the writers mentioned above, I also read Therese of Avila’s Vita and many different things by Hildegard von Bingen. I also read the first book by a very young author from my new home country, Rosa Evangelista, whose youthful enthusiasm for the catholic faith is infectious and at time hilarious. Even the text book for my new instrument, the cello, was written by a woman. And I read the first chapters of Giorgia Meloni’s autobiography to understand a little better where our new prime minister is coming from.

But I’ve been charmed by male authors too. The new bishop of my former home town of Ghent had a lot of interesting things to say about lent. Ages ago I had read a book by Willem Jan Otten about pornography and it turns out that he has converted to Catholicism, not an obvious choice for a Dutchman. I enjoyed his book about not attending mass during the Covid lockdowns. And then of course there’s the great Tom Holland. After watching hours of him talking about how even atheist Westerners are essentially Christian, I started reading his history of Christianity called Dominion.

The most important discovery for me this year has been the writings of Pope John Paul II. Since before my conversion I had lead a life filled with porn and fornication and now I wanted to marry for the church, I felt a great need to educate myself on love and sex. John Paul’s Theology of the Body is giving me wonderful insights in the centrality of the body in Catholicism and the sacredness of love.

I tried to read The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins to see if he could offer any good arguments why I should not live this beautiful Christian life that brings me so much joy. But I didn’t get far into the book because it started with attacks on people and their ideas rather than sharing his own convictions.

The Unreal Forest: step 23 – beta 2

Development Log, The Endless Forest,

I spent all week on creating a build of the second beta version of the remake of The Endless Forest. It’s a complicated process because Unreal Engine only allows the building of a dedicated server program through a custom version of the engine built from source downloaded from a GitHub repository and a C++ based project, rather then one based on Blueprints, the visual programming language that is the main reason why I use this technology at all. The new version 5.0 of Unreal Engine seems to have made this process even more complicated and unpredictable. Following the directions failed but through trial-and-error juggling with many gigabytes of data I finally ended up with a software package that works. The resulting program is twice the size of the previous release built in Unreal version 4 (and 10 times the size of the original game which is exactly the same) and requires an up-to-date graphics driver and a recent version of Visual C++ runtime (included with the download).

Welcome to the future!

Anyway, I’m extremely pleased with this build. We’re getting very close to a final release. Fingers crossed!

If you are a backer, you should have received a download link. If not, please let me know.

23 Days

Cathedral-in-the-Clouds, Compassie, Development Log, Viriditas, ,

The Viriditas Chapel of Perpetual Adoration is not the first of my projects to deal with Christianity. In fact, a long thread throughout my creative career connects various references to Christianity, culminating in the ongoing production of Cathedral-in-the-Clouds. When the fundraising for that project started, I made sure that people realized that I was not a believer but instead interested in Christianity from an aesthetic and cultural point of view. Seven years later I can no longer claim the same.

The Viriditas Chapel of Perpetual Adoration is my first work of art as a Christian. Twenty three days after the release of Compassie, on Silent Saturday 2021, I heard God’s voice for the very first time and my life changed radically as a result.

Compassie was a piece about sadness. It’s the classic pietà scene in which the Holy Virgin holds the dead body of her executed son. In virtual reality, you take her place. In front of you there is an ocean of darkness. Behind you a luscious landscape that forms the backdrop of a cross floating in mid air held somewhat ridiculously by four cherubs. He has risen! We are saved! But you turn back around and stare into the dark. Your son is dead. You are inconsolable.

Compassie playthrough

I enjoyed how Compassie gave me a place where I could be sad. I remember enjoying how the VR goggles would hide my tears. I felt safe to let go in there, to silently endlessly cry about the sadness of life. I was certainly having personal problems at the time. But there was also the quite obviously desperate state of the world. Between the political polarization of society and the ecological crisis, I couldn’t see much hope.

Compassie was my tribute to this state of desperation. Christ became the symbol for the solution that everyone knows exists. But we killed Him, or we ignored Him and the promise made through His sacrifice. We know what a beautiful world looks like (just turn around!), we even know what it would take to get there (just turn around!). But somehow we find ourselves incapable of choosing that road and following it. We are stuck. Indulging in our misery. Too prideful to believe.

In hindsight, through the lens of my Christian faith, it is quite clear to see how Compassie was a subconscious “cry for help”. I was balancing on the edge of an abyss with nowhere to go that didn’t lead to destruction. I was ready for God. But I did not know that then. Until 23 days later.

Viriditas pseudo-playthrough

For me, The Viriditas Chapel of Perpetual Adoration expresses quite well how my new found faith makes me feel. Astounded by a beauty that borders on the surreal but remains framed within a long tradition. I feel loved, I am grateful, I bow down in awe for the glory of God. It feel lightheaded with joy. I am becoming myself, the one He created for Himself. Like millions of others that have now become my kin. And then with all that splendor in my heart, the lights go out. And I find myself alone with Him. His body and blood, soul and divinity, embedded in a simple disk of bread, exposed on the altar. In the dark of my closed eyes I smell the incense, I feel His warm hands around my heart, the stubble on his cheeks catching the tears on mine as he embraces me and whispers His breath of life into all of me.

Novena to St. John Paul II

Viriditas,

The Viriditas Chapel of Perpetual Adoration is the first work of art that I have created as a Christian. I converted to Catholicism a year and a half ago. Until then, the many references to Christianity in my art were made solely out of cultural and artistic interest, given that I was an atheist.

I chose to release The Viriditas Chapel on the feast day of Saint John Paul II because my attitude towards his person illustrates an important transition. Like many of my secular leftist peers in the 1980s and 1990s, I hated this pope more than any other. Why? Well, that’s where the problem lies. Because I had vaguely heard something about him being very very conservative and forbidding the use of condoms while people where dying of AIDS. That, apart from his frequent appearances on tv, was the extent of my knowledge of this man.

This was not atypical. Most of my opinions as a progressive liberal where based on flimsy quotes overheard in cheerful conversations. Mind you, I did not see myself as shallow. It simply never occurred to me that I should investigate a little before judging along with my friends or agreeing with people who seemed sympathetic or smart.

The same applied to Christianity. Oddly so, because I have been interested in this topic for many years. And I read all sorts of things about Christian art and architecture, and in the Bible. I visited hundreds of churches all through Europe, even attending services as research. I had a lot of respect for believers to the point of being slightly invidious. But somehow it never occurred to me to investigate the core of Christianity: faith itself. The thought that I should maybe read one of the Church Fathers or watch a movie by Christians on YouTube never even briefly crossed my mind.

When I converted I started devouring information about the faith. It was all so fascinating! It felt like I was using my brain for the first time. And often I came across references to Pope John Paul II. Apparently the man I had hated with such indifference was a very important presence to my fellow Christians. People loved the guy! They even made him a saint. So I started reading his Theology of the Body and came across his Letter to Artists.

In preparation for the release I am praying a novena as atonement. Not just for Saint Pope John Paul II but for the injustice with which I have regarded the Catholic Church all my life. And as an expression of gratitude to the almighty Lord for receiving me into his flock in spite of my obvious unworthiness.

Michael Samyn, Rome, 14 October.