Vortex Gaming

The announcement of 'Mabinogi Eternity' was made at the 19th Anniversary offline event, Fantasy Party. After a long period of service, the venerable Mabinogi is getting a makeover with a new look in the Unreal Engine.

Last December, half a year after its reveal, 'Mabinogi Eternity' revamped its new homepage and released a series of development stories. This is where the story of the developers who embarked on a full-fledged engine replacement began. Another half-year has passed since then. At the 20th birthday party, the new content of the Mabinogi engine replacement, which was not revealed, continued through the official website.

This development story covers parts related to the character, such as dyeing and tone correction, which are the first things that come to mind when you think of 'Mabinogi'. Among the many parts, you can see in advance the changes in the parts where the player's eyes are most focused, so you can feel the changes the most. In addition, deeper content such as the current status of existing work and changes in time are also revealed. It contains not only graphic changes but also overall system reorganization and planning.

Let's take a quick look at what will change in the new Mabinogi through the newly released information.

Developer '리블리레밀크티', who is in charge of planning, started the developer story by saying that he was wondering which topic to cover first among the many parts that are changing to Eternity. And a story that is most interesting rather than difficult and complicated. It started with a story about dyeing. That's why the title is 'Isn't dyeing what Mabinogi is all about?'

The reorganization of the dyeing system was carried out in a direction to improve the inconvenience when actually dyeing. Use a dyeing ampoule to select the target, and then dye again because the desired color does not come out. It eliminated such hassle.

Now, when you use a dye ampoule, you will immediately proceed to the dyeing procedure without selecting a target. In addition to changing it like this, we plan to add the ability to proceed directly to dyeing other items during dyeing. In the dyeing target list, you can see all the dyeable items in the inventory besides the wearing items. Sorting function will also be added.

Once you enter the dyeing mode, you can pour colors in advance for each part and preview color combinations without having to close and turn it on every time. However, due to the difficulty of knowing what items are consumed and the problem that the change notification becomes too complicated, the method of dyeing only one item and one part with one dyeing will be maintained.

It may feel a bit complicated when you look at it in writing. You can easily understand it if you watch the video above.

And the dyeing result notification window will also change. Now you can see a clean dyeing result window without any awkward line breaks.

There was also a concern about the dyeing palette. I was wondering if I should keep the current tangled palette as it is, but in order to put the colors in without cutting them off, I had to separate one or more dimensional information or go with the current form. In the end, a palette appearance similar to the existing one, which makes you think 'This is Mabinogi's dyeing', came out.

The current Mabinogi has various color palettes such as fabric, metal, leather, and silk, but there are situations where you can only dye some item colors in a limited way. Now you can select the desired material palette from all dyeable items. If it changes like this, we are considering changing the use of metal dyeing ampoules, which are becoming ambiguous.

The appearance of enlarging the palette 20 times by pressing the Ctrl key has also been revealed. Now you don't have to shake your hands and manipulate the mouse to change it in 1 pixel increments.

Even with various changes, the unique system in which colors are randomly dyed from the selected color candidates remains as it is for Mabinogi-like dyeing. We judged that this would give us more affection and the joy of cultivating our own personality.

Instead, we are preparing a plan to allow you to definitely dye one directly selected color even when using a normal dye ampoule. In addition, we will add a function to exclude colors other than the desired color from the 5 selected colors.

In addition, you can change the background of the dyeing zone or directly set the light source to various natural light or indoors without having to find a '누끼존' separately. Coupled with the improved lighting effects, more plausible dyeing becomes possible.

You can also check the dyeing of items of different genders and races through pre-set mannequins.

Eternity, which is drastically changing the game's engine to the Unreal Engine. This was not simply about transferring the existing character shader as it was. Even if we could match the colors in the Playone engine in a similar way, we could not get the results that game fans want.

This is connected to the actual light and the colors we see. The color of an object reflected by light undergoes the same process as light absorbed and reflected by surrounding materials, and then cone cells and rod cells detect color and brightness... Anyway, humans recognize color with the cognitive ability of the brain's eyes that selects and selects so many variables. Monitors and TVs are also made to match cognitive abilities.

The Unreal Engine uses a lighting system called Lumen to calculate the direct and indirect light of the lighting that affects the scene in real time. This feature, which is not available in Playone, can affect color.

The post-process function also supports a function called tone mapper. You can match this tone to the Playone character based on Unlit, which is not affected by the material of light.

However, Unlit is a shader that is not affected by lighting. Whether it's under the bright sun or under a shady tree, the character's shading will always be the same. We needed a process to adjust that. We separately recorded the shadow color of the character and changed the buffer that is not used in toon shading to record the lighting color to reflect the shading results.

As a result, the shadow and basic shading calculation results came out the same as the Playone engine.

After that, in order to solve the problem that the Lumen indirect light calculation results were excessive and the character color was not displayed properly, we controlled various parameters when using Lumen and when not using Lumen.

The color is affected by the background lighting, but not too much.

Mabinogi is a game where time changes in real time. Accordingly, the surrounding environment also flows from day to night according to the time. Like in reality, there are various time changes in the game, but first, the development of time zones during the day in the game was started first.

We started by organically changing various environmental factors that work with light, such as atmosphere, fog, and clouds, as well as simply changing from day to night. In the initial testing phase, we implemented the movement of the sun according to the passage of time and the change in shadows according to the movement of light. The direction and length of the shadows are changing.

Instead, we are analyzing and implementing the light operation method of the original Mabinogi game, which is expressed differently from the Earth's rotation and revolution cycle, and developing it in a similar way. The Lumen technology story comes up again here. The application of lighting according to changes in the surrounding environment and movement of light according to changes in time zone is applied more realistically.

Volumetric clouds, which create realistic clouds in real time, helped to realistically express the effects of clouds brightening when they receive light or casting shadows. Weather changes and the passage of time appear naturally.

It was also possible to simulate the state of the atmosphere. We dynamically changed the color and lighting of the sky and atmosphere, and calculated the scattering phenomenon that occurs when sunlight passes through the atmosphere in real time. We calculate the phenomena that can be seen in nature to create realistic colors.

In addition, by utilizing the atmospheric simulation function of Unreal Engine 5, it was possible to express realistic skies and atmosphere considering the position of the sun, the scattering effect of the atmosphere, and changes in time zone. Through this, we calculated the density and color of fog in real time to implement very realistic fog effects.

We continue to worry about creating an environment with rich and diverse colors, but it seems that we will be able to see a more realistic Mabinogi world that has been implemented in that way. It's not a finished version yet, but you can check the appearance to some extent through the released video.

Bringing existing Mabinogi 3D resources to the Unreal Engine. The idea of introducing it was shared to some extent through the first development story released last December. We are quickly creating a tool that can bring resources from the Playone engine, which cannot be imported as is, to the Unreal Engine, and the porting is proceeding smoothly.

Of course, the porting work is not finished just by importing the files properly. You need to set the areas where the player can move and the areas where they cannot. We also set materials that were not properly expressed before, and in some cases, they are too old and need to be replaced altogether.

Unlike smooth areas and backgrounds, it was meaningless to port clothes and hair as they were. It was difficult to create free movements due to the lack of bones and wires, and skin such as hands and feet had to be replaced. In that way, we were able to replace it and fully express each finger.

In this way, natural clothes and hair are finally being created. On the other hand, weapons that do not need to have simple skeletons are ported using automated tools that have been created. We are investing more resources in areas that need to be created anew to give more abundant movement.

You can check the changed parts through the video.

More changes and development information will continue to be released through the official website in the future. What does the Mabinogi Eternity you are looking forward to look like?

웹진 인벤강승진 기자
2024-07-22