Denny Lindberg, Technical Artist

For those who don't know who I am, I'm the Animator / Technical Artist at StarVault. I'm the halfbreed acting as a link between the programmer and artist team. I was initially hired to work as an animator/rigger, but as time went by my curious side couldn't stay away from other tasks in the office. Well, it wasn't just my curious side to be honest, at StarVault we've always been a really limited team so we've had to split up tasks between employees.

As of today I've worked with tasks involving animation, character rigging, export/import pipeline between Maya and Unreal, level design, modelling, texturing and even sounds! You should have heard my awesome magic sound effects back in the prototype, mixed from royalty free sounds, even Henrik Ekholm (our sound guy) was jealous of my skills! Or not... The point being that I've touched almost all aspects of the engine except coding, which means I've come to have a pretty wide understanding of how the engine works, mainly on the editor side, and hence I've become the Technical Artist of StarVault.

As many of you have noticed the client side performance in the game has been improved, small steps but it's getting better. I've been on the task of improving our workflow, coming up with solutions on how to improve performance among other things. Together with Andreas Springare (our level designer) we've started to replace some areas in the world with some of the new systems and on our end, the frame drop when turning around while having shadows on, has drastically decreased, which is a really good thing! I hope you guys have noticed it as well. But not to be naive and ignore things we still have a lot left which needs optimization and fixing.

Some of you might ask what's happening on the animation front. Lately my priorities have been what was mentioned above, which sadly has put animation on a lower priority. Don't fret though! This week we got reinforcement from a really skilled intern called Niklas Wennersten, he's going to focus completely on character/creature animation and rigging, mostly NPCs, which means that the world of Nave is going to become a little more lively in the near future. I bet there's going to be a new intern thread on the forums, so give him a warm welcome! Otherwise like the programmers in the studio like to call it...... I'll nerdrage and go Denny on your ass'!

So what am I currently doing at the moment? I and Erik Lindgren are currently looking into how to properly solve the foliage issue. We currently have some good and bad results, so hopefully the ground won't be as flat and boring much longer.

/Denny