Hey, everyone! Today I’ve got another RTX-powered demo to try out - the old-but-gold dungeon crawler, Torchlight!
If you want to see the before-and-afters, watch this video here!
RTX Remix-Powered Dungeon Crawling
For the scope of this demo, I honed in on the mines initially - the first dungeon in the game. With lots of rocky surfaces, crystals, some critters and a few notable environments, it seemed like a great place to start. The procedurally generated nature of the game meant most hashes for captured content were unstable, and that initially limited how far I could go. So, I went a little harder on the texturing front instead, experimenting with some pretty deep heightmaps and very strong normals to sell the increase in depth instead. By the time the mines were in good shape, the town was looking a little plain. Whilst I decided not to get caught up in remastering the whole town as well, I did provide a new coat of paint to some of the more essential assets and then did a general pass afterwards. The result is a good proof of concept for what the whole game could shape up like!
Heightmap Heaven
The caves were almost the perfect use case for heightmaps, really - rocky surfaces beget lots of surface dents and bumps, and you can see this most prominently across the rock floor. This consistency gives it a lot of opportunities for self shadowing and interesting catching of light. I made it a little smoother than totally matte rock might suggest, as there’s lots of dripping ambience in these caves and that implies a little bit of humidity worth echoing in the visuals of the new textures.
Emissive Magickry
Being a game full of whimsical stuff, Torchlight owes itself to emissives in a very different way than my previous demo. The crystals are a stark example that provides lots of strong highlights throughout the caves, but of course the lanterns and torches work well for this too. I went a step further and made the eyes of many critters - from your friendly pets, to the not-so-friendly ratlins and spiders - emissive. They’re not bright enough to really affect the environment, but they do help these critters pop out in the midst of chaos. Some spells also have emissive elements, like the alchemists ember bolts! Even the Alchemist’s default clothing has a nice bit of glint that shines off of surfaces.
Real Reflections
The puddles littering some of the caves were pretty subdued in the original, but as an artistic choice that deviates a little from the original, I decided to make them more opaque (implying some more viscous substance than just water, given all the sentient jellies hanging around the mines), and make them almost totally smooth. They reflect the crystals and player with a cloudy sheen now, and I made the goggles on the alchemist just as smooth - meaning they’ll also catch the light in a compelling way, at certain angles.
Future Scope
As with Nerf, I won’t be doing much more with this for the time being, but I think there’s some great opportunities for quick, efficient changes across the game. Just giving emissive textures to all the various crystals, embers, and other glowy bits in the dungeons would be a good start. I also only did the initial appearance of each of the three classes in the game. No doubt, there’s lots of opportunities for the various unique and fancy weaponry looted throughout to have some compelling emissives of their own. Torchlight’s readily available on Steam, and installation of this one is pretty straightforward - check out the downloadable file for more instructions!
If you want to pick up Torchlight RTX for yourself and continue where I left off, go for it! Feel free to use all the files provided in your own project.
Happy dungeoneering folks!
Wow! Very interesting project! Because of the level design and things that derive from that, first Torchlight seems to be more suitable to experiment with RT. Plus I'm sure there might be a bunch of other tech factors that influence it.
I'm going to test it tonight, looks very promising!
Thanks - yeah, there were some interesting problems introduced by the procedural generation, but PBR texture replacements were sufficient in most cases :)