Star Stable Extra May Blog - The New Tack System

The New Tack System

By Björn Jankes (Art Director)

Last year we started a project that we, at the time, called the "no (more) retrofit project." Retrofitting is the process we use to make sure our different horse breeds can use the new tack items we create for them. And by tack we actually mean new tack meshes (the 3D art term for the shape of the piece), as we can already provide color and material variations on the tack fitted to each horse. We wanted to make this process less time-consuming and allow us to more easily make entirely new pieces of tack available to most of our horses at once. The current system is very time-consuming, requiring us to manually fit each piece to each horse and test them for any issues. 

There are many reasons why we ended up in a situation where we cannot simply "copy and paste" the fitting of the tack between horses, but mainly, it is due to the fact that we have over and over again sought to upgrade how we create our horses over the years. We are always striving for better looking, moving, and sounding horses.

The solution

To not be stuck with only the tack pieces we already have and have an infinitely-long list of horses to retrofit at any point in time, we decided to create a technical solution to help us. Lotta S, our lead character artist, led the charge together with Petar from the engine team. We have been working on this new system for quite some time now, making progress towards a release. In the fall of last year, it looked like we would be able to get the system done before the end of the year and start getting horses out soon afterward. This was communicated in a blog post, saying we would retrofit "all Gen 3 horses by summer 2025". But, as many of you know, game development is not always a straight road and that date is no longer realistic for completing all the work.

We are at a point now when the system works, and we have worked on three horses as test cases and aim to ship them to you as soon as possible. However, we will not even try to make promises on how quickly we can do the remaining horses. We will bring them in small batches, and since the system is now in place, we will start seeing things go faster for each horse we do. The new system is now simply called the "new tack system," and we call the process of moving horses over to it "porting" them to the new tack system. We are super excited about this new system and eager to bring the fruits of our labor to you players!

So what is taking so long? 

We did not fully understand the number of placement issues we would have, just how much testing it would require, and one more thing: living up to our own quality standards. The amount of fine-tuning we put into placing tack on our current horses is quite a lot, trying to minimize clipping, stretching, wrongly placed straps etc. The previous process required us to do this in a custom way on each breed, allowing our inner perfectionists unlimited ways to fix minor issues. The new system is based on having as few custom tweaks per horse as possible, allowing us in the art craft to quickly set up new pieces of tack or adjust placement on older pieces. This means changing placement is done per horse but will affect all of that type of tack on that horse, and some tweaks (to the meshes for example) will affect all horses. 

As you can probably imagine, such a huge change creates some… interesting looking issues. However, we are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel! We chose three very different looking breeds so we could test the system to its limits, and we really do think that will pay off when working on porting the rest of the horses.

What will this give the players?

One thing this will give the players is, of course, the ability to use new tack meshes we have created since the last retrofit of that horse. This is very welcome for many players. The long list of exceptions in the shop will ideally be a thing of the past (but still applicable to older breeds, sorry Gen 1 & 2). We are also building for the future with this system, as anything new we want to do with the horse tack really benefits from this system. We would love to add highly requested tack items like blankets, multiple saddle bags, additional horse decorations, bareback pads, and more! There is more than just the tack system holding us back from releasing new tack slots, but it is one of the most important upgrades we need to do.

Visual bugs & changes to existing horses

When we port old horses to the new system, we will do our very best to ensure the quality stays high like it is now. However, we will not mix between the old and new systems on the same horse, so there will be slight changes when moving over:

- Placement and size of tack can change slightly (sometimes this will look even better)

- We need to make some adjustments to the thickness of pads and other meshes to minimize clipping (parts of the tack going through other parts or the horse)

- Some minor visual bugs will slip through the net but CAN be fixed if we get reports of them

Some of the old horses already have visual issues and bugs. These will mostly remain as is unless they are related to the tack system. Continue to make us aware of the most annoying ones, and we will try to fix them as we go. But remember, we are only supporting Gen 3 and newer. 

New tack pieces?

As I mentioned, we have a lot of plans to bring you players new tack pieces, and first will be something we already have a tack slot for, which are new models of saddles! And thanks to the new system, the ported horses are able to make use of these new models immediately when released. The trick is to coordinate artist time with testing time so we can deliver some sweet-looking tack pieces that fit well. No promises on when the new meshes are coming, but it is happening. 

When we release new tack pieces, we will have a selection of breeds that we will test, but we will not be able to test all of them fully on the same detail level as we have done in the past. The system is built in such a way that we should not be seeing major issues, but please let us know if you do find things we don’t catch. We will then continuously decide on what we do based on the severity of the issue, the time to fix it, and if fixing it could cause worse problems. 

I also want to personally thank the team working on the system, the implementation, the porting and the testing. Thank you Amanda, Christian, Francis, Lotta S, Lotta A, Natalia, Oliver, Petar, and everyone else contributing to making this happen!

We hope you are as excited as we are about finally seeing new tack on old and new horses alike and about having more fun things brought to SSO through the new tack system in the future!