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[Ed]

Hello - here's that
build. It *should* have all the DLLs and stuff, but I reserve the right to do some hasty editting in a few minutes...

Anyway, hopefully it runs ok. There are plenty of obvious and not-so-obvious glitches and rough edges. One bug I am expecting on some machines is the landscape not being lit... haven't looked into that since the previous thread.

I put in the region names, which appear in the bottom left. These will probably only appear in NPC dialogs etc rather than in the "HUD", and also they'll be based more on the real features of the area, once these sort of details are in.

I'm not sure how often we'll be posting updates - we might try and get something a bit more finished before revealing too much/building false hopes (as applicable)

Regarding exploration/quest balance, it will probably be heavily exploration-biased, at least at first. If there's a quest it will be fairly abstract. Maybe the exploration is the quest... hmmmm...

Non-violent conflict: there might end up being something rather Miyazaki-ish going on, but... see above

Oh also: Regarding Hunter/the Hunter - it's funny because Ray (co-developer) and I were talking earlier about the nice open world of the Amiga game "Hunter", but I reckon you're probably talking about the online hunting thing.

[Alec S.]

I tried out the build.  It's pretty awesome so far!  I can't wait so see what you do with this.  It should be pretty cool! 

[Ed]

Nice one, thanks!

I just realised that I forgot to say it requires .NET runtime

[agj]

So nice! I like that you can go above the clouds. So, it's all procedural, right?

[KennEH!]

This looking great. I wondering though maybe put some stuff be higher? Everything I like the idea of climbing actual mountains  instead of hills. Also the clouds felt really low too.

I found the third camera (the one farthest back) the clouds were usually in the way.

[Ed]

This looking great. I wondering though maybe put some stuff be higher? Everything I like the idea of climbing actual mountains  instead of hills. Also the clouds felt really low too.

I guess the main reason the mountains are so low is because with the current map size, the slopes would get quite steep and that was causing some trouble with the camera (at the time). However, we will definitely be experimenting with these parameters, and also perhaps adding some variety to mountain faces. Maybe if we have mountain trails and step-like scramblable cliffs, mountaineering would be pretty nice!

I think the clouds will probably come and go depending on the weather, the current fixed height feels very claustrophobic when underneath, which is meant to contrast with the feeling of being above the clouds.

I found the third camera (the one farthest back) the clouds were usually in the way.

Ahh yeah.. I really should remove those other camera modes. I think we're pretty much settled on the default over-the-shoulder one.

So, it's all procedural, right?

Landscape and placement of trees etc is procedural, yep. The clouds are just a solid layer at the moment so are only procedural in a trivial sense. Depending on priorities, design decisions, etc, we might have some sort of cloud pattern. Sprites and textures are pre-authored. Happy that you like the clouds!


Code tasks for this weekend: Improved towns, roads and farmland, and maybe some little features like forest clearings and SPOILERS

[FishyBoy]

Oh man, that art looks fantastic! Can't wait to see what you do with it.

[Ed]

Long time no update. PG town plans have been causing me a lot of headaches and wasted weekends.... but hey, even dead ends are a learning experience, right? 

One of my algorithms had a tendency to try to make swastikas (in roads), which freaked me out a bit...

Anyway, I took a new approach and left the code alone for a day and made some rough building models in sketchup so that I had a clearer idea of what the PG town code needed to do to make something that would look good *to the player* rather than generating flat maps and fixing theoretical problems with no real thought for what the game actually required!

So, here are some (roughly textured, windowless) buildings and a mockup in sketchup, and a screenshot of the current broken planning code but with the building models slapped in. Needs rewriting from scratch with a much simpler algorithm:







Mmm... jpeggy..

(Also, some work has gone in on more sensible town placement on the island, and determining what regions should have mines or farms etc. This is what the text in the bottom left is, along with an example of a whimsical PG town name)

Next jobs:
- Optimisation of model rendering (see the FPS count on that shot)
- Fix vertex normal import/export problem
- Load in world object library from a text file
- Make a simple, non-nazi PG town planner

Slightly further away:
- Farm and mine buildings etc placed in regions near towns
- Improved roads and other details painted onto the terrain texture
- Cliffs and other geometrical interest in the terrain, maybe some rethinking of the terrain renderer code
- Write up the design for the first playable version of an actual game in the world
- Everything else...

[C]

damn that's so hot, ed

keep up the PG work

swastikas are silly 

[Ed]

Haha thanks 

By the way, the buildings are supposed to be somewhat central/eastern European, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wroclaw_1a.jpg, although I'm not being particularly purist.

Also, here's a slightly older pic of a road:

[dspencer]

Haven't had a chance to try it, but I really like the look of it! Keep it going!

[JLJac]

I tried the build, and was it good! You have something going on here, absolutely.

A little feedback:

It is super awsome that you can get above the clouds, but make them higher! It kind of ruins the feeling of openess/large spaces when you have a compact roof just a few meters above your head. I'd put the clouds at least three times higher above the water level, and make some mountains extremely high and steep instead, maybe so steep that you can't just walk/jump up, but need some kind of climbing equipment? Then the reward of those beutiful above-cloud views would be so much more rewarding.

I see that you have a swamp ground type that you use in transitions between forests and water. This is super cool, but maybe you could do some kind of check if the water is sea-water or a lake? Then you could put beach tiles where the ground meets the ocean.

Maybe some precipices and rivers?

Make the trees bigger! It would be cool if they were quite a lot taller than the character, to really create the feeling of walking in a forest.

Could you possibly add a little haze? Not so much that it covers stuff up, just so that distant mountains get a little bluer and toned down.


Looking forward to see where this goes, best of luck!

[Ed]

Hey, thanks for the feedback!

These ideas match closely with a lot of stuff that is planned or semi-implemented, so that's cool!

I got a bit carried away rambling about the various things you mentioned, but I'll post it anyway:

Clouds - yep, the height needs reviewing. I currently have them turned off by default whilst working on other stuff. If the mountains can be made higher the clouds can go up with the snowline.

Mountains - I agree, they could be more dramatic. I want to do some interesting stuff with cliffs as well, something like steps and chunks of non-heightmap geometry, so that should make it easier to make big dramatic hills without the dreaded stretchy-ground cliff effect. Special climbing equipment would fit nicely with the skiing and gliding ideas, although there is a chance that these might not make it into the first game in this engine, we'll see what happens...

Haze - there is a *little* haze, but it's probably too subtle. Hopefully I'll get round to some sort of dynamic weather system and this and the clouds will be controlled by that. (Actually, maybe there was no haze in that build though... can't remember...)

Trees - Current trees are very different and maybe 3-4 times the height of the character. I don't want to post a screenshot yet because they're ripped off from somewhere. When we have some homemade ones I'll post, maybe with another test build.

Rivers - ya, these would be good. Apart from anything else they would lead the eye into the world, although they will be tricky to do well.

[Ed]

Just a small update with what is and isn't happening with this project.... it's not dead, just hibernating

Unfortunately I have a slight wrist injury which has prevented me doing more than a few minutes real work on this over the past month or so.

Last "real work" I was doing was with towns, but after taking an enforced break, I realised that the towns were giving me a lot of trouble and were not really serving the main theme of the game, i.e. wilderness exploration, so we've decided to drop them.
   
Rather than have a populated island with all the baggage that entails, we're going to go back to an (almost?) unpopulated island, with an interesting variety of somehow coherent things scattered around. Stuff like ancient overgrown technology from a long-dead civilisation, as well as natural "wonders" like giant Totoro-ish trees and that sort of thing.
The discovery aspect of it may be something like triggering memories of the old civilisation. The survival elements should still be present.

Concept art to follow....

[Ed]

Concept art from a previous incarnation of this world/story... with the same player character





(NB - painted/pixelled by Ray, not me!)

Also, here's a pic with the new trees. Ignore the crappy pale green plants for now!



Next job is probably to do some optimisation or use of higher-end OpenGL functions (vertex buffer objects etc) to raise the FPS to some sensible level....