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[jrothfork]

Hello ladies and gents,

I am slightly terrified of this post and forum, but here goes. I'm curious to see what people think about the look and feel of this game environment. This is for a game I'm working on called Ashianae's Journey (www.ashianae.com), and is still in its very infantile stages. The game's setting is in an "Atlantean" style society, placing the genre of the game in the area of Science Fantasy. Essentially, some fantasy and magic with science and technology mixed in. The game revolves mostly around quests and puzzle solving to reveal the storyline, as well as social interaction between players. Players will be able to hold positions of political power within the various cities of the game , and have the ability to physically place objects and design entire vilages/houses within their own "realms" (realms being sort of like a players own reality).

Some notes:

- The 3d character development is still in its initial stages as well.
- The game is based on a 3d chat program called "Active Worlds".
- Optimal performance is on computers with 128mb-256mb in video memory. This also only runs on Windows.
- The game seeks to appeal primarily to social players who would have an interest in player based economies/crafting, exploring, quest solving, etc. There is in game combat but currently it is fairly limited.
- I'm sharing with all of you a sort of trailer (it's not official) that is primarily shot with the intent of sharing one of the main cities and some of its spaces.
- The house models in their current stage are not varied at all - we *will* be coming up with plenty of variations so that not all the housing looks the same







- This is one of the first shots we took within the game. This character probably will not be used.





- This is a little more recent from within the city itself, showing a little bit of lighting.





- The above two pictures are from the very conceptual/initial stages of design for the second city on the island, which actually resides in a large cavern below the surface.

Finally, you can check out a very brief clip of some of the cityscape of one of the primary cities. Once again, the housing will be varied more (right now all the houses are the same). This is also not an official trailer or for commercial use.. Just to give a few people a sneak peek ^_^ Note.. it does spin around a little, heh, which if we do release an actual trailer will be resolved!





I look forward to critiques, comments and feedback. We have really only been working on the game and environment for just a few months, its actually fairly slow going as there are only a few of us able to spend some time developing the environment. I'm not really sure how to say what I'd like comments on the most, just more so looking for an over all opinion on the look and feel of things. Not many outside the Active Worlds community have actually seen any of this, so I'm curious how the people outside the environment will feel about the look of the game so far. We are currently working on the HUDs, and will perhaps have that to share later. Let me know what ya think!

[laserghost]

I really like how those bottom two screens look. The dust/fog adds a lot of mood and the brown and tan color scheme is nice. The above envirnment is well done too, but I think the grass in general needs work. I'd imagine there'd be more tufts of it along the bases of the trees to keep that tree-to-ground transition more natural looking.

[Farbs]

Hey,

There are nice people here. You needn't fear us. 

I agree that the fog looks nice. The thing I think you most need to work on though is transitions between objects. You have a lot of hard lines showing up where objects meet, and they really draw the eye. For example, it's hard to look at a tree without focussing on where the base intersects the ground. The same goes for the grass.

You might also want to experiment with dropping the ambient lighting level outdoors, & maybe switching to a hemispherical model. This should make it look less flat. Anything you can do to bake in ambient occlusion shadows or real GI would be well worth exploring too.

[jrothfork]

Shoo & Farbs -

Thanks for the feedback thus far! Actually, you know the point about the hard lines is an incredibly valid one. When a group of people are so used to designing things in specific ways within one environment (Active Worlds for example), certain things go unnoticed, like the hard edges. Thank you both for pointing those out.

What exactly did you mean by hemispherical model?

[Farbs]

What exactly did you mean by hemispherical model?

It's an old hack used to make outdoor scenes look more realistic. Basically you just light something based on the absolute direction of its normal, so stuff that faces upwards is bright, and stuff that faces downwards is dark. It's supposed to simulate the effect of the sky only providing light from above. You can usually tweak it so that "up" is blue and "down" is green or brown, to fake light bouncing back up off the ground. From there it's a quick hop to using environment cubemaps, but that's all down to whether your engine and target platform can handle them.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

I like the environments but not the model of the person.

[jrothfork]

Yeah, the character is from years ago on another game we did.. He's just a place holder for now

[Zaphos]

I don't want to sound too negative, but I have to confess low budget 3D is hard for me to enjoy when it's apparently going for realism; it doesn't have the retro appeal of pixels or quirk of more abstract things.  So, the visuals of the 'realistic town' area are hard for me to appreciate, even though for the most part they seem reasonable.  The last two screenshots I like a lot though; they work well with your apparent limitations and they look like an interesting place to explore

The trees are definitely the weakest part for me.  The way all detail except the main trunk structure appears to be modeled with textured planes is very noticeable.  Especially as some of the textures appear stretched or cut off at a polygon border?  It might be worth a bit more rendering budget to give them more detail ... when you're going for realism I think your success is kind of defined by your weakest asset.

Also, what's going on with the person's shoulders?

Looking beyond the graphics, it does sound like a neat game; I'm really interested to see what you do with the idea that people get to hold positions of political power

[jrothfork]

Trees are a bit tricky, at least in my experience with real time environments. Poly count gets to be pretty extreme in a lot of "high quality" trees, and when you have an area of hundreds of trees things can really get bogged down... But Im sure there are ways to investigate changing them to hide the fact that they're texture panels.

Like I mentioned, the character is pretty silly, and is not something that will be used at all

I'm not sure I understand this remark "So, the visuals of the 'realistic town' area are hard for me to appreciate, even though for the most part they seem reasonable." Is it the trees ultimately that might be bringing it down for you, if things "seem reasonable"?

Thanks for the feed back!

[michael]

i think what hes trying to say is that your choice of a realistic style is awkward within the constraints of your project. i'll try and further explain things with a severely exaggerated example.


this sprite is hard to enjoy because the level of detail of the beveling is awkward compare to my ability to draw. now im not criticizing your skills, your constraint is with budget or technology.

its awkward to go for realism, with so many limitations. that being said, i think games like halflife did a really good job with realistic 3d and donkey kong country for snes did a really good job richly shaded, prerendered sprites. so its possible, its just much more hard.

i personally dont care for realism in video games, and i think more than a handful of people here would agree, but that just means that we wont be your target audience. i dont like to dissuade people, but i would say that there will be a lot of difficulties in making a low budget realistic 3d rpg that is fresh and widely enjoyable. in the end, it really depends on who youre making the game for, it should be for you.

best of luck! and i really love that dear!

[jrothfork]

I agree with the points about realism when its difficult to go for said realism. We definitely aren't "striving" to make the environments seem close to realism, as that is not Active Worlds' strong point (in fact, it's not a strong point of any 3d chat based engine). Maybe that means however that it would be best to establish a more graphic feel to things, and really make it clear that its not striving to be realistic.

[Zaphos]

Yep, michael explained it well.

I understand trees are hard, but I do feel like there's a continuum and there might be some relatively small things you could do to improve them.  I cropped some screenshots from your website to illustrate what bothers me, hope you don't mind!


It seems like the texture on this leaves-quad is being cut off prematurely; the leaves end at a sharp line.  There are also some confusing rectangular details further up in the texture, which may be compression artifacts?


For leaf-quads that are tilted towards the camera, they looks blurry and stretched.  I'm going to randomly guess it has something to do with isotropic vs anisotropic texture filtering, but I'm not sure.


Zooming in on the last image, it seems you get a small line at some edges of tree quads, perhaps due to filtering in black from 'outside' the texture or something.


Looking at the whole tree, the quads are not aligned to any particular structure in the tree, so they look to be randomly floating structures to some extent.  Either orienting them along the tree, or making a few 'real' branch structures to support them might help.  The issue where sideways quads are blurry is also very noticeable here.

Is it the trees ultimately that might be bringing it down for you, if things "seem reasonable"?

The town as a whole does look like low poly 3D with no frills -- no bump mapping or fancy lighting.  The little bushes have have simple textured surfaces.  Some of the textures -- like the ground in the last tree shot there -- are not so detailed.  But I assume you want it low poly to run in the 3D chat environment, and within those constraints it seems reasonable.

[Tanner]

Active Worlds...
Oh, the memories...

[jrothfork]

Thanks, Zaphos! Very helpful.