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[Dugan]

very impressive progress!
New logo feels weaker than the old one though :/

[Seiseki]

Looks amazing

[zede05]

very impressive progress!
New logo feels weaker than the old one though :/

You mean the one with the green grass and dirt from before? I tried it but the 3D version was kinda ugly so we dropped it. This current one is the best that we can come up with so far that shows nature and industry at the same time in a simple fashion. I guess we'll keep sketching for a while. 

[impulse9]

This game is insanely beautiful. Wishing you best of luck.

[Dugan]

very impressive progress!
New logo feels weaker than the old one though :/

You mean the one with the green grass and dirt from before? I tried it but the 3D version was kinda ugly so we dropped it. This current one is the best that we can come up with so far that shows nature and industry at the same time in a simple fashion. I guess we'll keep sketching for a while. 

hi - i meant the one on page one at the top - it has a sort of flash gordon/indiana jones adventure feel. The other is cool too, just felt weaker/unfinished i guess against all the other updated art.

[zede05]

Ohh, that one.  We never considered that one due to it not looking very good when used on colorful images (since its monochrome), haha.

Here's a new vid showing off digging and building for combat:



We're been working on procedural stuff lately, it turns out it's actually pretty easy. We've already got the entire cave system working, now it's just to tweak them so that they give better shapes and appearances.

[SoulSharer]

This game sure looks incredible for an alpha.
Keep up the good work! 

[zede05]

This game sure looks incredible for an alpha.
Keep up the good work! 

Thanks! 

This week, we've been working on getting AI unstuck from pretty much everything. You know, a* pathfinding is great and all...for static settings, the moment you have a dynamic world, well, it doesn't work right a lot of times. The ai will behave nicely until it runs into a ditch or a cave, then its pathfinding just goes nuts. NUTS.

Another thing we've been working on is switching from Unity GUI (yes, we were using this for some unknown reason) to NGUI. NGUI is too awesome for words.

Finally, we've been working on procedural terrain and procedural caves, we've got the basics down now and are just adding flora and other procedural objects (like arches or houses or walls). Below's what we have right now, it's a 256*256 map, just using straight up noise and some erosion. We'll probably try to add some perlin noise next. In the end, we'll probably do 512*512 maps for multiplayer and ~2X2km maps for single player procedural mode.

[zede05]

Added gun weapon customization in the Creation System. Now we can pretty much make whatever shaped guns we like. Can't wait to see what players will come up with (although I have some notions ).

[zede05]

Moving on to vehicles, wheeled ones first. We're having a lot of fun with the physics. Running the car into a monster is a blast. Next step would be incorporating it into the creation system so that people can customize whatever they want. I think we're gonna end up seeing some racetracks in the game and some Twisted Metal style gameplay from players as well, haha.

[zede05]

We're closing in on a0.4 this week. Man I'm so tired. We're trying to get procedural generated plants and caves into this version, it looks ok at the moment, but not where I want it to be. I'll probably keep tweaking this over the next few weeks. I did redo the entire world map again getting ready for this, I hope that's the last time (this is like the 5th time I redid the whole map). Here below is a image from the canyon section of the map, it basically divides the forest biome and the desert biome. Once the plants go in, I think it'll look very nice. 

[zede05]

Just finished up herd behavior and pack hunts. Still tweaking the numbers on this as we don't want the animals to kill each other while the player just watches, but the unexpected random encounters have been providing us with a lot of entertainment. We'll throw this out in alpha 0.4 and see how players react to it.

Below are a pack of devilwolves tracking after a uredklad creature.

[Quarry]

I'm not really fond of the difference between terrain textures and foliage, seems to have completey diff color schemes

[Schrompf]

I think the concept of the game is promising... emergent gameplay by semi-autonomous NPCs. Sadly the "infinite" part of the concept shows everywhere. I don't like procedurally generated content, it just makes all places look the same.

Concerning the foliage: it might be a good idea to desaturate it a bit to better fit the ground textures. Apart from that, graphics look gorgeous! Strange alien-like forms everywhere... I love it!

[zede05]

I'm not really fond of the difference between terrain textures and foliage, seems to have completey diff color schemes

The saturation in Photoshop is actually about the same, the style is a tiny bit different, the biggest difference though is the lighting throughout the day cycle. We'll tweak it soon enough since it's been bugging me that the grass and the terrain matches up perfectly for about 20 min each day, heh.

I think the concept of the game is promising... emergent gameplay by semi-autonomous NPCs. Sadly the "infinite" part of the concept shows everywhere. I don't like procedurally generated content, it just makes all places look the same.

Concerning the foliage: it might be a good idea to desaturate it a bit to better fit the ground textures. Apart from that, graphics look gorgeous! Strange alien-like forms everywhere... I love it!

Thanks! Well, it's not really infinite, it's just that we have the tech for it if we want to go in that direction. What we do have in this game is procedural stuff (flora, caves, textures, etc) on a set map. It'd be impossible for us to go and paint everything onto the map by hand, we don't have the budget for that, we will manually tweak all the most important areas though. Speaking of important areas:





You're not alone out there. 

[zede05]

Put out alpha 0.4, available here: http://www.indiedb.com/games/planet-explorers/downloads/planet-explorers-alpha-04

Change list:
- procedural adventure and build maps single player with the grassland, forest, desert, and canyon biomes.
- cave systems single player
- a new procedural planting system
- more forest area
- some forest creatures
- swimming
- more efficient UI system
- herds and herd behavior
- better animal behavior
- more story scenes
- firing guns
- creating any gun in the creations system
- new map for the game world (now 17X10km)

We wasted a lot of time in this version correcting past mistakes. So it feels like we didn't get much done at all. But now that this is out of the way, we're gonna start the content piling...hopefully.

[zede05]

Finished making the trailer for alpha 0.4. Here it is:



Another one showing some wolfpack gameplay:



I've already got a bug list going from all the people who's played 0.4 so far...and boy there are lots, haha. I wish there's a button that I can push that makes all the bugs go away.

We're thinking of doing a Kickstarter for this project next month, it'll be busy, and fun...hopefully, on the fun part anyway. 

[zede05]

 

[Windybeard]

This looks amazing. Its very impressive how much you have accomplished since starting this devlog.

[zede05]

This looks amazing. Its very impressive how much you have accomplished since starting this devlog.

Thanks! 

The last few weeks, we've been working on getting a lot of new content into the game. There are still some standing technical issues, such as the seams in the transvoxels and getting really cool and realistic perlin noise on the terrain. We're also trying to get the multiplayer code completely split from the client code. The player animation system got completely rewritten getting ready for ik and ragdoll, I really hope it'll make a huge difference because we've been wasting a lot of time on it.

Just to show how inexperienced we've been at making this type of game, so far, we've probably spent around 6 months of man hours redoing stuff (rewrote the ai code twice, the player code once, the ui code twice, the cave code once etc.). But, we're getting there! 

Some new art!