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[Timo Vihola]

Quarry, karlozalb: I went to see real chicken couple of days ago and shot some footage so we can look at it with Sampo and see if it needs any tweaks The crazy part of the story is that there was also a rooster there who had just killed another rooster a few days earlier... real animals can be scary and violent! I can post a image of the killer rooster later...

Development update #14:

Here's screenshots of the first pass of procedural town generation:

White color shows connecting roads between point of interests, green color shows town roads, red color is town walls and big yellow boxes indicate gates.

The grand plan is to have sockets on the roads where the buildings are connected. (also special structures such as wells, street lamps, statues, town hall etc.)
Mikko Mononen recommended a great book called "A Pattern Language" by Christopher Alexander, it's been really helpful in trying to pick the most meaningful battles when it comes to town generation - highly recommended if you're thinking about doing anything related to town generation or architecture.

Godrays & sun are also new features and they're looking pretty, especially in motion - but at the moment I only have this screenshot to share:

[GrahamOfLegend]

Loving everything about this game!! The process - from pixels to final is really cool / smart. Can't wait to see more . I'll be keeping watch over this devlog for sure.

Good luck!

[AaronGlazer]

This game looks great! The chickens are hilarious, you've definitely caught my eye with this. I'll keep up on this devlog for sure.

[Timo Vihola]

GrahamOfLegend: Thanks a lot!

AaronGlazer: Thanks, the chicken have hilarious running animations as well

Development update #15: Summer holidays are slowing down the development a bit as almost half of the team is away.

Cool stuff is still happening though. Kalle was playing around with shaders today, would be fun to do an entire game which looks like this:


Same screenshot with the real shader:

(Soldier is one of the playable characters)

This is the killer rooster I was talking about in an earlier post.
In this photo he's showing no regrets for what he has done:

[Timo Vihola]

Development update #16: Second iteration of town generation:


(the first iteration can be seen in development update #14)

[vv]

This looks awesome! Love the art style, and environment.

[Timo Vihola]

vv: Thank you!

Development update #17: Town generation is reaching a point where it can actually be witnessed in the game and what better way to look at it than the (experimental/alternative) first person camera



Next time I'll post a video of the FPS camera which shows the player terrorizing the poor village.

[Timo Vihola]

Development update #18: More first person camera action showing the new PhysX physics implementation in action. It was a battle to squeeze this GIF under Imgur's 10 MB limit.


The villagers must hate the maniac hero by now, it's just as bad as Link's vase breaking & house stealing habit

[Quarry]

Oh god, this is wonderful! Please use gfycat or similar services for gifs this huge though

[Timo Vihola]

Quarry: One thing I like about Imgur is the ability to upload into the public Imgur photostream and get thousands extra views per GIF. Also the stats are pretty nice. This is the first time I have heard about gfycat, they mention on the website it converts to html5 video but I think TIGSource forums have some limits on what can be embedded (no youtube for example). Next time when I'll have to make a giant GIF I'll give it a shot, thanks for the tip!

Development update #19: Procedural grass animation from today:



It will look even better tomorrow once Kalle puts in the collision code so the grass bends around the player! It should also help with gameplay feedback when travelling in tall grass

[Timo Vihola]

Development update #20: Procedural grass animation continues, it now bends around the player and looks a lot more dynamic than yesterday

On the plus side the game also runs better each day even though the features and assets keep piling up. For example: it loads very fast now because we load the low detail mip map first and then stream the hires textures in. It used to load all hires textures before it let you play at all, which took a long time.



We're starting to prepare material for Steam Greenlight and we're hoping to submit it there in a couple of weeks (once we have a trailer ready to go). If you can then help spread the word about the project we would really appreciate that!

[kruxus]

Looks really nice. The designs reminds me a bit of eastern European stop-motion films. The combination of the blocky voxel style and high-res assets works really well in a way I haven't seen before.

When it comes to texture streaming, I rather wait a bit longer than seeing the low mip-map levels when the game starts, but if you can make sure the textures needed close to the player are loaded it's all fine. It's a pretty bad immersion breaker otherwise.

[karlozalb]

Development update #20: Procedural grass animation continues, it now bends around the player and looks a lot more dynamic than yesterday

On the plus side the game also runs better each day even though the features and assets keep piling up. For example: it loads very fast now because we load the low detail mip map first and then stream the hires textures in. It used to load all hires textures before it let you play at all, which took a long time.



We're starting to prepare material for Steam Greenlight and we're hoping to submit it there in a couple of weeks (once we have a trailer ready to go). If you can then help spread the word about the project we would really appreciate that!

The physics interaction with the sunflowers is amazing :O

[Obreht]

This looks amazing! Why the stone faces, though? Makes the players look rather inanimate and a bit off-putting (that may of course be what you're going for, and in that case nice work  )

[Timo Vihola]

Development update #21:

kruxus: I'm not a fan of texture pop in or LOD popping either. As you said we can also give priority to textures which are seen first. Even in it's current implementation you won't see constant popping like in many console games, it only happens once in the beginning and after that it's solid.

Obreht: The heads and especially those big eyes will get much more life once we get the head & eye turning code working correctly. We're gonna use a sliding UV map like Nintendo used on Wind Waker and Twilight Princess:
http://www.benjones.us/twilight-princess-eyes-breakdown/

After that treatment the eyes should transform from dead to expressive as the characters start looking at each other and also at interesting objects you can interact with to help the gameplay feedback. The animals have to be so cute that you feel like a real bastard if you harm them

karlozalb: Added even more procedural goodness today, wheat field:

[Quarry]

I can simply not believe that this game looks this good and runs this well

[Timo Vihola]

Quarry: Thanks for the encouraging words!

Development update #22:

Yay, we've got the first iteration of procedural eye animation working! It's the similar type of sliding UV as in Wind Waker.



EYE TEXTURE BREAKDOWN:

Texture edges are clamped to prevent the iris from becoming visible on the opposite side with characters that have more round eyes.
The normal map has a small bump in the middle to improve the way it catches light.
As you can see it creates the nice and tight highlight on the cornea:

[Timo Vihola]

Development update #23: Couple of fun terrain generator tests from tonight:



The above image is 70 million triangles. (there's more debug stats in the upper right corner of the image)

This bottom image is 110 million tris with 59000 physics objects: (runs like a diashow at 3 fps average )



There's no LOD system yet so it's drawing everything no matter how small it is.

[Quarry]

Silky smooth 6 FPS

[DeadAlienCult]

really impressive stuff here. nice job