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[Mr F]

So here's a little demo I've been working on for some time. It's not much of a game, more like... a poorly interactive dream.

Download link: https://docs.google.com/uc?id=0B8bUyxmdPeZSb2UwVUx2c2hkZmc&export=download
(Windows/DX9/doesn't demand top hardware... guy with Intel HD 4000 reported me that it worked fine)

Video (though it spoils everything. Better play yourself):

Code:

https://youtu.be/GZRGE_CutyY

Screenshots:







In case you're asking "WTF is happening there", I don't have an answer

[owendeery]

Wow, really neat. It's right up my alley.

My favorite part was the ending/painterly bit. How did you go about rendering it?

[Mr F]

Thanks for the reply
Painterly scene has really crazy implementation, I could write a detailed article on that. But in short, it's all made of small camera-aligned quads (no screen post-processing), each with a paint stroke texture. Quads were generated from a highly detailed offline scene (similar to voxelization process). Stroke direction is also important, it's partly procedural, partly manual (direction painted as vectors in textures). Ending animation is all done in a vertex shader, it's just sin/cos/lerp/pseudo-random. There are a lot of details to tell about... If there's enough interest to this technique, I'll better do a blog post.

[Hibbe]

I just downloaded this an hour ago or so, played through it a couple of times and... wow. All the scenes look amazing and the music fits really really well.

The lit up temple/palace looks really cool. Playing it for a second time I realize that you are being "railroaded" towards that point, but I think you could ( maybe not should, but could ) definitely open up the "city" a lot more and you would still see players drawn towards the palace because it looks like a place that would be really cool to explore.



Really the only thing I can think to suggest that could improve on what already exists would be the transition between the "city" and the "mountain path" - the brazier didn't work for me and I couldn't find the path at first. It reminded me of the snow storm in Dragon Age: Inquisition where you have low visibility and you walk around aimlessly for a little while before the game fades out and puts you in the right direction. If you could have it so after players walk around in the snow storm for a little while the path appeared almost right in front of you regardless of what direction you decided to go then I bet that would look great.

I don't know if you plan to make anything out of this, right now it looks like showcase but if it were to become a game or "interactive experience" then I certainly wouldn't mind

[Mr F]

Thanks for the reply, Hibbe.

definitely open up the "city" a lot more

I tried that originally, but some players didn't realize where they should go, so I made it a bit more obvious.

the brazier didn't work for me and I couldn't find the path at first.

I agree here, it's a bit on the side, while people mostly tend to move straight forward  . I'd like to redo this, but I think I'm a bit too tired for now, but I'll keep that in mind.

if you plan to make anything out of this

It was planned as just a little demo... to test my skills, I guess. Also as a gift to one person. Didn't plan to make a huge game out of this, but it certainly gave me some ideas and experience for future things.
Before I used to start really big projects and wasn't able to finish them in any sensible amount of time, so it was a nice change of pace, to make something small and finished.

---
Oh! I just realized, I forgot to translate the launcher to English. Sorry, my bad. The controls there are:
- screen resolution;
- window mode (windowed, borderless, fullscreen);
- mouse speed (sensitivity).

Reuploaded translated version, should be readable now.

[Mark Mayers]

I came across your 'Rendering painted world' blog post from Twitter.

All I can say is wow, that looks fantastic and impressive.

Keep up the good work!

[Mr F]

Thanks! And I'll leave the link here as well:
Rendering painted world in JG

[Senior-X]

wah, very beautiful, love it!
that last scene is so great! an experience that would look crazy on VR

[Pishtaco]

This is very nice. I got a bit lost in the first section - I went round in circles for a while, until I read this thread again and worked out that I could get to the lights in the distance.

I read your write-up on the painterly section. Can you say a bit more about what your point cloud is? I gather that it's generated in advance, and fixed; but are the points meant to be spread at more-or-less even density over the surfaces in the scene, or something else? I'm confused because it sounds like at one point you're generating them from a depth map.

 

[Mr F]

Point cloud is generated from offline-rendered frames by re-projecting pixels back to world space from color+depth maps. Scene is assembled of multiple such re-projected frames. They shouldn't overlap too much, or you get unwanted density change. I rendered all frames from nearby positions and cleaned up overlapping to maintain density.

[Nition]

I know this is an old post now but I still come back to this occasionally because it really feels like something truly different. Your initial comment of it playing like a dream is accurate. The directionless wandering, the strange visuals, the fuzzy edges to the world where you feel like you don't really know how far things go, that anything could happen. Beautiful little demo.

I have it in the back of my mind to try something with painterly splats like this one day.