map magic – Exbleative

Tag: map magic

Exo One June 30 Progress Update

A quick update on what I’ve been working on for Exo One this past couple of weeks, now that Kickstarter is pretty well settled for now:

The new version of the backer preview build should now work for 4k screens/odd resolutions. Check your Humble email/download link if you had issues in the past.

Worked on the story for a couple of days.

Rhys fixed an old, annoying camera bug. In some situations the camera would tilt annoyingly. Still one or two other oddities to fix yet.

Pre-order page is now up on Humble here, if you missed out on the Kickstarter: https://www.humblebundle.com/g/exo_one

Slight ‘wing tip trail’ upgrade on the craft in glider mode.

Partial world streaming tests. Instead of generating terrain in real time, I’ve pre-generated it in a huge area, which results in a big performance gain, and hopefully no frame rate spikes for people without beast CPUs. There’s still plenty to explore, but this would mean no more infinite terrain. With the focus of the game more on the movement and feels, and without a huge amount of ‘content’ to find, I think this is fine. I’m still yet to complete testing this as I have to actually stream the terrain in. Have to see if there’s a framerate spike from that next.

As part of optimization tests, I’ve tested baked lighting as the terrain now exists (pre-generated) before the game starts. This would mean a slight improvement in distant shadows, but unsure if I’ll be using it as I have less control over lighting (afaik, need to spend a little more time) and there would be a huge lightmap generate time for the number of terrains.

Pre-generated, streamed terrain (if they’re as smooth as I hope) will have a number of other advantages visually as well, since I won’t have to try quite so hard to keep frame rates super high to account for frame rate spikes.

Terminus Nominee – best game/design. Pleased to announce Exo One was a close runner up/nominee for Best Game and Best Game Design for TERMINUS this year. Full details: https://terminusevent.squarespace.com/2017-award-winners

Wind air currents. These are nice little atmospheric objects you can find if you look for them. If you manage to get inside the air current, they will give you a speed boost. I may toy with other ideas like having your controls become harder to handle within as well, so you have to ‘wrestle with’ the turbulence/speed.

First Ansel Tests. While this didn’t work in Unity 5.4, now that I’m in 5.6 we are in business. Just need to remove my own camera controls while in Ansel mode to make this work, since now the camera controls are competing with Ansel’s. Below is just a silly retro snap:

New trueSky, MapMagic, material updates. Here’s a screenshot of Sagan4 with the latest versions of these plugins, using MegaSplat for their rather awesome texture clustering (minimizes tiling effects):

AVCON. If you’re in Adelaide and are coming to AVCON, I’ll see you there! Unsure yet whether I’ll be bringing an older or newer version of the game. Might depend on what state the current build is in.

Catch you for the next update, where I hope to have made some solid progress on planet streaming!

Distraction Levels, Huge. More Planet Making.

February 3, 2017 / Jay / Comments Off

Due to some (good!) news I can’t announce just yet, my distraction levels lately have been rather huge, so I’m not getting a lot done.

So I thought I’d do another planet making video.

Planetary Planning:

Focus is on the clouds for this planet, so won’t go too crazy with terrain. We are probably aiming to be airborne at least half the time on this planet, so the terrain is a little less of a focus.
Need to make sure the player isn’t going to be ramming higher altitude terrain while inside clouds, so keeping things low/smooth.
Consider what terrain is good for constant, fast, 1-directional movement.
Today mostly tackling a Mars-style, high-speed wind affected terrain using line nodes and noise masks. Check out:

Video

Action! (the video recording software) or my computer shafted me and I lost most of the first take, so here’s a 2nd one, using NVidia ShadowPlay (thanks for the suggestion, Mr @CFantarella).

Flora

I know some frozen rock is unlikely to have much in the way of living flora, but yknow… SPACE! Who knows how these plants live!! Plus, moving grass shows high speed wind nicely.

I checked out some of the fastest moving water/water plants on earth and saw this long flowing and endangered Texas grass:

Also saw a lot of interesting super long seagrass/seaweed, and wondered if I could replicate it somehow. Collisions with long flowing grass probably wouldn’t happen, but at the same time, I’m not sure I care that much. I’d rather the cool looking flowing plants (which probably wouldn’t affect movement anyway) and zero collisions. Indie game dev! Boom! Anyway, this might be a tough ask depending on the scale I go for. I’ll see what I can rustle up.

Things to try:

3D plant models made from Blender. Probably multiple big sheets, to which I add a tiling grass texture, x and y, for rezzz.
2D billboards, but much smaller scale, don’t know if I can even get them to follow the wind direction I want.

Results:

Can’t use grass, it doesnt take wind zones into consideration. It just flaps about aimlessly.
Made a custom tree and messed around with it for an hour or so to get this:

The main problem with this is, we can’t really animate it like flowing grass. So it just kinda sways oddly like a tree. Maybe I need to get my hands on a line renderer type of thing… Unsure I’ll keep this.

Tweaking Terrain

Spend another couple hours making the rivers better, the lighting better (now we can see the ground more easily) and the sky/nebulae a little clearer:

And then back onto the grass again for another hour, and so it went until it was ridiculously late and I got too carried away tweaking things! Looking back at the grass stuff again in that screenshot I think it actually looks alright, hummm. Will see what it looks like to me on Monday morning!

Bye!

More PR + Ice Planet Making-Of Video

February 2, 2017 / Jay / Comments Off

Planned Tasks

Continue through Game to Market eBook and ensure I have a well-rounded plan to take to my consultant. 4 hrs
Upload teaser for EXO ONE to Facebook (mostly to see how many views it might generate) 15 mins
Begin Planet 2 terrain (replacing placeholder terrain). Possibly film for Youtube. 3 hrs

PR/Marketing

After going off on wayyy too much of a Kickstarter tangent (though not entirely unrelated to EXO ONE’s marketing), I covered some of the following:

Communication channels (ie Facebook, email, Twitter, etc)
- What to post, when, topic ideas
- Earned vs free coverage options
Kickstarter marketing
Read a crap load of stuff that took ages.
Watched this video:

Which was in this excellent article by IndieWolverine on Kickstarters: http://indiewolverine.com/2016/02/01/video-game-kickstarter-tips/

Planet 2 Terrain

I’m going to try recording a video of this just to see what it’s like, but may not actually share it (will see!).

Here’s some reference for this planet’s terrain:

I’m going to try essentially replacing this water with ice for this cold world. I think long half-pipe like river structures should work well in combination with the fast moving clouds, especially if they mostly somehow orient themselves to match the cloud direction.

River Heightfields

Ok so I spent an hour making a video and it’s not too bad. Pretty slow, and I’m rusty, and mumbly and so on, but that’s what 2x youtube speed is for ya’ll!

Here’s some screens from it, showing the node setup, the resulting heightfield, scene view and in-game. Again, this was only an hour of work, so it has a little way to go still.

Above: River heightmap, created using a simple noise texture, but isolating one small strip of grey value and then applying a curve that turns that grey value strip into a river bed cross section.

Here’s the very simple node network used to create the river, with the cross section I mentioned above.

The heightfield, represented as green for low altitude, red for high (which… is kinda backwards…) :)

The heightfield with a muddy/rocky texture, and snow layered over the top to make it more obvious where the river bed is/isn’t.

Much more lighting and material work required to make the river stand out properly, but here’s a quick in-game screenshot anyways.

The Videoening

Wow, I’m famous, there I am, on Youtubes! Listen to me mumble! And don’t forget to 2x me!!

Cya next time!

Making Craters for EXO ONE

September 1, 2016 / Jay / Comments Off

A crater is perhaps the perfect piece of landscape for EXO ONE to leap in and out of. It can be approached at various angles, has lots of room for error, and is suitably sci-fi and outer space-ey. You can build up a ton of speed if you hit them just right as well.

Below you can see a screenshot of just the crater nodes, which then feeds into the rest of the somewhat vast node network that governs the procedurally generated terrain. This is created using Map Magic by Denis Pahunov @akaWraith which you can grab on the asset store here. Essentially the entire terrain is assembled in this graph fashion. Of course, with EXO ONE I bent reality a bit so that almost everything can be jumped into and out of. Anyway, here’s the nodes + the end result crater: