Woods of Faraway[survival/3d/online]

Woods of Faraway is the game i want to play. Idea is to create survival hardcore experience like
Heaven and Heart, Wurm online, Don't starve, and many more.

The heart of the game will be the online part, as all those games above lack the most important
part is the ability of player to create his own server/realm where he can play alone or with friends
if he wishes so.

about me: I am a 3d modeller and mediocre painter, im very dedicated and i can do a lot of things fast.
Working evenings before sleep for 4 days i finished this as a concept
2 days i've spent on the scene itself modelling every asset from scratch
as well as all textures are painted digitally by hand.
1 day for logo and 1 day for ui sketch (it turned out not as good as i thought it would be)




I plan on working on it for a long time. Right now im searching for a partner, and i have already planned a list of basic
features to make a PoC. Making this game as a tree will be a good idea i think, starting with basic flawless and responsive
motion of characters, and immidiate testing in server. Then basic needs, simplest crafting, vital skills and skill trees,
basic world generation based on ecoregions(allows to gradually change biomes without making mixed predefined setups)
and so on. As of now im alone all i can do is create some visuals which i will do
Feel free to leave comments and let me know what you think
about this wall of text and the project itself, im very open to critics.

 

As of now i used only fully hand drawn textures, but i feel that i will have to switch to photoreal later. What do you think?
this is example ground texture

i would love to stay with drawn, because well i love drawing
and also it's sort of my style i always prefered something like that - fast crude drawing but it has
something in it, some warmth.

 

Why do you have the feel to switch to photorealistic textures ? I hereby summon you to keep it up with the drawing !
It looks really lovely (only that the SSAO is a little to strong for my humble taste).

And yes, I also think hand drawn texture have some sexiness and warmth going on, Im always a happy duckling when I see such stuff.

I also agree with the guy on the HUD.

 

For the love of god please don't switch, I know better than most that digital painting is a massive drag when its for something as (seemingly) inconsequential as texture maps, especially ground tex maps. That said, it add SO much to games when you can actually see the effort put into every inch, stay with hand drawn, you wont regret it even though it take a lot longer.

 

hi guys! I found myself a codewizard partner) that's a very good news, now he is working on server part while im just doing nothing.
here are some sketches of Kauhi race which i think can be playable and not playable race.
They are not birds, they are humans with a bit different anatomy, bigger, taller, and their culture takes inspiration
for native American tribes and animism and cult of birds.
By lore (which i just made up but don't tell them ok) they are just scattered tribes of long ago extinct empire.
Centuries ago they were riding Kau - giant intelligent birds (analogue of dragons, since i hate dragons because of how mainstream they are)
so the Kau-hi means Kau riders. Kau were their family and protectors, they Kaupoi (Kau child a man that was gifted enough
to eventually build himself from the highest ranks (read renown skillset, since skill and wisdom was the highest value)
into omnipotent wisdom holding rider. Kaupoi were like Gandalf they have ridden whole world, disappearing from empire for ages.

All that's left are small tribes living around some ancient totems and structures which are never used for it's purpose again.

As of technical side Kauhi are strong natural survivors, can't hold any magic apart from native ability to befriend animals.






on last picture you can see the Kaushutai - a giant installation from wood with a big
cloth umbrella on the top. Color and patter was showing which tribe possessed that territory
to flying Kau.


All pictures are made very fast and the least i was caring about is quality. Since i will model all that myself
all i really care are ideas, i want to create something containing soul in it. I do believe that despite no top
notch quality people can see the soul of the project.

Oh i forgot to say, Kau themselves disappeared Nobody knows where they are but im sure they are partying with dragons in some other universe. Or someone left witchers in, who knows?

 

While pointcache is doing nothing, hang on he finished a rig for some toons, I finished proto types for base auth, server, client and spend most of past time with procedural world generation. Server side we managed to generate a 1024km² terrain but we feel 64kn² is a more realistic goal for a huge world where you can still find your friends.

The demo in the video is showing a 16km² patch of terrain in dev mode and it is not really optimized to be played with at that scale and fully loaded so let it lag ... a client version with octree based culling does fix that.

Base Procedural Terrain Generation:
http://www.twitch.tv/insudra/c/3496187

*voxel look will go by the time I'm done with it

 

Please do this correctly, everything is trying to make a survival game but they all SUCK.

What I personally feel downgrades a survival game to something really dumb and boring: small maps, lack of options, ugly environments, no realistic systems (such as hunger or thirst) and no realistic combat.

Please. It sounds like it could work. Don't mess it up.

 

What programs do you use for modeling and painting?

 

JESUS MAN! IM WATCHING TV, you can't say im doing nothing.

Prepare to drop your character if something wrecks your eyes and all you'll see is black screen. Or what can be more enjoyable than fall from the tree and break both your legs. And slowly bleed to death while yelling in chat, and only one who can hear you are wolves.

3dsmax, photoshop, painttool sai

 

Made a updated video for irc folks, thought I share here ...

Scale is a question mark atm (at least to me), but at the end and half way true, I show the base world texture and try to point out the small area you see being generated. So euh ... no worries there is more space then we might actually end up using. How big would a perfect world be for you and do you want real world scale or a scale more suited for game play ... mountain and valley wise ?

http://www.twitch.tv/insudra/c/3504521

The update is using a basic technique to smooth the voxels, this to get a better feel of what the procedural generation will look like. The generation has been tweak dramatically and is now using 36+ noise textures mixed and matched together.

*Note: Lagg .. LOD Turned off, Culling Turned off, ... it's dev preview, mostly for us to get a idea of what the generated terrain will look like at final stages. That and recording as well ofc ...

 

Ok so now we have a youtube channel, twitter, and blog and easier way to stay with us if you're interested is to follow us on twitter since everything goes there automatically.

btw for your convenience or if youre lazy to click links here is a dupe of last vid from Insu on yt,
video starts at 1:35 sry =)
[video=youtube_share;99aYLI_QkT4]http://youtu.be/99aYLI_QkT4?t=1m35s

 

Still working on procedural terrain, moving on to re implementing lod and editor preview (without pressing play). Once that is done I can finaly start on shaders and texturing.

Small preview of what the final mountains look like:
http://www.twitch.tv/insudra/c/3509294


Edit: Update, Improved terrain performance and optimized lod by taming the beast called 'vertex overkill' ... see atachment.



Terrain chunk is 64*64*64 voxels and represented 32 meters, on the terrain mesh these where subdivided so 128+1*128+1 let to 16.641 verts per chunk of 32m². Ofc that doesn't work well if your goal is to scale up to 50 km² or even with just a view distance of 1-2km.

With the new system terrain chunks are now between 8k-0.5k verts, with 12k-1k trits from high to low as seen on the images. Next step generate normal maps and test out what the max required lod is with those applied.

 

Ui concept, please comment and critique !

 

Really nice looking UI! I'm dying seeing Butt-head there >.<

 

Tech Info

Code wise the terrain has gone to back burner for a w short while, need to clear my mind on a few things and get a fresh perspective on some memory related issues. (shakes fist at old gc inside mono 2.6*, why you so slow and dim bro) What is the issue ? google: 'mono heap fragmentation'

So with free time at hand I started working on the networking, going over all the possible options again it was decided to go with UnityPark, it just fits our needs and reduces the amount of boiler plate code we needed to at to almost zero.

What where our needs ?
- Authoritative servers, 'no logic' on client.
- No ccu, nether we nor our users want a limit!
- Users need to be able to run there own servers:
a) Quickly boot up a private server. (local or public ip)
b) Setup a more permanent server that hooks in to account system. (public ip)

This alone drops about 50% of the available options, looking over the remaining options and keeping in mind that network code is a specialized job that requires allot of knowledge, tweaking and optimizing to get it just right ... UnityPark was the most interesting one left on the plate.

Why start with networking ?
- Solo play is extremely low on our list.
- Co-op or pvp is what makes this game design tick.

How far did we get ?
- Base registration, login, friends are done, this was a breeze with uLobby system and easy to expand on.
- Base character controllers up and running for movement, the system we ended up using has no state synchronization at all and is completely designed around rpc calls, this works great for our target based movement system and creates a absolute minimum amount of network traffic. We make sure it all stay in sync with authoritative server by sending state check rpc’s right after / before the character starts / stops moving.

Next up ditch OnGui and replace with NGui and start adding attributes to characters and environment.
(ui design: http://i.imgur.com/jQ4SEol.png)

Demo: