Shadow's Stuff

A long while ago I was working on a game in Unity, it ultimatley changed switched and shifted. Became some sort of Sci-Fi thingy, so in my spare time I decided to continue on with the original concept of a Dragon age / Witcher / Skyrim mishmash in Unity.. As I need something to keep this thread around here is an obligatory picture:

Although not really focusing on graphics for the moment .








Done so far:

Basic AI / Waypoint Nav system, with basic interaction. Press E key, player turns around comes up to you and says hello whilst on their duties.. Currently you only have the option to say goodbye, how rude?

Basic Inventory system, pretty much click a button and it swaps various character meshes out.

Basic UI, you can exit the game which is nice.

Some interior stuff that needs some "defacto meshes swapping out".

Basic level / skill system, bit too linear but it's on the list.

Two quests made, slightly more interesting than fetch me a potion. P.S Get it your self, trying to save the world here sheesh..!

Story line that doesn't make much sense at the moment, which is cool..

 

screenshot looks tight. I request moar visuals.

 

^ op saw the light and came home
everyone knows it.

 

So, before I start on the laborious artwork bit outside of stock asset store stuff (which I didn't post, what's the point?).. Wanted to get some feedback on style, the art will dictate really what the game is.. Mechanics are just mechanics, they will be <Insert any TPS / FPS RPG game title here> type mechanics.

I was thinking of something a little different, I suppose the idea is from Fallout "future past".. If any fans of DR. who here, I was thinking something like Gallifrey.. Again if you're a fan of the series, you'll of noticed that Dr. Who pretty much grew up in a shed, but it's one of the most advanced civilisations in the Galaxy.

Just a thought, let me know.

 

Just thought I'd sling this in here, it's a Navmesh test scene. Jump over tables and stuff, see if they can sit down etc..

 

Keep on going. . . .i'm watching you. . . . err this thread i mean

 

As it's on the cards I might actually be using Unity (again), I've been heavily researching into custom shaders / rendering / post etc. here is the result as part of "Shadows Stuff"..

 

Wow! Gotta say I am impressed. That's one of the best, if not THE best, forest shots I've seen made in Unity. Would love to see it without DOF to see how the detail and (anti)aliasing looks at a distance. I'm looking forward to see your progress on this! Great stuff!

 

Wow! I've got to say that this is insane! I really like it The forest ist just WOW... Looks like real life Keep your work up!

 

On the second screenie, I've heavily removed the DOF it's just the far background stuff.! Thanks everyone ..!

 

So does that mean "Unreal 4 bye bye" then??

Sorry, I'm not up to date with the forums due to a lot work. Maybe you mentioned already somewhere else.

Great screens!

 

Umm, err.. Nope.

 

Love those screens.
I'm a mac user mainly developing for iOS but thinking of making the leap to desktop games so its great to see what can actually be achieved. So many questions
I'd be interested to know what kind of FPS you are getting at the moment and the spec of the pc running them.
Would you be willing to share a breakdown of how you achieved those screens i.e tools used to generate the terrain, shaders, post fx etc.
And if you do get 35fps can you share your secrets

 

After a lot of tweaking, I'm now getting 60 FPS on our dev machines. Which is either a Radeon 390X / I7 5820K / 32GB DDR or the same with a 780TI.

No probs, I'm using world machine to export normals / splats / HM's. If you've never done that before, there is a splat example that comes with it.. As I need tiles to be streamed at distance I'm using WM PRO.

Shaders are mainly custom, last night I was experimenting with Alloy which gives similar results and is along the same lines as what I did. For example inverse square falloff on lights etc. and my own (old) implementation of GGX although I really like the deferred decals in Alloy and area lights, so it looks like I'll be using that from now on.

In terms of post effect stacks, well it's deferred / linear and HDR on the camera with a custom chromatic abberation / depth of field (which isn't great in them screens IMO), SSDO and I'm using Unity's cinematic post effects for touch up's (colour grading) and tonemapping (via Aces). I also used Unity's cinematic bloom..

 

I'd be very interested to hear your opinion on the free Lux shader framework. It supports all kinds of goodies like dynamic snow and rain. Afaik it comes with some terrain and tree shader too.

 

Thats excellent thanks for sharing.
Good to hear you've got 60fps. Where did your best gains come from or was it just a case of little gains here and there?
Did you have to sacrifice anything on the visual quality to get that fps improvement?

 

I'm currently trying to use SpeedTree billboard / alpha's (as grass planes) to speed up everything whilst trying to get similar results.. In terms of amount of grass / performance if I use the terrain system instead of using mesh based grass (which has shadow casting / AO on it etc. which makes a massive impact) I can literally get three times the amount at three times the FPS / msec rate.

At the moment visual quality has tanked because of it, but I'm trying various techniques to find a decent balance.

All in all the game has to work at 60 FPS medium settings on a GTX 470, so I really need to pull out some performance gains somewhere.

 

Just thought I'd do an update, I'm re-hashing an old project I started in the Unity 4.1 days .. Just sorting out the general look whilst cracking on with the artwork (did this as a demo for TOD).. Most of the combat systems etc. was done years back:

If I could consistantly make it look like this all the way through, am I on a winner? P.S there might be some odd artifacts from the temporal anti aliasing, kind of like the screen moved whilst the screeny was being taken.. Performance is 60+ FPS so that's good.

 

Looks great! I really enjoy seeing quality graphics in Unity.
Just a couple of small crits is that I think the path texture is a bit lacking contrast and color, and also in the bottom image it might look better to have more of a hue difference between the shadows and highlights with color correction - the yellow/orange is too uniform imo.

Top image looks amazing! Look forward to more.

 

Aye, that's the issue with PBR.. You need occlusion maps etc. for it to look right... Also some POM probably wouldn't go amiss either. I can't remember what I did with my old terrain shaders, so looks like I'll have to re-do it..!

I'll also have a look into the shadows, in UE the shadows pick up small amounts of ambient lighting. I'll poke Unity and see if they'll do anything about it, if not I'll look into that too.!

Thanks for the feedback ..

 

Very nice as usual ShadowK.
Do you have some blog where we can follow you ?

 

Actually no, might start one up..

 

Ok, so about the new project:

There's only two of us working on it (mainly), the other main project I was working on pretty much went bust.. Many reasons, took on too much / lost interest / too many morph's / changes to what it was originally supposed to be. Originally the game was supposed to be along the lines of the original Dragon age, it ended up going towards an open world Mass Effect.

Anyway, with that out the way.. A new highly reduced scope game is in the works, I'll do a more "official" WIP thread with all the polished shiny stuff later. This is more along the lines of workflow / nitty gritty stuff I'll be working.. So what's the plan?

DISCLAIMER: The end result may be nothing like the following.!

- 3X 4KM2 terrain semi-openworld segments, desert / snow / sand.
- Art more inline with medieval era.
- Full mod support, I mean run-time .FBX loader / C# script support.
- Story (of course) will leave all the voice acting until the end, no point in paying a boat load of money if the game never see's the light of day.
- Basic RPG stuff (interaction system (done), inventory system (done), UI (is passable at best), camera system (done), character controller (done), combat system in the works..
- Character creation system based on morph target's.
- Anything else anyone can think of???

I've changed the way I want to approach this, It'll be a free release and I want it to be constantly evolving with new additions and materials that get updated via patch releases. Hopefully the community will join in, the best "mods" as such might even get merged into the core branch.

This needs to be a fun project, as opposed to trying to release a semi-big budget game which is a shadow of what a larger company could do.

 

Noooooooo!!! =( =( =( I was so looking forward to see that one develop! *sadpandaface*
Are you going to write a post mortem? I'm sure there'd be a lot of valuable insights in there.

Is that the core problem why you're not continuing with the old project? Either way it sounds like a good choice. I'm looking forward to see how the new project is coming along! Is this one gonna be done in Unity again?

 

It's literally going to be a continuation of the original project I started early 2014.. https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/fallen-spirit-rpg.225407/

All that REALLY needed to be done was to replace all the stock art (it'd all have to be replaced anyway PBR and all that) and finish off quest's / storyline etc.. Issue was Unity in it's 4.X variant literally couldn't handle the size of the game (even though it was very small compared to the UE version).. Now it can, I have tons of pre-made code and tons of stuff already done. *Schwing.

Sure I'll do a write up at some point, although I still can't fathom how it turned into what it did.. It was fun / learnt alot though and that's all that really matters ..

 

Ok, so I believe I have the look / feel of the game down for the most part.. Got a very basic combat system finished, started finishing off own artwork and adding it to the game.. Char's are just asset store stock for now until I can get a morph system and a random generator for all the NPC's.. I'll leave that until later, it's a lot of work.!

I've had to do a major performance overhaul, it wasn't exactly running great (P.S, 80 FPS on an R9 390X at ridiculous settings)..

 

Is it just me, since Im looking from my phone, or upper part of the tree barks are glowing yellow?

 

I think they are just blending to a different, bright and more orange bark texture from the mid point up.

But yeah, from this angle and they way the lighting is set up for this shot, it did look like some weird SSS action was going on (especially that tree on the left).

Anyway, great stuff!

 

Remains me of Gothic Good .

 

Yes, all major foliage is using SSS (well a performance modded "workaround").. As you said it's a combination of things, but I'm going to show the process warts and all (it's a WIP, why not?), I have a relatively small amount of scripts / art from previous projects but I'm only 4 days of actual work into the project.. It's going to be rather messy for a while, especially with all the stuff I'm using being completely dynamic which will push Unity to it's limits.

With draw distances / shadow casters etc. originally I was getting 20 FPS , so I've spent most of that time just optimising to a point where the editor wouldn't continuously stall. Which is annoying development wise.

Overall though, I am impressed with how far Unity has come along. I've tried this in just about every major engine and it didn't go too well..! Especially having the option of dynamic GI (well semi-dynamic).!

 

It's a long time coming, but I did actually create a development blog..! (see signature)..

 

Good to see you commiting to a time frame for a demo! I'm looking forward to see your progress on this. Please keep us updated here when you write a new blogpost.

 

Congrats !

I cannot send you a private message for some reason, please consider removing "There's nothing here." under the image on the Home page (unless it is intended).

 

As requested:

Later update than usual, the sun was calling and it was time to soak up enough to avoid scurvy for the coming winter months. So this time around I’ve been mainly “testing” and I’m not yet done testing, sounds a little vague huh?

The main part of any reasonable sized project is going to be artwork, I won’t even tend to open the editor to do much besides UI work and the rest of the time it’ll be the DCC open.

So it’s a perfect time to see what’s the latest and greatest out there, what new tools and toys there’s to play with.

Amazon LY caught my eye and I’ve still to do a proper deep dive into all its systems / subsystems but the performance is a corker, of course based on that other engine it has a metric ton of other great features, like dialogue system / AI / Water system / TOD / RL GI etc. etc. for an openworld / semi-openworld project seems a bit of a no-brainer? From a fringe look it appears a little rough around the edges still in terms of usability and documentation, apart from that we’ll see.

This time around I really want to just keep pushing forward, if I find something too much of a compromise and / or hit a wall / get bogged down in technicalities I have a backup. So a side build is the way I’ll approach it this time around.

The second engine is Unity 5.X, it has vastly improved since its U4.X iteration and many of the original issues I’ve come across in previous projects won’t be an issue. I’ve decided this time around the game will be mainly mesh based skipping a lot of issues with things like terrain.

It’s a terraforming outpost split into multiple sections right in the middle of the sea, it can benefit from such things as static occlusion and Enlighten can do the part of semi real-time GI.

It’s a compromise I believe will work well as opposed to a big terrain based open world game. Ok, so I’ve used Unity on and off for years already, I had a couple of year break whilst working on an MMO in Unreal / learning the engine.

Performance testing is of course at the top of my criteria list, a skinned mesh renderer test showed I could have 30 – 40 characters on screen at once without affecting performance too much (with GPU skinning enabled).. This is fine I doubt I’d ever have more than 20 in frustrum at any one time and the chars were far from optimised (40 – 60K poly’s per mesh w/ around 10 mats each).

The one thing that keeps bringing me back to Unity is the scripting pipeline, not because of C# but the rapid iteration speed of the component system.. Something LY is also investing in. Also contrary to many peoples opinion I think Unity looks great rendering wise, post could do with a bit of work (especially jitter from SSR) but that’s somewhat easily solved. I’d love to be able to keep up with the rendering level (tests shown below) but I’ll somewhat reign it in.



I will use small bouts of terrain for open areas; the only real noticeable issue I came across was using grass meshes (via decal / grass system) apart from the standard “billboard” plane system. It doesn’t take much to sink performance; I’ll look into using a mesh painter w/ instancing and mix the two together for dense areas.

As I’m not “fighting” Unity this time around it should be far easier to deal with, also there’s the asset store for navmesh etc.

Finally I decided to partake in a “gamejam” of sorts (images below); main reason was to get back into Unity a little bit. Next up is to do a test project in LY and see how it ultimately compares..