Something Like Final Fantasy XV But In Unity

First, let's watch this few video.

and the longer one, if you understand Japanese.

Then let's watch the TECH DEMO.

By looking at the tools, we definitely can achieve that in Unity as well.

But so far I only can think the road editor is similar to Easy Road 3D.

Terrain, Unity will crash when handling 4 tiles of 1000x1000 terrains. For me.

Other than that I cannot give comments.

But there's this promises for Unity 5, let's hope they fulfills them.

So, anything in our assets store that can help us have a workflow similar to what they've shown?

 

Maybe Unity 7.
Remember that engine blows even Unreal Engine 4 with SVOGI out of the water.

But it is not like their engine would make a difference with the quality of those assets.

 

Not sure what this rather pointless thread has to do in "Showcase" so it's moved to Gossip.

 

Really? What are your specs?

 

Ah! I'm truly sorry!

I didn't realize it was in showcase, my silly mistake.

Thank you for moving it.

Again, truly sorry.

 

You mean my computer?
It's Macbook Pro 13" Early 2012.
With 16GB RAM.
But it's not about the computer.

Unity crash because of out of memory. Can't utilize the rest of my RAM being a 32bit apps.

 

Ah...

Well...

If you consider all the things that are stopping someone from making a game with the scale and fidelity of games like FF XV or Skyrim, or whatever other examples people like to post in "Can Unity do whatever", the actual abilities of the engine are pretty low on the list, while having a team with enough people and talent and budget is pretty high up.

And if you do have the team and budget, you can either work-around any Unity shortcommings pretty effectively, or just go ahead and create your own engine and make it focus on whatever you want.

 

Actually, I feel that Unity can be the same.
It's just that we're not fluent enough.

Just that some assets store products is the one who bring Unity up to par with the other game engine that have them "as is".

 

Hmmm...

Those tools are very awesome from the tech demo video but Unity3D has some of those tools (thanks to the asset store)

Here are the ones that I like:

Visual Logic Editor

UScript Professional Edition (Link to the Asset Store)
Great for -
- Setting up Interactive events in your level (Metal Detectors, Alarms, etc.) in a visual way.
- Has a free Personal Learning Edition

Node Based Shader Editor

Shader Forge (Link to the Asset Store)
Great for -
- Setting up your Shaders in a visual way in Unity3D.
- Node based and familiar to people who used Unreal engine. (Like me)

Level Design

Prototype (Link to the Asset Store)
Great for -
- Getting and rapidly making an idea that you have in your head.
- Seeing if that great idea is worth its weight in draw calls.
- Prototype is Free but Limited (Pro version here)

World Composition

Terrain Composer (Link to the Asset Store)
Great for -
- Making large beautiful terrains better and faster.
- Helps Populate your terrain faster with foliage, Rocks, etc.

VFX

Popcorn FX (Link to the Asset Store)
Great for -
- Any Particle FX that need user interaction
- They make their editor freely available via their website.
- They made their trello board public (Here)
- Requires Unity Pro.

Roads

Easy Roads Pro (Link to the Asset Store)
- Makes roads and deforms them based on the terrain
- Comes with a river tool

You could totally do a Indie RPG if you had Unity 5 or any other PBR capable engine. But You would need to keep the project small and work smart. Using the tools what ever they maybe to best effect.
However do not expect instant results. Expect to pour your heart and soul into this game you are making and try and have fun doing it BTW. That is the only way that you will get it done. Just saying

 

Can Unity Handle This™

 

Ugh... even though the graphics are good, it feels like Final Fantasy is having an identity crisis with the direction Squeenix is going with the series...

I miss the FF's like FF1-3 Legends/Sada (yes I know, its Saga series but I feel that it did have some FF elements in it), FF7, FF5 and FFT... if they would just remake any one of those into an HD equivalents...

 

Yeah, that's what I thought too.
It seems your eyes are more wide in scouting this assets.

 

- Can a Cessna circle the globe?
- Can you afford the fuel needed to do that?
- No, but can it?
- ...
- EPIC FAIL!!!!11

 

Cesna can circle a globe.
But it perhaps takes 5 years including servicing, refueling, and touch down time.

Compare to Boeing 777 that can make it perhaps in 36 hours in one go.

What's your point?

 

That it might be an interesting thought experiment for you to muse about making a game like Final Fantasy in Unity, but unless you have a few million dollars to burn through, it's pointless to discuss the game engine when you won't be able to afford the assets.

 

Some people like pointless discussions about impossible hypothetical scenarios.

 

You guys have a valid points there.

If this can be a valid discussion, if money is the big excuse, why don't those with high caliber budget choose Unity?

 

Some of them do, I'm sure depending on their needs. It's not required for companies to disclose which engine they used, though, so I don't know what you're basing your determination on.

 

Erm... I am sorry if this thread have create confusion among the commentators.
But a reply something like HeadClot88 is what I expected, if you read the thread carefully, it's not about "can unity do this?" I know it can, no... more to I BELIEVE IT CAN but with extended tools on Assets Store or from other resources.

I wish to know, if someone willing to share what are those extension.
That's all.

 

No, it cannot. The levels are too big, Unity would crash. And there is too much action at once, you would get like 3fps in Unity if you would not get an out of memory exception

Start here and read 5 posts: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/ue4-5-released.274322/page-4#post-1820795
In short: Unity is more than 8 years behind UE (so many important UE3 (2006) features are still missing in Unity), e.g. missing Kismet and material editor / 64-bit editor and cinematic tools.

.

 

Unity is a rapid development/multi-platform engine. Those games with realistic people run on highly specialized, platform specific even, engines.

 

Unity:
Really agile, fast-turning, easily suited for different tasks on the fly

Hyper realistic high poly engines:
Thrust high velocity jet car, can essentially only be used in one environment, really expensive to produce and maintain

Fundamentally, different things entirely.

 

True for some internal engines, but UE4 is very general purpose and multi-platform (e.g. working WebGL, which is still in the future for Unity).
The UE4 SSS head example looks similar in quality to the FF ones.

WebGL: UE4 strategy game WebGL, said to even run on Intel HD GKs in firefox (I bring this because some say UE4 games only run on high end hardware): https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/strategy-game-webgl-demo-available-now
User comment:

 

I guess Unreal is magic, because it can make your hardware work better. I should have known about this, but I've been smoking my pipe weed lately.

 

If the problem is scale, then cut the world into chunks that unity / your computer can handle and then load/unload them based on what area the player is in. When you load a chunk, you should reposition everything around the world origin, or your float dependent operations are gonna have a bad time.

I suggest looking into instances. They stop players from competing for resources/kills, it lowers the specs needed to play the game and if you make fairly simple levels for your boss instance you can raise the graphics and ai through the roof because nothing else is being rendered / computed

 

Unity seems to load resources on the rendering thread, and at once. So you get a huge stall each time you load a large chunk. Gamers hate that.
And anyway, to see into the distance is expected from a modern game.
Also this does not solve the too much action at once problem (e.g. try to create a RTS with thousands of Units on screen in Unity to see what I mean).

Don't want to be a troll, but UE4 does that for you ;-)

 

Then go use unreal.

 

I always use the tool that fits the job (and that is UE4 for some cases).
And in this thread the job is to recreate FF XV, and you would be nuts to try to do that with Unity.

 

Don't want to be a troll, but you can't make a game of this scope, anyway. ;-)

 

I had heard unreal was better for making chunked / procedural games. Is that what people refer to when they say this? Also, you can use clever tricks to get around the short graphical stall In my infinite ocean game, if people actually reached the 2000 unit mark, there would be a flash of lightning to obscure vision for a moment. This was hidden by storm mechanics in the game that occurred randomly. If you see a storm approaching, either you've got bad luck with the weather or you're approaching the edge of the world!

As for the other thing, check out 7 days to die and TDL. Their chunk&load systems work fine. I even got to work on TDL and I still have no idea how it works

 

With procedural generation I can make a game 100 times that scope. But would probably suck to play it...
There is a AI solution in the UE4 community forums to generate history, quests and NPC behaviors procedurally. Someone even said, he is maybe porting it to Unity.

That depends on how much data you have to load. If it stalls for 5 seconds it can be annoying. Especially if you can travel fast in the game (e.g. fast car). So you get a random storm each minute that has a lightning blinding you for 5 seconds each time.
But yes, I see how that can work for an ocean game.

 

Chunked works in UE4 (in my eyes it does not work in Unity). And sometimes you don't even need it. You can have 20x20km in UE4 without chunking.

For procedural I would say you must be a better coder than to do it in Unity, because you have to understand the engine internals from looking at the source code. But that probably changes and you can read in the forums how others do it.

 

"With procedural generation I can make a game 100 times that scope. But would probably suck to play it...
There is a AI solution in the UE4 community forums to generate history, quests and NPC behaviors procedurally. Someone even said, he is maybe porting it to Unity."

Best of luck with that product.

 

Haha maybe that was a bad example. I've never had a delay that long. Then again, I've made systems to load some assets, stop, and continue later. Instead of loading 500 assets at once, I load the ones nearest to the player first and then run a function with a reference to a "number of objects to load" variable, so maybe 5 assets are loaded, and then there's a break. I'll let you know how that works out if I ever work on a huge project. I'm just making small stuff now until sixense whips that assembly line into shape and gets me my damn wireless hydra!

I'll stick to cheating

"Memory is cheap" - every game design and cs class I've had in college.

You can load assets you need into the scene ahead of time, out of site. I do everything with code. Most of my projects have a gameobject called "Game" or "Main" and then on them is a script called "Main". That script is the only monobehavior in the project

--edit

Some other cheaty stuff would include dark transitions between some points, so a bright flash of light can glare your scree for a moment and "reveal" items over time. As the player adjusts to the new light level, more and more objects will fade in (get loaded and or instantiated)

 

There are multiple games in development with it.
But yes, I would also not trust that without evaluating it. Still sounds fascinating (and too good to be true): http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/2mpfhc/recently_made_my_ai_engine_open_source_have_a_look/

 

That's a point and simply because Epic is making engine versions but games also, they push graphics and performance to be able to compete in the big games field (AAA), that's the major difference between Unity and UE4.
But Unity 8 years ago was even smaller than today, it wasn't asset store, they didn't had that popularity on 2.0 version for example , Unity were more indie engine not targetting big complex games, and was lot more easy to use than many 3D engines that's also the difference.

It is like Epic main task is making the engine friendly for indies because they already have the features while Unity main task is pushing the engine graphics and other stuff because they are already indie friendly.


But let's forget UE4 , Crysis or SnowDrop engines, it's Unity talk here.
For the FF scene world , i don't think Unity 4.6 can handle too much polygons , effects etc ... at same time without memory crashing. In the game Son Of Nor , they had to divide big levels in sub levels because they had crashes.
Perhaps Unity 5 will do better ? So we'll have to wait Unity 5 public and wait for someone or some company to make a big scale game with good lightening to proove it can be done.

@princeWIGUAN :
I hope you are not trying to make the same FF game ?

 

@zenGarden

Maybe the CIL updates will improve some of this. Maybe Unity is made for people with lots of programming talent and small aspirations

 

@TomM :
I don't know, you have 3D engines today to make from smaller games to bigger ones , from simple to complex rendering , i would say :
Pick up your choice

 

My skepticism vs. end results in things I've seen over many years is usually accurate, in my experience. I use 0% emotion in my analysis. You're right to be suspicious of anything that sounds too good to be true. Even good things don't always sound all that good.

 

Of course. But still would look at that if I need something like that. Because (quotes from reddit thread linked previously):

Because I don't have that much time and I don't have access to a NLP specialist.

So if it is only half as good as advertised, it would save me a huge amount of time.

 

Just don't break out your wallet 'til you've heard some post-implementation reviews.

 

I would use the open source version first for sure. So free and adaptable.

 

Did you use hardware instancing? For a RTS with many units you need to know how to optimize, independent of engine. Question is if it is at all possible to optimize enough to run thousands of units with a specific engine.

 

I know the level limitation for Unity.
Well, for example I use World Composer to generate tiled terrain, the biggest I can get is 4 terrain of 1000x1000 tiled together with trees and all texture.
But it's super lag.

My ambition is to get the same LOOK and feeling.

 

I'm far from impressed by this FF video, it's very desertic, with some big animals here and here, a road, and vegetation.
GTA 5 is toushand times more impressive with a world really more complex that is alive with all cars and people on streets.Could your tool be Unity 5 , UE4, Crysis , you should begin from he beginning : a story, quests, events, characters ( their look, personnality, dialogs, animations, lyp synch) , graphic style and time period of the game , it's lot of heavy work without needing to touch a 3D engine. Then second heavy work will be making characters, animations, textures, levels, effects etc ...
That's lot of work and motivation needed, good luck.

 

You could split up the world into floating islands that are the optimal size for performance. Then you can have a short cutscene for traveling between islands which gives you time to load in the next island and unload the previous one.

It isn't really 'ambitious' to jam 1000x1000 units worth of content into an engine and hope it performs well. It's ambitious to get the performance you need by using whatever tricks necessary and fooling the player with those tricks It also helps people differentiate their Unity projects. Handling huge worlds is difficult. In the future, there might be an asset store plugin for large scale world stitching, but right now you need to make your own.

Half of your concern is the correct feeling for the game. Try focusing on that. Get the gameplay right for FF and maybe by the time that's done, someone will have recommended a way to handle giant worlds that you think is doable.

 

I don't know how big is FF XV, but here's something in Unity about generating BIG if not HUGE terrain.

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/24-hour-terrain-demo.218650/

 

Again, generating that huge world not really my main concern.
It's that feeling like realisticness but not really.
Hard to explain.

Look at the grass, wind blowing, the monster...

 

Read it. It says the entire thing is loaded at once and that World Composer did most of the work. I think they mean to convey that it's 1 massive mesh. Once you get into prefabs of buildings and vegetation, they talk about the hit on framerate. Without trees and complex objects or logic, the project runs at 400+ fps on their machine!

You want an mmo-ish landscape filled with decals, buildings, enemies, spells and whatever else. Each of those things take away from what you can do.

Then what you want to look into is realistic shaders. Unity 5.x is getting PBR shaders.

http://www.marmoset.co/toolbag/learn/pbr-practice

 

I know about the Terrain Composer things.
That's what I said even earlier in the thread, it will be SUPER LAG.
So I don't want to approach that work flow given the current Unity limitation.
That's why I said in previous comments, generating huge terrain is not my main concern but again....
Generating huge terrain is POSSIBLE, but just not practical.

The link that you share is a good knowledge to me.
Thanks to that.