realmsoffantasyadmin featured, world building

Town, Camping and Interiors

Bit of a long time since my last update. Sorry. You know how it is etc. You can follow me on twitter @skyemaidstone if you like. I do tend to update that more often.

Anyway, I’ve been beaving away at making the 2nd town “Serah”.  It has a forge, market, guard towers, a wooden wall to protect the towns folk from the dangerous lands beyond and a large comfortable inn (compared to the tiny one in Tarin. Here’s a couple of screenshots of how that’s getting on:

serah2

serah1

You can also see it has some nice magical lights to act as street lighting. Who knows how they work? It’s magic. This required me to make a light editor so I can adjust their color, intensity and obviously position.

Next up I moved on to an enemy camp:

goblincamp

This will soon be populated with orcs or goblins or some kind of enemy. This will be the main problem for Serah so I’m planning a few quests for this.

And that brings me to the next focus of my work: Interiors.

When the player enters a building or a dungeon they effective change to a new mini “world”. So I needed to make it so my editor saved models, lighting and “terrain” (which is usually just flat for a 1 story building). This proved fairly complicated but I got there with some nice fairly elegant results in the end.

Here’s a little video of Tarins’s small Inn.

 

Needs candles, fire in the fireplace and some patreons to drink and offer the adventurer some words of advice or perhaps send him on a quest and of course an innkeep to serve drinks and offer a room for the night.

Next up I’m going to have to make the particle effects editable so I can place them where they’re meant to be in the world (fire in the forge/fireplace, butterflies around a bush, water from a fountain – stuff like that) because my flaming braziers are rather hard coded right now. Also I really would be nice if the place had something else to fight besides the 8-12 rats behind Darin’s farm.

Until next time…

 

 

realmsoffantasyadmin Uncategorized

Flaming Braziers, Trees and More

So loads of updates and it’s really starting to come together as a small village.

As you can see the tree are back from the first tests and as you can see from my YouTube Channel there is now fluffy grass to go in the patchy grass around around the village. I think the effect works really well and it a combination of soft particles and billboarding for those that enjoy the technical side of all this. I’ll be adding bushes, rocks, patches of pebbles and scree (I think thats a word) which will make use of the Instanced renderer shortly.

What was great fun to add was some flaming braziers. That’s the right word for those isn’t it? Looks too much like Bra to me? Same spelling? Anyway.. those flaming pots as lights to welcome you to the village. I have quite got the light sphere to match up perfectly with the particle effect; it’s a little too intense and white but it’s nice to finally get to use the deferred lighting I built all those months ago.

I started to add in the peasants but that’s not really ready for public consumption yet.

I think the village need a vendor of some kinda. Some guy/gal selling stuff from under a canopy or from a tent.

Until next time.

realmsoffantasyadmin featured

The Village of Tarin

Ok so after another game design meeting we came up with a name (Tarin) and a basic layout for the starting village. 3 or 4 homes, a tavern for weary travellers and a farm (producing some kind of corn/wheat.. or something).

I’ve added a few props around such as barrels, a water trough, some creates and boxes. It’s funny how adding a few small things really makes it start to look like a village.

I’ll be adding in some more of this stuff along with scattering some instanced pebbles and soft-billboarded whispy grass to really add some realism to it next time.

Next up are some people to speak to. So I’ll need to wheel out Mr and Mrs Peasant (and get them doing a couple of basic animations. Oh how I hate animation.. Maybe I can hire someone for that part because my own efforts will certainly not be professional enough.

Until next time weary travellers.

tarin1.png

realmsoffantasyadmin Uncategorized

Realm of Upgrades

Well not the most productive of weeks.

I’ve managed to finish off importing a couple of market place props (finished the weapon stall and added in a wagon) but spent a fair bit of time upgrading my development machine. My shiny new GTX 1080 graphics card was a complete pain in the rear-end to install. I won’t bore you with the details but it just simply refused to install the drivers. Eventually I found a way to get it to recognise it.

The plan next week is to get a load more of these props in and get some bones added to the peasants so they can at least stand around looking bored at least.

I also really need to make a few tweaks to the instanced model and billboard model UI’s. They’re “ok” as they are now but i really need to just be able to easily spray grass/miss/mud/pebbles where ever i want. It’s far too fiddly to use now.

I guess that’s it. Hopefully a more exciting update next week.

realmsoffantasyadmin Uncategorized

Flora and Marketplaces

Wow you can so easily waste fiddling with and effect to get it just right, then still hate it then fiddle with it some more.

Inspired by No Man’s Sky (I refer to that game so much because my landscape is ridiculously large too) I liked their use of Billboarding. It’s a cheap technique and looks a bit crap unless used sparingly and only in certain situations. It never really looks good from above or on large objects.

Anyway Here’s an example of some heather blended in with some mist with some rocks and trees:

blendedlav.png

I fiddled around with that waaaaaay too long. Anyway on the the actual game again.

As you can see from the featured image i’m starting to add market stalls for the player to actually buy stuff. Weapons in this case. I have a load of medieval props to import. Other kinda of market stall and baskets, barrels etc so it should really start to look like a market/village soon.

One day i’ll learn not to fiddle with effects so long it eat into the actual game making process but I sense it’s a common trap for game developers to fall into.

Next week: No more effects, just game (I’ll try).

realmsoffantasyadmin Uncategorized

Mrs and Mrs Peasant

It’s been a busy week building the village and surrounding area.

I’ve had to make a few tweaks to the editor UI to make it more useable but I won’t bore you with those.

I managed to resist the urge to fling in some post-processing effects I was playing with (Depth of Field and FFXA) and get on with adding some more building types. So now my village had a 3 different types of house, 2 types of shop and 1 Inn. I also added some bushes with no leaves dotted about the muddy village. I think I need some cart tracks running through the “road” in the middle of the village. I don’t think this village needs actual gate since it’s pretty small, just the basic wooden wall and a couple of guard towers will do. Which means I’ll need some guards. Who would employ 4-6 guards in a village with only about 10 buildings in it? Maybe it’s best not to dwell on such things.

Anyway I added some more pine trees and rocks about the surround areas and realised I need some nice purple/pink gorse (or whatever that flower is) and some other kinda of tree and also some large rocks (there’s only so far you can stretch my rocks before they start to suffer in quality.

So yeah then I decided my Red Ranger was getting lonely so I rolled out some peasant. They have no “bones” yet so they’re just being rendered by the static model renderer (in a rather silly looking T pose). They look pretty nice for an initial effort though.

It’s all coming together.

I really need to find some nice grass and gorse (sp) and start actually using the instancing and billboarding renderers. It looks nice enough but that will really give the hillside a more fluffy and real feeling.

surround

Did I mention this supports multi-player (MMORPG style) already? I can log on multiple copies of “Realms” and shoot myself with my ranger and he proceeds to do a rather bad dying animation. But hey at least he has the decency to die when he’s shot.

 

 

realmsoffantasyadmin Uncategorized

Village of Emptiness

Well the wonderfully named “Village1” is coming along nicely. It has 2 types of building (a barn and some kind of house) and a couple of props (a wood pile and a firepit).

I’ve done endless fiddling with effects as usual. Toned down the fog a little and re-added my particle ground fog from the old terrain engine which looks pretty nice I think. Voila:

groundfog

Also after playing some more No Man’s Sky I decided billboard grass still has a place in modern games. Especially from distance. Sure it doesn’t look great from above but it a cheap (framerate wise) way of adding more fluffiness to the game. I didn’t bother actually finding a nice texture for it but I kinda flung support for it in. It waves in whatever direction you want and whatever speed and it can be semi-transparent. It doesn’t cast shadows like the instanced version can but who cares to be honest. Here’s a bad example of how it would work (it would be far more bunched than this in game). It’s mixed in with the instance grass.

wavygrass

It’s a bit too patchy as I said but you get the idea.

Back to the village. I just need to rip through a load of placeholder bought models while my model guy does his thing and get them in game. I haven’t even added the normal maps for them yet but they still look pretty reasonable for cheap models.

Hopefully but the end of the weekend I’ll have the village surrounded by it’s wall and another building and some more props to make it less empty.

I’ll have to do some serious actual game design soon since the actual “what do I” parts are a bit sketchy other than a bizarrely in-depth plan of how the gathering/mining etc is going to work.

morevillage3