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

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

Realm Building

Sometimes you’re a victim of your own success. After spending a few week making my terrain able to support gently rolling hills along with giant mountains and deep valleys but be so huge you’d never realistically reach the edge of it I’ve managed to encounter a problem i didn’t foresee: getting lost in my own world.

I thought, ok I need to make the map feature now.  So here it is..

map.png

I’ve had to artifically boost the lighting a bit due to my sunset directional light. I guess I could change the directional light too but I like my sunset look. Anyway there’s the map top left. Unfortunately the small white dot in the middle is the player. Well sort of. Its a 4×4 white dot but 1 pixel represents 50m squared so not really THAT useful. To get the mud to line up with the first village was deeply annoying so I’m going to have to add a zoom feature. I maybe even allow the blend map of editing mud/grass/rock to be adjusted by clicking on the terrain. Yeah maybe I should do that..

Anyway my model guy is a bit busy so i’ve had to get some random medieval village models from CGTrader. I’ll replace them with higher quality versions where needed later but I just wanted to get on with making the game.

I have lots of private pages of notes that i’ve been coming up with the game designer too. For some reason we’ve focused on the crafting/gathering/hunting and exploring aspects so far but there’s a lot come up with. We’re not making the next Everquest/World of Warcraft so we’ll have to curb our enthusiasm somewhat to actually get it finished.

Anyway enough waffle from me. Getting make to Village 1 – great name for a village.

The featured image for this post is an aerial shot of where the player is standing. Just to give you an idea of just how huge this world is.