in dev open world island game (9 pics)
Community Forums/Graphic Chat/in dev open world island game (9 pics)
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| Hi guys, I won't go into details about what the game is, and what you do in it, etc, because I'd rather wait until I'm a lot further along in development on the project, but I really loved how the graphics are turning out so far in Blitz3D. It's set on an island off the south-west coast of England, and I'm spending a lot of time trying to capture the right sort of moody feel with the lighting and texture colours/tones and the ambient audio sounds. It's still early days, but here's a bunch of screenshots while walking around the island, to show what I've been up to so far :) All the trees, grass clumps, rocks, hedge shrubs, are all 3d billboards - flat 3D one-sided squares, textured and rotated to face the camera. It works really well!          |
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| Some shadows and that will be perfect to me :) Moving the camera the player will probably notice that its all about billboards since some of them are very close to camera. Water seems fantastic. Any close image to show? |
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| The country side look amazing :) |
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| The graphics style is consistent so this is a good start, however the lighting/shading looks random and inconsistent, so i suggest to work on that (make sure that each tree/bush/leaf/grass is lighted from the same source (the sun) with approximately the same intensity of lighting and of shading...) |
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| Hi guys! Thanks for the comments. VIDEO: if the video doesn't play, here's a direct link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abpEWQCW1t0 Here's a 3 minute bit of clips showing how it looks moving about in 3D. It runs between 50 and 61 fps, but FRAPS doesn't like recording while running my game, so the recording got pretty jerky. When FRAPS isn't running, it's really smooth. I think FRAPS dropped it down to just 15 or something! @ Volturna: I walked close to the water in the video. At the moment, it is a semi-transparent plane, with a wavy texture applied to it. The plane rises and falls a bit, so it 'comes up' and down the shoreline. I want to make some wave images to lap up against the shore when the player is near the water to make it look better - so it's a work in progress :) @ Hotshot2005 - thanks! @ RemiD: you're right about the lighting on the scenery - they're all photographs, and there's no commonality in their lighting/ leaf shadows. I'll take a look at that and edit the photos, so that they are all displaying lighting from a similar direction. You are right, it looks a bit random at the moment so I'll want to improve on that. For the moment, I'm just trying to populate the world with scenery objects to get an idea of it all. Buildings: My first goal is to make simple models of everything, then get all the gameplay running. Then to make more complex buildings and architecture. I want a slider in settings, that lets people add or lessen the detail level, according to computer performance. Shadows: It will look better once shadows are in there. At the moment, the only shading I've done is to do some simple shading baked onto the landscape texture, but there is no shading or shadows relating to scenery at the moment. That's on my to-do list :) Billboards: When I tried to make a program that used actual 3D models - it wouldn't even run, and I've got a high end gaming PC. So the only way to have an expansive landscape with long draw distances and lots of scenery objects, etc, with DirectX 7, seems to be by billboarding a lot of the scenery. The main frame killer is the hedging. There's almost 30,000 hedge billboards on the island at the moment. I'm still not sure what to do there - basically, all the fields are to have low walls or hedge walls surrounding them. I tried to do it in 3D models, but had a lot of difficulty with it, so then I thought 'I'll just dot billboards of hedge images all around the outside of the fields' and that is working for now. I still would like to make some sort of actual 3D wall / hedgerow lines, but the landscape is curvy and hilly, and I had trouble working out how to shape 3D walls / hedges to the landscape. I think some people will be put off by the billboarding scenery, but anyone who enjoyed old games like Daggerfall or Might Magic Vi, etc, will know that you get used to it, and after a while, your brain stops saying "that's a billboard!" and gets immersed in the feel and mood of the game. So, this game is for people whose gameplay experience isn't ruined by billboarding effects. But if I can get a better alternative working, I certainly will. |
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| You could switch between the bilboards and 3D models as you get closer. Btw it looks pretty nice. I quite like it |
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| Thanks for the tip - I might try that out, 3d models in the foreground, but at a certain distance, unload the model and load in a billboard picture of the model. Then I could still have trees and things kilometers away showing on the misty ridges. |
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| @tsmpaul>>you may want to try to use a tree generator (like "tree[d]") which generates realistic looking trees, this would allow you to use it to generate your own trees and bushes in 3d and then use these 3d meshes (which have many many many vertices and triangles) to light/shade them correctly (with the same sunlight and the same ambientlight) and then capture the result (so that you would have the same low tris trees/bushes but with a correct lighting/shading) Here is a demo made with tree[d] trees and bushes : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuccl9ywyKQ Tree[d] : https://web.archive.org/web/20130915030534/http://www.frecle.net/treed/tree%5Bd%5D-setup310.exe |
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| I didn't know there was a tree generator like that around - I'll definitely check it out. Thanks for the links! |
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| looks nice. the billboard stuff looks weird though. maybe remove the shadows by editing by photoshop or gimp. |
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| If you switch between billboard and models according to distance I wouldent unload/load the models. I would use copymesh and hideentity(and probably entityalpha as Im doing the switch) those are Blitz3D commands so Im not sure what they would be in Max if thats what you are using |
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| Looks bloody great, very pro indeed and almost makes me pine for old blighty where I come from(I live in France now, long story, no hedges here). Well done truly; just goes to show what b3d is capable of. |
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| This is excellent. I thought the billboards would bother me but they really don't. As has already been said, after a few minutes of gameplay most people won't even notice it. Very clever stuff. |
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| If you light/shade the texels of your impostors with the same lighting/shading than your 3d shapes, it will not be noticeable and will look good... However you may need to have at least 4, preferably 8, renders (=textures) of each impostor at different angle (4 at 90° step or 8 at 45° step) with for each a lighting/shading from a different side. And then depending on the position of the camera related to the impostor, you apply the appropriate texture to you impostor (or you show only the appropriate textured impostor (the one which is oriented towards the camera the most))... |
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| Looks very nice...The clouds and trees look static though - they need some movement. I always feel movement adds so much life to a scene. At the moment the scene looks almost like a photograph slideshow - which is not totally a bad thing! :) Good work. |
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| @RemiD, excuse my impertinence/ignorance but what does the word pimpostor mean to you? Entity? I wasn't aware of a technical use for this word. |
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| ... okay, just googled it. Impostors are billboard sprites basically. |
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| Yes several ways to say the same thing... A textured flat mesh which gives the illusion to represent a complex 3d shape (usually far away) If you try to analyze a scene when you play a 3d AAA game, you will probably notice a few... |
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| Cool! This is an interesting approach. Unusual visual nowadays. :) It reminds me a brazilian game called "Varginha Incident" (Perceptum Studios). I am working on a Open World too. Good luck! |
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| Here's a 3 minute bit of clips showing how it looks moving about in 3D. It runs between 50 and 61 fps, but FRAPS doesn't like recording while running my game, so the recording got pretty jerky. When FRAPS isn't running, it's really smooth. I think FRAPS dropped it down to just 15 or something! If Fraps lets you pick your own codec, then try using one of the old inefficient ones -- much larger video files, but a lot less CPU intensive to do the encoding, so would leave more resources for our game. Then when you're all done use Handbrake or something to convert the video to a modern codec with good compression to shrink down the file size significantly. |
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| Hi guys, thanks for the comments and the help with suggestions! I originally wanted old low stone walls lining a lot of the fields, and could't work out how to place them around the map lining the curves of the hills, but I worked it out and am now putting some low stone walls in some areas, instead of billboarding the hedge pictures everywhere. If it works on a large scale, then I can replace the hedge billboards with physical hedge rows for some fields as well! I also saw a mention of FastExt in another post on here, and I remembered that way back when FastExt started doing stuff for Blitz3D, years ago, I had bought it, and so I went to their website - and I was able to log in and download it after all these years! So now I've added Depth of Field when you look at things that are close to you in the foreground, and I love the effect! Like all visual settings, it with be toggleable in the game's settings screen.   |
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| Very atmospheric. Nice work tsmpaul, this is turning out very polished already. |
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| Personally i don't like the depth of field effect, i prefer linear fog with impostors far away... You may want to add a sun rays effect ( like this : fastlibs.com/images/fe/rays.jpg ), it would look nice with your scene. |
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| At what distance does an impostor become a charlatan or a fop?? Food for thought.... Oh yes, I've just thought of another similar technical term, CAD. Conincidence?? Geez, I've got far too much free time on my hands... Tsmpaul, I seriously like the look of your project RemiD, sorry for making fun out of imposter. The term just tickles me as my definition looks totally out of context. All the best both of yous.. :) |
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| @Ploppy>>Sometimes i also find that a term to describe something is not the best way to describe it, but in this case ,"impostor" (fake) makes sense to me, or maybe "illusionist", or simply what it is : a textured low details mesh. |
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| ..very nice..I have just now downloaded new version of FastExt by Mikhail, and it works fantastic..so many new features added to B3D i had no idea, are available..wow..now im wondering, does FastExt works fine on W8/W10. W7 seems to work very nice and smooth.. |
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| Hi, it's working fine on win 10 64-bit here, but I had to install blitz 1106 as the latest version of blitz is not compatible with it for some reason, but with 1106, everything seems to be working. It took me a while to realise there is an english help file with it, and now I'm able to customise effects a lot better now. This screenshot only has placeholder models in it - I'm making really simple meshes, with basic textures, and then once I've got the game playable, I will go over the meshes to make more detailed graphics - and then I can display the simple meshes at a distance as an LOD mesh, and display the detailed meshes when up close. From a distance, the basic meshes don't look too bad I think. Anyway, this is to show how I customised the settings of the reflective water of FastExt to make it look a little more oceanish. Some consolidated Catalina seaplanes, and some royal navy Dragons. I've got them all bobbing slowly in the water, and it was a lot of fun working it out. So, it's on an island in the early 1940's - but it's not a military first-person shooter.  |
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| Interesting, nice to see it coming along so quickly. Water shader definately adds to the graphic detail. |
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| Very good work so far, I dream of producing something similar, I've also used Fastext to good effect for buttons within B3d. A great B3d showcase! |
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| hi!, congrats!, is a very big scenary and looks amazing!, try to light more the land and whater, becouse you have a very bright sky and the ground is a little bit dark.  i took the liberty to modify with photoshop to show the diference i have the same problem becouse the ambientlight up give you less contrast, but you need to put more lights to simulate a diferent ambient light. the scenary looks great!, textures and brush too, congrats! |
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| This looks really beautiful but I have two majjor questions: 1) How do you achieve the multitexturing on the terrain? 2) How do you achieve the out-of-focus blurriness for distant objects? |
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| looks lovely. i'm gonna buy a house there. |
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| I'll settle for going camping there in the summer, budget won't stretch to a second home at the mo ;) |
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| 7 months since the last dev post - I hope that doesn't mean this has been abandoned as it was looking pretty spectacular. |
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