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SoW - More Environment Screens.

Naked Ninja

Arbiter
Joined
Oct 31, 2006
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Location
South Africa
I have to admit, Scars development has been pretty slow the last month or so. There are 2 reasons for this. First, the release of a lot of games that I've been waiting ages for. Mask of the Betrayer, The Witcher, Hellgate London, The Orange Box.

And the second, far less pleasant reason, is deadlines. My project has reached crunch time at work, so that means late nights and weekends spent at the office, hooray. Hopefully that won't last too much longer, I'm looking forward to some vacation time around Christmas.

But anyway, I have done some work, mostly on the environment side, laying out areas and levels. So, since I don't have much to talk about on the code side, let me distract you with pictures :P

First, the village of Bhenninstrad, located in the north of Mirtar :

screenshot_151-00004.jpg


screenshot_151-00008.jpg


screenshot_151-00016.jpg


screenshot_152-00001.jpg


Bhenninstrads distance from the Lethani Border kept it away from most of the conflict, sparing it from the devastation of more southern settlements...or did it...?

screenshot_153-00003.jpg


Next up, the Atharan Highlands. Forestry is the major source of income in these parts, yet the mills stand empty. The Foresters Union are protesting unfair wages and working conditions, refusing to work until their demands are met. Attempts to negotiate have so far failed and the gossip in the taverns is that things are beginning to get violent.

screenshot_154-00008.jpg


screenshot_156-00014.jpg


screenshot_155-00010.jpg



And finally, a picture of an underground research complex I'm working on, aka a "dungeon", in Constructor.

screenshot_001-00005-1.jpg


screenshot_001-00002-1.jpg
 

Naked Ninja

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Messages
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South Africa
Since this is the Codex, I must at this point make the obligatory "check out my forest scene's awesome soil erosion, I spent weeks researching at a university getting that perfect!" comment. ;)
 

YourConscience

Scholar
Joined
Feb 9, 2006
Messages
537
Location
In your head, obviously
Really very nice. If I may comment:

Everything that sticks directly out from the ground looks as if misplaced, because there is no real connection between, say, the fences in the fourth picture and the ground.

You could avoid that by modeling a few little low-poly stones and plants and have them (many of them) randomly be placed around and vertical object at the ground so that the direct cut from a horizontal ground texture to the vertical object texture isn't all that sudden. You also might want to make the stuff that's generated depend on the kind of object/texture. If it's a fence, let it have many little plants around it. If it's that ruin, let it have many dark stones. If it's the low stone fence, let it have similar stones and little plants.

I don't know whether it makes any sense in your game world, but you could also make those stones pick-uppable and usable as a form of distraction when thrown.

Generally this should only be the first step. Further steps would be randomly placing other stuff in typical locations, such as lumps near the road (or near where a road texture is placed), bones near ruins, dung plies on a field, whatever fancies you. :)

I especially like the last two pictures (before the editor pictures).

Bascially, if bethsoft would have made oblivion look like this (and hence cut 95% of their effor wasted on even better graphics), perhaps there'd have been enough man-power left for some, you know, creative work...

And, yes, the soil erosion looks really convincing. :)

Only the drawing distance is a bit noticeably low.
 

cardtrick

Arbiter
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Apr 26, 2007
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Maine
Looking great! Very, very impressive for a one-man game. I especially like the saw mill in the third-to-last picture . . . something about the way the logs are piled up feels very authentic.

I agree you need more details eventually, but for an initial layout these look terrific.
 

Section8

Cipher
Joined
Oct 23, 2002
Messages
4,321
Location
Wardenclyffe
I like. I wouldn't worry too much about fleshing out and adding fine details. It's a slippery slope, and before you know it you've spent months on making prettier pre-release screenshots of locations that most people aren't going to analyse in depth when they're busy being distracted by actually playing the game.

As it stands, I get a very "Dark Age of Camelot" vibe, and those are fond memories for me, so keep up the good work!
 

Sovy Kurosei

Erudite
Joined
Dec 29, 2004
Messages
1,535
YourConscience makes some good suggestions. Can you make stuff like the fenceposts cast shadows somehow? That would help a lot with what YC mentioned.

I like the shots of the forest and lumber mill as everybody else said though. Are there any tree stumps around the lumber mill?
 

Naked Ninja

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Joined
Oct 31, 2006
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Location
South Africa
Thanks for the kind words guys :)


Yep, those are some good suggestions YourConscience. I'll definately consider them in the next pass at these environments. ;)

But this is simply the first pass. I like to develop iteratively, starting with laying out the basics then moving "inwards", adding in more and more detail. That way you don't waste time detailing something that might change. Nothing worse than laying out a lot of detail into a scene then realising you need it to be a slightly different size or 20 meters to the left, heh.

My dev cycle looks like this :

Code->layout environments -> Layout entities (NPCs/Items/Dialogues/Quests)-> Test gameplay -> Feedback into design -> Repeat.

So next up is NPCs, dialogue and quests! Fun times :D
 

Higher Game

Arcane
Joined
Apr 14, 2005
Messages
13,662
Location
Female Vagina
Damn it, I thought Turok style fog died in the 90's. :evil: Turn down the details so we can see more than 100 yards in front of our faces.
 

Kos_Koa

Iron Tower Studio
Developer
Joined
Feb 12, 2006
Messages
315
What are those... trees!? I can hardly see them through the FOG....
 

Elhoim

Iron Tower Studio
Developer
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Oct 27, 2006
Messages
2,878
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San Isidro, Argentina
Higher Game said:
Damn it, I thought Turok style fog died in the 90's. :evil: Turn down the details so we can see more than 100 yards in front of our faces.

Come on, the fog distance is perfect. It´s not Oblivion, but it doesn´t end in your face like in NWN or Morrowind.
 

elander_

Arbiter
Joined
Oct 7, 2005
Messages
2,015
Why using a bluring distance fog at all? Oblivion uses two scenes. One is only for the mountains and background objects (like the Imperial city tower) and the other is for everything in the close proximity of the player. The two scenes are blended on top of each other using transparency to make the transition (instead of blurring the color to that of the background color). You should try this technique. I'm sure Torques engine will let you render two separate scenes like this.
 

obediah

Erudite
Joined
Jan 31, 2005
Messages
5,051
elander_ said:
Why using a bluring distance fog at all? Oblivion uses two scenes. One is only for the mountains and background objects (like the Imperial city tower) and the other is for everything in the close proximity of the player. The two scenes are blended on top of each other using transparency to make the transition (instead of blurring the color to that of the background color). You should try this technique. I'm sure Torques engine will let you render two separate scenes like this.

It looks fine to me. I wish indie rpg makers would spend less time trying to make their games look 4 years old intead of 7 years old and just make some mutha-fucking RtothePtotheG.
 

Naked Ninja

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It looks fine to me. I wish indie rpg makers would spend less time trying to make their games look 4 years old intead of 7 years old and just make some mutha-fucking RtothePtotheG.

Your wish is my command. Well, not really, but our philosophies coincide. I shall make the best of the technology I'm using. New code will be added only if it is needed for gameplay or if it is trivial.

Why using a bluring distance fog at all? Oblivion uses two scenes. One is only for the mountains and background objects (like the Imperial city tower) and the other is for everything in the close proximity of the player. The two scenes are blended on top of each other using transparency to make the transition (instead of blurring the color to that of the background color). You should try this technique. I'm sure Torques engine will let you render two separate scenes like this.

That wouldn't be at all trivial to implement, and no Torque doesn't natively support that. What does Oblivion do for where the two scenes meet, the intermediate blurring part, do you know? Specifically with relationg to hills and valleys and suchlike, where handling the depth buffer and culling terrain geometry would become tricky. Doing a straight linear blur without depth considerations would result in some hideous rendering problems. Implementing something to handle that isn't simple as far as I know. Not to mention the fact that Oblivions engine is modern and takes advantage of modern rendering techniques. Torques doesn't. That kind of overdraw (the blurring) would be expensive in terms of render time. And would require significant changes to Torques underlying renderer. How many months of dev time do you think it is worth, so you don't have to see fog in the distance?



Come on, the fog distance is perfect. It´s not Oblivion, but it doesn´t end in your face like in NWN or Morrowind.

Thank you :)

What are those... trees!? I can hardly see them through the FOG....

Consider seeing an optometrist?

Looks very Mount and Blade like, how big are you thinking of making the world?

Well, the world isn't continuous like Oblivion. Each area is a specific map. But the maps are a decent size, big enough for a good size city or a nice chunk of the outdoors. I can't give you an exact count on the locations at the moment. Most of them are specced out but development will reveal whether regions should be consolidated into single maps or split into parts. I may not get time to put in everything I want, such is life.

There are core regions and then there are optional regions which you can explore if you want to, which might hold secrets and the like to find. I enjoy exploration in RPGs, so...
 

ecliptic

Liturgist
Joined
Feb 11, 2003
Messages
915
What does Oblivion do for where the two scenes meet, the intermediate blurring part, do you know? Specifically with relationg to hills and valleys and suchlike, where handling the depth buffer and culling terrain geometry would become tricky. Doing a straight linear blur without depth considerations would result in some hideous rendering problems.

It really looks like shit. It's about an as abrupt transition from high to low quality as you could imagine, and there's no real transition to speak of. It's rather jarring, just like the load screen every time you enter a house. Next gen, my ass.
 

Claw

Erudite
Patron
Joined
Aug 7, 2004
Messages
3,777
Location
The center of my world.
Project: Eternity Divinity: Original Sin 2
Hey, I didn't see that before.

I like it, but so far it looks a little generic to me. It reminds me somewhat of a demo for a planned Ultima I remake.
I like the plants most, the cornstalks and little flowers. Also, the columns in that dungeon.

It looks like there will be generous amounts of farmland. That's a good thing, makes the world more believeable.

Still, I'd like to see something unique soon, something recognizeably Scars of War.
 

dagorkan

Arbiter
Joined
Jul 13, 2006
Messages
5,164
Don't bother with shadows or things like making sure the fence 'blends' with the ground like one guy in this thread said. I never noticed the lack of shadows and blending until they were pointed out, it's things like this that lead down the slippery slope of graphic whoredom. What you have is fine, it looks good, extremely good for some areas that I assume I will only be passing through a few times. You can be sure I won't go around checking whether bush 'x' properly blends into the earth texture at location 'y', I have better things to do like go and talk to the guy who actually owns the farm and who I need to go to see for the quest and next part of the story.

Everything is fine, and you already have way more detail than you actually need. Only idiots in the mass public will turn down your game because of looks. It's better than Morrowind and better than 95% of Indie games out there. If you had a several $million budget and department of graphic artists to boss around I'd expect more, but don't waste your time with that stuff, work on the gameplay and story.
 

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