KF Style game in Unity

[dmpdesign]

Just for the record, Dark Slayer is going to have much better shadows than this

I will be anxious to see it Holy, it would be awesome to have a new lighting engine for SOM.

[Holy_Diver]

[quote author=Holy Diver link=topic=649.msg8635#msg8635 date=1363648207]
Just for the record, Dark Slayer is going to have much better shadows than this

I will be anxious to see it Holy, it would be awesome to have a new lighting engine for SOM.[/quote]

Its coming, but shadows are pretty low on the importance totem pole. I honestly don't know why people think they are important (especially considering that they are always so shitty in every game that ever tries to do anything with them)

Only Ico or SOTC has done an acceptable job with shadows. Excluding pre-rendered games. Dark Slayer is going to be very much like Ico only more modern. The shadows will be geometric. Like triangles. But they will have all of the quality of shadows (which as far as I know no game has ever even attempted to do)

EDITED: It's really going to be a new light compiler. But it won't just be done with mapcomp.exe. It will be built into Ex so that the lights can change (slowly) with the setting of the sun by recompiling them. It's mainly for static shadows, but provisions have been made for real-time shadows.

[dmpdesign]

I'm not sure I would agree that no games other than those have gotten it right, I would wager you just haven't played other games ;)

Anyhow, check out this tech video about Unreal 4...this is likely to be the main lighting engine folks use for the next gen of games in the upcoming few years. ‎  IMO, this is lighting done right.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOvfn1p92_8

[Holy_Diver]

I'm not sure I would agree that no games other than those have gotten it right, I would wager you just haven't played other games ;)

Anyhow, check out this tech video about Unreal 4...this is likely to be the main lighting engine folks use for the next gen of games in the upcoming few years. ‎  IMO, this is lighting done right.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOvfn1p92_8

Its true I haven't played with a lot of games. But I am familiar with the techniques used. Contemporary games with moving shadows either colour tessellated vertices, or project a texture. Neither approach can capture what a shadow looks like. In this youtube presentation, though it didn't appear to be concerned with shadows, the shadows you can see are very Unrealistic. To begin with they are simply black or white, and there is no overlap going on.

You take a game like Dark Souls. Its just a basket of tricks to give your impressions of things like shadows. There are no particular light sources. And the shadows are just a texture projected straight down. So it doesn't flow over steps. It just seems to because the steps happen to not be level. Another way is to make textures from the point of view of each light. Textures appear pixellated and can't address more than a single plane. Vertices looks like saw teeth. I've never seen a game with volumetric vertex shadows, they tend to only be softened where each vertex blends into its nearest neighbor.

Ico's shadows are nice because they are vague, geometric, and placed by artists. Dark Slayer will just generate these kinds of shadows automatically, but in a more accurate way, so that you have all of the qualities of shadows. Umbra, penumbra, combination, falloff.

I mean if you are going to have shadows in a natural setting they should look like shadows above all else. But still shadows are really not important. In fact they are the last thing in the world to worry about. That's why photography is so much about shadows, because there isn't any else left to talk about. Its at the end of its rope.


PS: Dark Slayer's shadows will be baked in. If you want them to move they just have to be re-baked in real time. Probably moving shadows will be blended between frames so they can be recomputed every few frames instead of every single frame. Pre-animated shadows is an option. But I mention this only to say that the lights themselves can be modulated, flickered like fire light, turned on and off, etc, but they can't move without re-baking their shadow.

[HwitVlf]

Looks nice! Reminds me quite a bit of Oblivion. This comment cracked me up:

"Right, so where's the gameplay? All you guys have done for the past 2 months or so is build aï ‎» ‎¿ map. There is nothing to do.."

Ha ha, yeah Todd! It's been two whole months; why haven't you made a fully functional epic game yet?!! I'm sure the guy who wrote that comment could crank out 7 or 8 in that amount of time. ‎ 

[Guyra]

Haha, yeah, I read that comment too. It's like, "yeah, two months! Honestly! Because a game should be near completition after such a long time in development!" xD

It looks good though, but I'd be interested in seeing some KF style level design. That'd be cool as hell. :D

[dmpdesign]

Well unfortunately the bid shown is for another game entirely so it will be a while before I have the time or know how to attempt an actual kf style game.

[Hguols]

I'm not familiar with Unity. ‎ 
Is this something that requires a fair amount of programming knowledge and coding?
...or is there some sort of an editor where us musicians could take a whack at it?

[HwitVlf]

Unity can do a lot of common procedures with no/almost no programming knowledge like map making, basic camera control, lighting, physics etc . But if you want to set up something more unique for your game, it requires varying amounts of programming knowledge (C# or Java) depending on how complex what you want to accomplish is.

Unity works by "attaching" code snippets to game objects which then define how the object behaves. Once a snippet is created, it can be attached to an object with just a few clicks. ‎  Unity comes with a bunch of ready made code snippets and there are a lot of people out there who have made add-on snippets to achieve tons of different gaming scenarios so you MIGHT be able to scrape a game together with very little programming knowledge. ‎ 

The ORK RPG kit is an addon kit with code snippets for common RPG game elements. I feel fairly certain you could pull it of Tom! ‎ 

P.S. What I want to know, is what sort of top secret "other game" Todd is bidding on!!?? ‎ 

[dmpdesign]

Lol that is a typo, bid was meant to be vid...gogo texting on my phone with my giant fingers!

I will however be involved in something akin to Gauntlet Legends verysoon. I have figured out how to make AI for spawning mobs and giving them navigational intelligence and so on. ‎  Eventually I will learn what is needed to make a full fledged 3d rpg..