+1 Impressive stuff.
Iron Chieftain: Simulated RTS and Citybuilder
- Thread starter Kentucky 『 ＨＥＩＧＵＩ 』 James
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Ancient cities recently launched a closed beta. You have no excuse anymore! IrOn ChIeFtaIn PlAyAbLe WhEn?
Keep it up, it looks amazing.
I am still working on it, and even though I don't know a damn thing about how to implement multiplayer, I am designing everything to be as scalable and organised as possible so that implementing it wouldn't be hard.
Tests of some stuff:
Troop colour customisation
Landscape
"Fake" precalculated reflections on metals which change as characters go inside buildings, so you don't get the typical open world game problem of how to balance interior and exterior dynamic lighting.
Troop colour customisation
Landscape
"Fake" precalculated reflections on metals which change as characters go inside buildings, so you don't get the typical open world game problem of how to balance interior and exterior dynamic lighting.
Cubemaps?"Fake" precalculated reflections on metals which change as characters go inside buildings, so you don't get the typical open world game problem of how to balance interior and exterior dynamic lighting.
I'm sure the answer to this second question is somewhere in here, but I don't feel like going through 12 pages to find it.
Do you have predefined maps, or do you use procedural generation?
Kind of, but also a bunch of maths to make sure the cubemap lines up with the sun, gets darker at night, only appears on metal, is blurred by the less shiny part of a model, gets less prominent indoors, doesn't show up too much on the underside of a mesh, and only shows up at the shearing angles.
Predefined, but the terrain meshes are generated at runtime by a .csv data file and a heightmap which are kept in folders. This is both for my own sanity (unreal engine's own landscape system is slow, buggy and extremely restrictive), and so that people can make quick changes to maps without having to use the engine. I'm currently (as in, right now in the other window lol) implementing a system for making forests in a similar way, with a group of 256*256 maps and a list of parameters for generating different tree types.
That unironically looks like a chinese mobile game ad. It's literally, unironically the crappiest game trailer I've ever seen in my entire life. I'd rather soil my own trousers during a court hearing than watch a single femtosecond of that garbage again. Blocked.
All joking aside though this kind of looks fake, or at the very least basically a cutscene. Some of the UI stuff is just a little too punchy to be real and the gameplay they did show doesn't really link up. I am glad to see more games like this though.
I don't think there's a single bit of actual 'gameplay' in this trailer. It's utter nonsense from start to finish.
- "Generic Name Game"
- Horrible stock audio effect right at the start.
- "Viking" "city" builder where huge manly viking dudes decide to live on rocks, because vikings thought rocks were cool I guess.
- Music from M&B Viking Conquest they definitely don't have the rights to.
- Armor and weapons that look like they're straight out of Dark Souls 2.
- Roslagen anno domini 796, Full-body plate-armored crusaders fighting vikings.
- Obviously faked "Gameplay".
- Literally Kratos from God of War sitting on the Iron Throne surrounded by his two hot viking wives.
- "Generic Name Game"
- Horrible stock audio effect right at the start.
- "Viking" "city" builder where huge manly viking dudes decide to live on rocks, because vikings thought rocks were cool I guess.
- Music from M&B Viking Conquest they definitely don't have the rights to.
- Armor and weapons that look like they're straight out of Dark Souls 2.
- Roslagen anno domini 796, Full-body plate-armored crusaders fighting vikings.
- Obviously faked "Gameplay".
- Literally Kratos from God of War sitting on the Iron Throne surrounded by his two hot viking wives.
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Another pseudo-Viking title that will be devoured by the sands of time... A big meh
When I heard the VC tune
When I heard the VC tune
What, really?
I guess I really wasn't looking close enough. That's hilarious.
Been reading through this wonderful thread.
- If I'm understanding correctly, trees don't cast shadows past 300m, but rather only create ambient occlusion shadows?
If it's not too much to ask, could you give us comparison screenshots between two versions of the same spot in summertime? One with distance-field shadows enabled, and one with your current ambient occlusion technique.
- This looks genuinely amazing. How demanding is it?
- Can anything be done to reduce the egregious pop-in such as in this gif?
- Correct me if I'm wrong but I'm not noticing any Global Illumination in any of your screenshots.
- If I'm understanding correctly, trees don't cast shadows past 300m, but rather only create ambient occlusion shadows?
If it's not too much to ask, could you give us comparison screenshots between two versions of the same spot in summertime? One with distance-field shadows enabled, and one with your current ambient occlusion technique.
- This looks genuinely amazing. How demanding is it?
- Can anything be done to reduce the egregious pop-in such as in this gif?
- Correct me if I'm wrong but I'm not noticing any Global Illumination in any of your screenshots.
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Too late, the new versions of unreal are much more efficient with shadows which allows me to extend the range as far as I want. I didn't mention it because it was something I noticed gradually, but yeah.
Hardly at all. Before I let the rain particles get too high the clouds set in and the sun is turned off, so the biggest fps hog basically ceases to exist. I also make the rain clouds the same colour as the shader fog, which basically free, so i get the effect of a billion particles with none of the lag.
- Can anything be done to reduce the egregious pop-in such as in this gif?
That was a very low resolution map with very aggressive culling because i wanted to check if the system worked. Currently it's barely noticable. I dont plan to let the player zoom in and out that ridiculously far anyway.
There is a dynamic GI system but it's fairly subtle and you mostly see it in the evenings, or indoors. I might implement a system where it gets much higher around noon where it's probably needed most, but I haven't put much attention into it yet because I think the game is well lit enough without it. I kind of "cheated" GI by having a skybox that is way brighter on one side that rotates along with the sun, and in 90% of cases it looks more natural than even the raytracing system. You can see a bit of it in the second half of that rainstorm video.
I love that wind and rain effect, and it's not the first time I've told you. If you lack clouds, as long as you need them; _Sebastian_ can sell you some for 10€ each
Is this a tease for your next community dev blog?
How dare you. Game is cancelled.
