D.R.O.N.E. one of Unity's most graphical games

Hi guys,

Check out our D.R.O.N.E. game, which is made with Unity! In the coming months we'll have a demo available...

The comments on the engine reveal are funny, many people simply can't believe it...

D.R.O.N.E. is a community driven sci-fi multiplayer arena-shooter with focus on creativity. It's currently in development by Five Studios Interactive. Compete in an ever growing number of community created arenas, with your own unique drone designs, to become the smoothest drone operator in the galaxy.

We kept it a secret for many months and we've been asked a thousand times, which game engine we use... We are totally excited what Unity is allowing us to do, both on a technical as well as on a creative level.

The arenas are built with the in-game editor. The footage is recorded in-game with an internal pre-alpha build.

For more info, screenshots and videos visit our site: http://dronethegame.com

We have many more trailers and video's on our Youtube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_fozzchq3Muon2ES9CE0Ow

We're quite well know from the Asset Store with UBER - Standard Shader Ultra, RTPv3, TerrainComposer2 and WorldComposer

Nathaniel
Lead Developer
Five Studios Interactive

 

Well, there goes the excuse of 95% of the devs.

 

wannabe's devs.. NO excuse, work at it like any one else. Games like this will show more and more its not the engine, its the devs fault if they can't make a game look good to many wannabe's or lazy devs want there game to be built for them or to look good out of the box.. Devs like NATH, Tom, and Team, will show you it can be done in Unity... If you work hard, and take the time, to learn your skill... you will make a great game. in any engine.. I been telling people this for many years.. Game development takes time to learn, 3d modeling, shaders, texturing etc.

Congrats Nath, glad to see you guys are hard at work and your game is progressing, I heard many people asking me what engine, and I said YOU WILL SEE....

 

Is that the speedtree shader that Tom is supposedly working on? Because speedtrees don't look that good in unity...

And if you drop speedtrees into a scene at that density, your frames drop through the floor, long before you have added a game, even after optimizing them to the point where pop in is ugly. So, how does that work?

 

Very nice work. Was it tough? What can you talk about that could be improved in Unity that would've made your life easier? What parts of Unity functionality did you feel you need to replace and why?

I feel that the game needs a mention for how nice it all is and how fun it seems.

 

Thanks Recon! I think which engine matters as there can be a limit to what you can achieve simply because the engine doesn't allow access to it. One reason Unity is awesome is for its expendability: Custom shaders, compute shaders, command buffers, etc...they are taking this to a whole new level with the script able render pipeline.

Yes Tom made custom SpeedTree shaders. The issue with frames drop is that each speedtree has a seperate draw call and Lod group. This taxes the CPU and GPU. However Unity implemented DrawMeshInstancedIndirect where the transforms can be stored in a compute buffer. This reduces bandwidth between CPU and GPU, further instancing reduces draw calls. I recommend to look into Vegetation Studio, it is implementing this:
https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/wip-vegetation-studio.479244/

At the moment we still haven't optimized this and each tree has still it's own draw call and Lod group. And we are CPU bound by this. We already have very good frame rate on high end and optimizing this will be the next step. Another thing we use is dynamic occlusion culling, currently only on triangle level.

Thanks, well what makes it sometimes tough is not having enough low level access. However Unity is addressing this with the script able render pipeline, which is totally awesome. Also looking forward to the C# job system. We use our own terrain/grass solution which runs on the GPU. CPU doesn't have to do anything for it to update, etc. Unity is addressing this with a new terrain system they are working on.

Nathaniel

 

agreed, but I see to many people making S*** shaders, S*** models, S*** animations, just trash, and blame the game engine...Steam is full of games, of people saying, UNity!! Not again, it will look terrible, run terrible etc...I see this for years and alot.... This is NOT due to the engine, this is due to experience... from the dev team.. Unreal will see this more to, since more people are using.... I see it already with contract work, people want the game to be made for them, they plug in an asset and the game is made.. That is a huge issue, and why Steam , Android has suffered, another reason why Unity has suffered with this kinda of reaction to games being made from Unity... anyways best of luck....be sure to work on that networking, that can make or break the game... to many games, make there games look pretty, and there networking suffers. not saying your game, but I see to many people spend 95% on graphics and UI, networking, game play are after thoughts.

 

Yes agree, that this is a major issue. I remember that steam Greenlight was a good place to go a few years ago to build a community. But now Steam had to replace Greenlight, because of being flooded with such content. Unity has this issue with the forced splash screen for free version and it can be removed on the pro version...

Yes definitely, gameplay and networking are our first priority. If that's not good no matter how pretty the game it wouldn't last long...

Nathaniel

 

So, what does most graphical mean? The screen is saturated with 100% graphics? It has a hard drive footprint to rival Halo MCC? Inquiring minds need to know!

 

Meaning, some companies, spend 95% on graphics, and forget to worry about game play, networking, this tend to happen, not saying Nath would do it. But it does tend to happen....FF MMORPG, was nearly remade, game was awesome looking, but that was it.. The game fell flat, so need a steady balance. But I know Nath, he won't let that happen. He has a ton of passion for game development. They will be very successful, I have no doubt. He and Tom, are the few I know on his team, they are hard workers, and have a ton of passion, and experience.... Having those few things are half the battle and I learned in this industry hard to find hard workers. I have a ton of respect for these guys, and wish you guys all the success. This game should sell like hot cakes on Steam. XB1 PS4, are seeing more games from Steam and doing even better in some regards, something to consider in the future.

PS: The videos are looking better and better since we first seen them they where great then, but even better now, keep up the great work. Did you decide on an KickStarter yet ? how many followers your looking for? I would consider a forum to, since its multi-Player, atleast later on. This helps keeps your community together anyways... and keeps them hyped and talking...

 

Especially the 2nd picture looks like a rendering. I have my doubts it is realtime . Maybe we have to wait until the final playable version.

 

Hoooly... This I was not expecting to see in here. Nice work!

Now, pretty please, run on a Core2 Quad... (only kidding)

 

I am in awe, well done Nathaniel and Team! You are are leading the way. Do you use any of your awesome assets The quality and performance seem out of this world. You should make how to's and offer / sell those so all Unity developers can make top quality games.
Now I suppose the next mission is to get your title out there and create the media hype it deserves! Good luck, I am sure it will do very well.

 

Asset flip TBH

 

Amazing graphics!!! Great job team!

 

Thanks! We try to go as low as we can

Thanks , Yes we use Horizon[ON], UBER and our terrain editing I made before TerrainComposer2, TC2 is basically an extension of it.

Nathaniel

 

If you can. That said, if it can't or would hold it back doing so, it's ok.
Understandably, my hardware is real low tier lmao

 

Graphics is always not a concern for Unity, but the performance.

 

Well, it goes hand in hand really. That said, Unity, barring some special cases, has excellent performance compared to some engines, and will run on almost anything. (Yep, even that Intel Atom netbook in the cupboard, just need to do shader optimization first)

 

Yes but Unity allows in many ways for optimizations like custom shaders, compute shaders, new script-able render loops, etc. On high end hardware we have it already running pretty well. But there a ton of things we can still do to optimize it more.

Nathaniel

 

Looks really good, can you tell us a little more about any assets you've used?
are you going to release any new Assets to the asset store?
That grass looks interesting is that an asset from the asset store?
What about that water is that one?

I've contacted all my mates giving them links to support you.

Cheers

Roy

 

Thanks for spreading the word. You can read more about the Assets here:
https://unity.com/madewith/drone

We have 2 new Assets released:
Mesh Combine Studio for increasing performance.
Thor Thunderstorm the fastest and most user friendly Thunder and Lightning system.

For the water we used PlayWay water

Nathaniel

 

Impressive.

I will surely play it and it is technicaly very instructive.
How do you manage the collisions ?
Do you use mesh colliders or a custom system ?

Cheers

 

Thanks We combine everything into cells with MeshCombineStudio with 3 Lods and 1 simplified mesh collider per cell.

Nathaniel

 

Thanks for the answer.

I am more hyped than I first expected for this game.
A shooter where movement in 3D is key seems perfect for me.
+ the infinite potential content made by players, that's the dream.

What is your workflow to generate seamless terrain macro textures for Horizon[ON] ?
I haven't found the ideal tool that can make tileable eroded terrain.
Apparently it is not possible to have tilable terrain with World Machine or MapMagic. There is L3DT but there isn't enough control for my taste.

Maybe I will have to make my terrain macro textures with World Machine and make them tilable with Bitmap2Material or Substance Designer, but I found that inelegant.

 

of course they use there own assets, RTP, Terrain Composer 2, Horizon On...etc.. Uber etc.. Tom and Nath are both talented at what they do. I wish they great success.

 

Man I wish you guys would make in depth tutorials on getting those visuals. I'd pay for it AND for your assets Would be a good sale funnel for your assets actually.

 

I can't believe this level of graphical talent was wasted on a profoundly flawed and boring gameplay concept ...

 

Hi, why do you say that, I guess everyone can have their view.. but what leads you to believe it s boring?

 

Any updates on this game as it looks too good to be true...

• User configurable terrain for a high speed e-sports game?
• At Completive Multi-player refresh rates?

This goes against the basic nature of Unity: It's use of baked static data for collision/lighting/rendering/occlusion performance enhancements.

I really hope it works and even more so this dynamic environment technology ideal for procedural games or user configurable games is made available of all Unity developers.

I've tried with sort of game with SalvageRL's procedurally generated derelicts (below) but graphics performance takes a massive hit with my level of skills so made it an Rogue Like/Hot Shot style the world only moves when you do.

 

They just started crowdfunding !

https://funding.dronethegame.com/

I think those guys gave so much to the community with their assets, they deserve my support ...

Hope that others share my view !

Fred

 

um, I said that for years.. and wouldn't even look at at a Unity game,,, then last month someone called me on it, and said.. "when was the last time you looked at Unity?" and I said, like 5 years ago, and he said "you should take anouther look" and I did, and I iwas pretty impressed with Unity

 

i read all stuff and i appreciate the knowledge you have shared. keep up the good work!

 

This is really cool to read. What do you think contributed to raising the 40k for the game thus far?

 

everyone has there own reason some may be people who know the devs and want to support, some people like that type of games, some may like the look, game play etc...So just like any game people support for different reason no one knows for sure......But I dealt with KICK STARTER games and everyone has there reasons...

 

I see good textures details, or grass physics.
But i don't like the levels , there is no design , no interesting unique places, it's all terrain editing and heavy copy and paste placement tool. Well ... i guess as a multiplayer game , level design does not matter for players.

Drones should be fun to play , with something different from shooting only it has potential to be the next Rocket League big game.

 

awesome graphics.
how you guys managed to achieve such graphics quality with unity and what was the terrain size (it looks super huge) and if you dont mind can you tell me how you guys placed those plants?

 

well it does from years of making games...
. it can cause issues with balancing and such. This is a early build, also I believe they will be able to change the design with different maps. I been following it, as Nath has been showing it to us since he nearly started. But the changes, they made seem to be a lot better in level design aspects . But level design matters, a lot with these kind of games for sure.. other wise they can be boring and become unfair. even, unbalance. But its has come along ways. as long as they do good support, and there networking is solid..... they should do well, as they have everything else in order. Not a fan of the UX.UI. myself. but the rest of the game is really coming along. I have no doubt they will be successful, as long as they keep up on support and networking. Many games, don't and they don't do well. They see UX.UI and networking as an after thought.. Which is a mistake. But so far Nath has really been working on networking. so it seems to be coming together...: from what I can tell. ( I been busy myself with our own game) but from what I have heard and he has told us. /cheers.