Jovia environment demo

Hey everyone,

AndrewC and I have been working on a first person adventure game in Unity Indie. We've put together a small demo of our first environment and we'd love some feedback:

Apartment Demo (74 MB)
Mac
Windows










We're starting to develop a few characters in Mudbox, so just a taste of what's to come:

 

this looks awesome dude. make a web build. i have a pc i cant run the mac stuff. I want to see how smooth it runs on my pc

 

hey man, really looking this. Some nice touches as well to the environment, the globe and orbiting planets I particularly liked. Nice little touches like footsteps changing depending on where you're walking...(although it does sound like you have metal shoes, but I presume none of this is final, it's just to test) most of all though, it looks great!

Is there a reason you play as the world's tallest man though?

Do you have devblog or anything for the project?

 

Very nice-looking, runs pretty well at max settings on my 5-year-old G5. Nice textures and good use of subtle effects. Is the apartment door the only interactive element currently in the demo? The last couple of screenshots show areas I couldn't get to. (Also, room 97-11 is missing the door.)

If you want to keep things simple, a web build is best--you don't have to host it as a webplayer, just zip the .html and .unityweb files. If you want to stick to standalones, you're using Unity, no reason not to make a Windows build.

--Eric

 

Hi, I'm the other guy working on this. We tried a web player but it runs really slow. We can try it again later but it seemed unusable. We are in Unity indie so I don't think we can compile to windows. We can try the a web player again soon but don't know if it'll work, sorry windows people.

Eric, that doors missing because a long time ago I was think about another room there, still might. The only other thing interactive now is the elevator but we disabled it for the demo because the lower area is incomplete. Also we plan on having some people in the halls so they won't just be wasted space.

Thank for the feedback everyone.

 

Sure you can. That was changed back when 2.5 came out.

--Eric

 

Incorrect good man, as of Unity 2.5 we dropped that bit and now allow Indie users on both platforms to create executable builds for both platforms, have at it!

Edit: Eric beat me to it.


On to my feedback: gorgeous visuals, although on my MacBook Pro driving an external 24" it ran a bit slow/choppy on the highest quality settings.

 

Wow, the stills look really lovely. Can't wait to see the demo and, when you've finished it, the game. Very impressive for just a 2 man team. Be sure to keep us posted on this!

Edit: Just looked at the demo, really top notch artwork!

 

Holy crap, those are some really amazing visuals (especially for Unity Indie!). I have a question, what do you use for lightmapping (assuming that you're using that). Do you use pureLight, or something else?

Really want to test the demo, but due to the fact my Mac is for iPhone development and nothing else, a Windows build would be nice

 

Mike should be getting a windows compile up soon, sorry for the oversight. Sakar, I am light baking in maya using the built in functionality. Some of the lightmaps use just light mixed with a color map in unity for things like repeated textures, while some are light and color baked into one map like areas that have hotspots and need to make the texture brighter. Those use pure white lightmaps and the light color is put into the color map in unity. Does this make any sense?

BTW if anyone is curious this is suppose to be in futuristic Chicago...

 

Huzzah! I've uploaded a Windows build.

 

The bottom elevator button is also interactive. It's admittedly a non-obvious target, so we'll make it much clearer. We've prototyped a more intelligent proximity-based object focusing system, so you won't have to suffer through a pixel hunt. We'll definitely post a demo and some code once we have it hammered out.

The elevator script seems to be misbehaving, so I'm afraid that the reception room (the final screenshot) is unreachable.

 

Hey Mike the mac demo didn't look like it had the elevator button. You might have uploaded the old one so check it out.

 

Thanks! This is a detail that won't be particularly relevant until much later in the game, but the holographic moons follow the actual orbital periods of the Galilean moons. Io, Europa, and Ganymede are locked in Laplace resonance - Io orbits twice for every orbit of Europa, which orbits twice for every orbit of Ganymede. It'll make for some very interesting resonance-based puzzles.

Haha, we'll have to check our proportions. We're using two units as our default human size, but that may be too tall.

Not yet, but I'm setting up Wordpress on BasenjiGames.com - stay tuned!

 

Looks really nice guys. The only thing I noticed is that you feel a bit like a giant walking around. Can I be so bold to ask for a sample of the elevator script? I've been trying to create it for a while and as a 3d guy(read no programmer) I am touching in the dark here. Another question is what did you guys use for baking the textures? and how big are the maps?

Loads of questions but I hope you can enlighten me

Thanks

Jasper

 

Worlds tallest man? phooey, I'm 6'3" and it seems about right for me. I think it's the "wide angle" effect of the camera settings. But, I think you have to go with that or the view would be a bit confining.

Excellent job, fellows. I really admire the use of lightmaps. Could use a little more detailing (light fixtures in the hall ceilings or incorporate that into the texture, sniggley little detail stuff like that) Some more sounds might be nice, low noise for the big screen (hum?), some little cool sound for the jupiter globe and moons, refrigerator noise, stuff like that would make it really alive. OH, and don't forget the muzac in the halls ;-)

One thing I noticed is that when you open the apartment door the bathroom disappears and you can fall off the map. I don't know if that's because of the halls or what.

Can't wait for the next version. I hate being stuck in a elevator!!

 

mastajappa, the elevator script is a work in progress. One thing to note is that we needed to make the player a rigid body for the elevator to work at all. We'll put something up when it's working better. Also I baked the maps in Maya. I usually bake them to the biggest size that's realistic and then see how far I can scale them down in unity before a quality difference is notable. Their actual size is a wide range from 128 to 4096.

 

Really FANTASTIC!!!! It made me think and remember of "The Journeyman project turbo" first scenes. !! GREAT GREAT JOB, can't wait to see something more and the elevator working!

Congratulations!

 

Hey thanks. The Journeyman Project was my favorite game growing up.

 

Actually was one of mine to (but preferred "spaceship warlock"!!) Working a lot to be able to some day work on something like that!
Again very good and cool work man!

 

Great quality lightmapping and I liked the general visual style.

I don't think being this high is right too. Think of the Unity units as real life meters so check all your proportions based on this, you won't have any problems.

This demo definitely needs some signs of outer life. Like ambient sounds of the city and maybe some passing flying cars out of the window (it is a futuristic setting right?) If not maybe some birds just out of the window.

You can also add other sounds, like when you go out from your house, some loud music coming from some of the other flats, or a couple fighting etc.

 

How can that be with indie? clearly, you can see shadows, so how?

 

Lightmaps. There's no rule saying you can't do shadows in Indie; just not the built-in dynamic rendertexture shadows you can use in Pro. Even with Pro, you would want to use lightmaps for a game like this, because of being much higher quality.

--Eric

 

I'd like Vsync to be able to be a graphics option(if possible), I get some pretty nasty tearing in the hallways.

Keep up the awesome work guys! Looking forward to seeing what comes from this project.

 

Sakar, I have no idea how to do that but if you tell me I'd be happy to add that functionality.

 

In the quality settings, turn on Sync to VBL.

--Eric

 

how do you make a light map?

 

Use the appropriate function in whatever 3D app you're using.

--Eric

 

Here's a good tutorial from the unity website that is for maya users:

http://unity3d.com/support/resources/tutorials/lightmapping-in-maya

good luck..

 

This is a truly lovely looking thing.

The lightmapping is really nice quality, are you using a really high resolution. I normally use 1024 for the complete levels Walls etc but I don't get results that good. Are you lightmapping individual items? if so, I'm guessing you have high draw calls.

How did you do the bathroom floor reflection?

Really great look. Excellent work!

Matt.

 

Since they said they're using indie, the bathroom was probably done with mirrored geometry. There's another whole bathroom under the transparent floor.

I'm also interested in what rendering engine was used. Is it Maya's standard renderer or are you using MR? There are some things throwing me off about the light in there.

One suggestion has stuck with me since I played this a few days ago. I love the exterior environment. It's a great mix of a beautiful skybox and geometry. The sunset is really dramatic and warm and the flare is a tasteful contribution. Only problem is that the interior of the building doesn't really match. The light coming in is pure white and creates a really neutral mood inside. If you had more color in there(this also ties in with my question about what you used to render the lightmaps), it would add drama and atmosphere.

 

My holy atheist god!! That was amazing. I couldn't believe it was the Indie version I was playing.

Ran it on highest quality at 1280x1024 without any issues. Game looks beautiful. I am a big fan of games like Syberia and this come close to actually recreating all the pre-rendered images in realtime.

That robot cleaner though. I chased it around and I still couldn't stomp on it (in DeusEx the poor thing makes a screeching sound when you step on it). :evil:

 

Post a web build dude.....

Looks great so far however I feel It lacks a bit of charector/ mood give it some atmosphere....not sure how perhaps dirty it up... or something

 

fallingbrickwork- YEah we are using different textures for different items like walls floor ect. Map range from 128x128 to 4096x4096 and use different compressors. It's all about optimizing by bringing them in at the highest quality and then reducing quality in unity through size reduction or compressors until the game runs smoothly. Draw calls don't seem to be in issue since modern computers seem to be able to handle a good number.

defmech- We're just using mental ray to render. The sky box was done in maya as well. Maybe we can brighten up the sun, it's suppose to be sunrise not sunset.

NikSha- Good suggestion about the robot. I kind of remember something like that in Deus Ex. Right now the robot is on an animation path but maybe we could add some A.I. to it once we learn how...

Thanks for all the feedback everyone.

 

You can also take a look here;

http://www.geartechgames.com

Some really nice examples and tutorials about lightmapping.

 

I know there is a problem with the player falling through the elevator platform... How did you hook up the touch of the button to open the elevator doors?

Thanks

 

Exactly. We use this trick in a few places - it's fairly easy to set up, and it will render on pretty much any graphics hardware.

Haha, this was our slight homage to Deus Ex. Once we get into AI I'd like to add some basic player avoidance to the bot.

 

We use a generic Button script that sends an "OnButton" message to a game object, in this case the elevator doors. If the receiving game object defines an OnButton() function in one of its scripts, it will be called. If not, it will silently fail.

The elevator doors' OnButton function just plays an animation of the doors opening, but it could do anything - perhaps the OnButton handler for a crate of dynamite would cause it to explode.

 

Is there some article on this trick? Can someone please link us to it? (I have been wondering how to do that effect as well).

 

It's actually pretty simple, I never saw any articles on how to do it. Just take whatever geometry you want reflected, group it and scale it to -1 in the y axis. Then give the floor between the two geometries a transparent texture(Specular looks best).

 

I used to use this method 'back in the day' when coding OpenGL directly... with the advent of these fantastic engines I had totally forgotten about it! Many thanks for reminding me!

Matt.

 

I really like the lightning and the overall mood of the warm light. Also the view outside the window is simply amazing.

However here is what I don't like:
If you stand close to an object ( like a counter) and then turn your view while looking down it looks like you're half-way standing inside the object.
Also it has been pointed out before that player is a bit too tall in my opinion.

The timing of the footsteps isn't quite right in my opinion. It should be double the speed as in: Left foot, Right foot.

 

The halfway standing inside object is because we made the player collider pretty thin(maybe too thin) so that the player can squeeze through things like behind the kitchen chairs. Maybe we could make it a little thicker but that might not get rid of the effect. The other option is to restrict the camera so you can't look straight down. I guess it's sort of a trade off but we'll think about it.

The height issue is weird because we scaled it perfectly in Maya and got the correct conversion in unity. A doorway in real life is about 6'6" I believe and in the game you can see about six inches of clearance when you go under a door. Maybe it looks weird because most games have shorter characters. I don't know...

The foot sound speed is also a good point. I'll have to record myself walking and then compare. Thanks for the constructive criticism.

 

Thank you AndrewC, that will help most of us.


About the player height, I did think it was a bit too high, but not because of the room. It is most likely that few of the objects in-game should be a bit bigger (like sofa, but not the bed) compared to real life to make them believable. But of course, easiest way is to increase the room dimensions I guess.

I think it's just few objects that give the impression that you are a giant in-game while in real life it would feel normal.

 

Great Demo. I would recommend lowering the camera a little though... from the eye level the player is at he must be at least 8ft tall.

 

I agree with the height thing.

When I have the pointer in the middle of the screen it looks like the character's eyes must be about 4 inches below the top of the doorway. That would make the character about as tall as Kobe Bryant.

Maybe you have the camera set up so that the person's eyes are at around 6'4" or something.

But overall, looks nice. I really like the couches.

 

Very nice, but upon running it, all the fans in my case started running at full speed. Perhaps some optimization is in order?

 

Yea I'm aware of that. I mean it's not a big issue. Or you could use a variable sized collider for different areas.

Maybe 100% size accuracy isn't always the way to go

 

Could you post an example of the script, I really need to have things chewed out for me sorry

 

i would love to pick you brain to find what exact mental ray settings you used to get such high fidelity radiosity ! no matter what sliders i pull in mental ray the color never quit bounces aroudn the way it does in real life ... maybe its my materials ... or some setting on the lights ... aarrrrrrrrr too many settings ..... D: