Games [Now Released] Eastshade: A game about exploration

Fantastic article as the previous one, thank you

That's surprising how much Unity is very weak about terrain and not having better features to adress big scenes and lot of objects performance
I mean about your test on poor performance Unity default features like LOD, terrain, culling or instancing. So you made your own better and clever performance system.

Grid system is very popular ( in some mmos games ) , but i would never thaught about such system you made or using hexa grids lol

Until Unity would make some real game, i don't think they will ever improve and bring new features about terrain and performance in complex real case games.

Do you think it would worth it you could sold your optimized nature system as some plugin ?
Or would it be too much work because of support for Unity versions and users always needing continuous support ?

 

I suppose you could say they already do have a batch combining system. They have static batching, which I think works reasonably well for mobile games with low fidelity art and small levels, since mobile devices have a lot of memory comparatively. It didn't work for the game I'm making, But that's the thing: Any implementation they do for batch combining will not work for everyone.

In the case of Unity devoting resources for large, outdoor, high fidelity 3d scenes, consider this: Probably less than half of Unity users are making 3d games. Less than half again are making open-world 3d games, and then some portion of that are making outdoor open-worlds. And even among that subset everyone has different needs. So I'm not even sure I'd want Unity to devote resources to this functionality. I will probably end up rolling my own anyway. They don't know what kind of game I'm making. I think I'd rather them spend time on more core functionality, like multi-threading low-level engine functions, general scripting performance, and extensibility things like scriptable render loop, as they seem to be doing.

Regarding selling my batch combiner, I don't think it'd be worth it. I think it would be useful to very few people, and then of those they'd likely need more features I'd have to support. For instance, my scripts do not work with Unity terrain objects. That right there would turn many off. Then on top of that you need to author with an atlas. I think they'd want some one button atlasing feature.

 

I agree ,the majority won't make larger or open world games.

Unity allow coders to customize it in some moderated "easy" way (like your optimisation system), i agree they should focus on low level multi threading and core performance.

For Wicther 3 , devs used Umbra for culling in very good way.
I wonder why it did not worked for you ? Perhaps Unity implementation is too basic ?
(i'll got to re read your article)

Terrain as meshes is a way to go for performance, but you must get some multi texture system and tools. Once again few people will go that way unfortunatelly.
Continuous support for users asks lot of time indeed, it's something that can escalate quickly lol

I just wander what system did you use for spawning or painting grass, trees ? to manage their visibility ? and wind system is a shader ?

 

Yeah I hear ya. Regarding authoring the forests I wrote a tool I call the Prefab Stamper. It just instantiates prefabs from raycasts in the scene view and aligns them to terrain. I can also save multiple objects as a "stamp" and that whole thing drops to terrain as I click. I've been giving away this tool freely in my twitch streams. Its so simple but way way better than any prefab painter I've used imo.

 

Don't you experience editor performance issues, if your scene contains thousands of objects? I did some tests a while ago and the editor does not scale when using more than a few objects, see this post.

 

Ok, i thaught grass was a specific system, but instead it's prefabs.

 

Since my world is divided into 9 scenes that stream in as the player moves around, I only have the few scenes I'm working in loaded at once, which Unity handles okay. Yeah if I have the entire world loaded I get like 2 fps.

 

How many scenes do you have visible at same time in game ?
Are you using some specific tool to load unload and manage scenes ? Or it is just Unity Scene Api loading ?

 

Just normal unity API. Each scene has a "vicinity" markup that when the player is within the scene is loaded. So typically the scene your standing in plus one or two adjacent scenes. Three max.

 

Nice, "Horizon" game is also some open world like with clever map sections loading zones.

I'm curious about terrain multi texture, you used some Blender shader with vertex coloring to paint terrain in Blender and imported it in Unity right ?

 

No blender shader. I just paint the vertex color with only seeing the colors and then export to Unity to see what the heck it looks like with the actual splat shader . Not the most robust way to work haha, but it works for me.

 

#nightmares

 

We now have a Steam store page! It would mean the world to us if you go wishlist and/or follow the game there! Plus then you won’t miss its release . With the release of our steam page comes an updated trailer. Since so much has changed since our initial announcement, I wanted the trailer to reflect all our updates. We now have full voice acting and lip sync after all! I’ve updated almost all the shots, and replaced some with new ones. Now that Jaclyn is helping me art the world, many areas have more tender loving detail.

 

this is really beautiful .. your landscapes are just stunning !!

 

It makes them lot more real alike, lip sync brings so much, good job
The games looks like a AAA title, amazing texturing and level design.

 

Very nice, I checked the differences of the last and recent trailer and especially the spoken text adds a lot of context and atmosphere. Also the rendering seems more smooth (The room and inn look way better). Really cool to see how the game is getting along. The trailer has a great atmosphere. the only thing that bothered me quite a bit is the light effect of the sun at the very first scene. When the sun moves behind the moon the light effect seems to fit, but when it moves in again I had the feeling that everything got lit up even before I was able to see the sun again. Felt off, but maybe I missing something here.

 

Yeah we added light baking for the interiors which helped a lot! The crit on the eclipse is fair, I don't think the ambient light levels and sun are aligned perfectly. And thank you for the kind words!

 

Man, congrats for Leaving Lyndow... it is an awesome introduction to the fantastic Eastshade world
How is the development going? There are any news you can share to amaze us?

I wonder if you can write a blog post, or at lest share some info, about the great painting function you built... some tech details on how do you accomplish it in Unity would be highly appreciated i believe it is not just a print screen with some post processing sent to a material

Thanks a lot and i hope the game development is going well!!

 

looks like its now available!
https://twitter.com/eastshade/status/1095699269061726212

 

Congratulations on the release! It seems to be doing well on its first hours!

 

Congratulations!!!!!

 

Congrats on the launch! I have been following this thread for two years, so I am excited to see the game finished. The world looks amazing - its clear that art and design are your super powers (especially with regards to the architecture), but the reviews so far are also highlighting the gameplay.

Unity will most likely be featuring Eastshade to show what the engine is capable of.

Now, about the Mac version....

 

streaaam
https://www.twitch.tv/eastshadestudios

 

Congratulations on release.

This topic has a lot of useful informations, especially for the first game developers like me. Would be great to hear about release stories. I mean, after the game finishes - to start of steam release, i'm really curious about progress.

 

Congratulations on release! Looking forward to playing it!

 

Great job bro, love the visuals, nice models, effects, etc., stunning, keep up the great work, we need more like yourself

 

..when is the next game stream starting?