The island of wandering fools (Unity test level)

I have been working with a friend to put Unity through its paces and learn a bit about working with it. I created this Island to test texture baking and various simple scripts as well as particles, GUI elements, physics... etc.


Take a tour of the island. Keep in mind that all the elements are just tests nothing meant for broad public consumption . But the characters will stop and talk to you, you can ride the boats (As a passenger and it's a challenge) there is a telescope which can be used by right clicking once you have found it. (it's in the stilt hut without the fire) and there is a map down on the shark infested bay wharf. After you "find it" you can activate it by pressing "m".

There is a crude "Underwater" sound and graphic that is triggered by walking into the water but we have created a simple script that once you get too deep you are teleported to the top of the tower (Where the old mute man with the red book is)

Otherwise the first person controls are standard W, S, D, A and space bar. with mouse look.

Everything is work in progress as all the island is is a testing ground not a game. this will be obvious when you get there, but it might be worth a tour. We have finished with it and are moving on to a new, fresh testing ground. Any comments, good or bad will be very welcome.

Edit: The level takes a long time to load. It will be black with sounds for a minute... then it should start fine.

 

Look pretty good for a demo

May I have a intel version, please?

 

Here is the Intel version

 

hahaha the npcs crack me up! seemed like one got mad at me when i knocked over some barrels. started talking pig, wavin his hands in the air. intentional? i couldn't understand his accent.

nice touch with the birds and shark. lots of cool stuff in there. bet you learned a lot and good job getting that much done.

 

Thanks for checking it out. just a bunch of goofy odds and ends that we were testing.

did you find the telescope or map?


How was the frame rate on your machine . I should attach that show frame rate script. I'm interested how the very high poly island mesh and the 2048 x 2048 textures all over the place play on different machines.

I had blob shadows on all the people/horses but they absolutely killed the frame rate.

 

some more screen grabs

 

nice very expansive. mood kinda reminds me of shadow of the collosus. that was alot of fun just exploring - i tried like hell to ride on that horse ; )

 

Anybody want to donate some nice trees to the island? As you can see by the piece of junk tree that I started. That is an area I haven't even begun to figure out....

 

trees... did you look here:
http://www.unifycommunity.com/wiki/index.php?title=The_Trees#The_Trees

yes i found the telescope and map. that was easy since you told us where they were! cool effects.

frame rate is tough to guess because the walk speed is pretty fast. overall it seemed pretty smooth. a couple areas where it felt a little choppy but my cpu is pretty weak: 733mhz G4, 1gb RAM, 256mb radeon 9800.

 

Wonderfully large area. My frame rate was slow, but not too bad. The image of someone's face in the castle with the tree was slightly disturbing... it made no sense and the yellow teeth were scary :wink:

I spent a long time wandering around and I'm impressed by how fluidly it all worked... there's a lot of geometry here and it never ground down to a halt.

The texture maps are wildly inconsistent though. There's streaking all over the place. There are a ton of glitches and poor mapping, and some of the textures (bricks/stones especially) are way out of scale, but it's a big area and a WIP so I'm sure you could fix them in time.

A lot of areas look like they're under water... I'm guessing that's because you're using some cookies on the lights to variate the lighting. It looks cool, but I'd "warm" them up a bit.

Great work,
Ethan

 

Thanks for taking the tour and your feedback!

no cookies used, only texture baking . That is one of the little things we were testing. Yes the textures are very inconsistent. We were just trying what different methods looked like.. I am learning about cookies in my next test level.

Blob shadows looked okay but they gave us a serious performance penalty. I could not figure out how to limit their "depth" of penetration. The obvious var. in the inspector didn't seem to work. I had to remove them despite the fact that they gave the characters some nice sense of being there.

The constant streaking was strange because those textures were applied within Unity. We usually baked a texture created and lit within cinema 4d for the undertexture and then used a detail texture applied within Unity. These often streaked. How does one avoid this?

None of the details (Animations and so on) were meant to be polished. just a big testing ground. For instance, the weird walking dudes were more of a scripting test. Meant to see how the JAVAscript could be implemented,in this case we just tweaked the robot script from the FPS tutorial... (Actually Muriac did most of the little scripting tests) Instead of stopping to shoot grenades at you, they come over and scream or laugh or make pig noises.

the horse was in to see how the meshweighting transfered to Unity from C4d (I had use the claude bonet tool in Mocca, had to switch back to plain mesh weighting and restriction tags in the dude animations). The telescope and the underwater visuals (Very crude) were just very simple ways to learn about the GUI textures and more basic Java.

the boats were there to attempt a physics based first person controller. I don't know if you went for a boat ride, but it's a little shaky... You can do it, but its nothing like the ferries in WOW. (lol)

The super dark areas were in complete shadow within c4d when we baked the texture. I agree, it does not look good. An attempt at super moody, "magic hour" dusk light that did not work.

Another problem is that the island mesh itself had to be broken into 5 peices, each with there own 2048x 2048 baked texture... but I mistakenly added a 2 pixel border on to those baked texture maps and you can see huge , blocky black borders between the island meshes.

We won't be fixing anything on this level, cause it was just a test. we will be taking lessons learned to the next testing ground. Because there are so many fundamental flaws in my approach from the start, it was starting to be too frustrating. From this forum I learned that much bigger landscapes can be achieved with far less polycount and look actually better, by selective subdivision of the mesh.

the only thing I would like to see is a bunch of trees in certain areas, just to check the performance hit, and to give those wandering idiots something to do... ; )

 

Great start, I'd love to know more about the project
Ran smoothly here, obviously you already said its a tester, so the only comments I would make at this stage is that I occasionally fell through the terrain mesh when jumping, and, unless the characters are supposed to be tall, they need to be scaled down to camera eye level or the fps needs to be scaled up.
Please keep posting info, I'm very interested in this
Boxy

 

would it be possible to get a windows .exe or atlest a web player

 

yeah that fall through the mesh problem I think is symptomatic of the physics based controller which has to be re-thought from the ground up. Anybody ever confront that problem?

i think it has to do with the size of the collider in the first person controller vs. the size of the polys in the meshes. i don't quite know yet.


And no sorry, no windows build (I don't have pro...) Actually can the indy licence publish a web playable version for windows users? Never explored that option.

 

Yes. Any web player can be viewed by a windows computer, but web players built with indie will display a watermark when on windows.

 

Some more screen shots. one shows a faint boat in the distance, the other, through the telescope (same boat, same distance)

i'll make a web version later today


If there are any scripting type folks out there who would like to collaborate... We could use some assistance.

 

Actually I remember now, I used to get it quite badly, but was advised to always build and import stuff to a 1:1 scale. Since I did that I've never had problems. So if want a 30m tree in my level I make sure its 30 metres in C4D before exporting, then in the Unity import setting for the mesh I set the mesh scale to 1.
Cheers
Boxy

 

Well this pretty much puts my "marble madness clone" test project to shame.

I look forward to any "real" games your team puts out. If this is the quality you put out when you don't know the engine, the final product promises to be amazing.

 

Hey, the demo looks great! I am ready to give it a try, but it's not running on my computer for some reason. When I start it up, I get a black screen with nothing happening until I force-quit. Any idea what is going on?

I have an eMac G4 1.25 ghz with a Radeon 9200 video card.

 

It actually takes a long time for the textures and sound to load. give it a second. It should work fine.

 

in 2 hours time it will be tomorrow instead of later today :roll: :wink:

 

Your right. I will make now... (Sorry... I got side tracked with new level)

 

looking forward to it =P

 

Ok. I have never done the web player thing. In this folder are two files. I assume the html one will access the other one. It works on my mac....


It will take a second to load. Let me know if it doesn't work

 

A few bugs iv found,

Firstly the lighting is wierd the ground seams much to light in some places, you have light on some walls where there are no light sources (and probably more things i didnt notice)
(also if you click the thumnail to see the large image, you will be able to se a wierd line on the terrain texture at the top of the picture i noticed quite a few of these
here you can se it even cleare)

then i jumped off the tower and into the water, cool view, swam about 3-5 seconds towards a ladder and suddently i was standing on the top of the tower again, still with the under the water view i. i noticed i could walk through people. i then jumped off the tower again, i went through the map.

iv fallen through the landscape a few times now, kinda annoying, btw i noticed stretched textures on the small wierd stone thingys that stand around at where you start, i havnt explored much of the map yet, delving deeper =P

hmm fell through the landscape under water again, for some reason it always or at least all the times iv fallen through there places you at the top level of the tower.

jumped at a few barrels the fell over and i fell through the harbour and landed on the tower =P

ok this falling onto the tower is getting annoying ^^ ill continue my exploration when the bugs have been fixed =P (atleast the collision thingy)

 

You are right about all those problems. The level was about learning and thanks to our own observations and people like yourself we have discovered the way not to do certain things and how to do them better.

But as I mentioned in the above posts, because this level has so many problems from the ground up, instead of fixing them all we are taking our lessons and starting fresh. We actually have a simple 3rd person concept that we are building.

Here is a picture of the star

thanks again for feedback!

 

no problem, id gladly bughunt in the new game too.

hmm.. a mouse... im thinking playing around with toy planes, cars and boats and stuff =P that could if done right be awsome =D

 

I'd be curious to hear what, specifically, are the "ground up" mistakes you will avoid next time, so I and others don't make them ourselves!

 

other lessons learned:

With careful subdivision techniques, you can have nice big landscape meshes with much lower poly counts.

Use sounds which have good quality but affective compression. I had uses a bunch of ambient loops from an ancient sound f/xlibrary I had which were huge files. this seems to add a lot to the start up time.

Use light cookies

Import meshes at the proper scale to avoid the annoying fall-through-the landscape-mesh issue that is so frustrating in that level

Import the entire project folder into the meshes folder from cinema4d. This took away the headaches of lost textures that I seemed to run into...

bake textures in C4d with only a one pixel border to avoid that black border.

Note: the "feature" in that test level where you appeared at the top of the tower when you fell through the underwater plain was intentional. this allowed me to wander the island, scouting for places to put things and then zip back to the tower by jumping in the ocean. Also, when I fell through the mesh, I would not have to restart the game... as soon as I hit the underwater plane I would zip back to the tower...

there were all kinds of lessons learned. It was fun.the next project will be polished and playable...

thanks again for taking the time to have a look!

 

Yes, great job and thanks for the tips.

What did you make your animations in? I particularly like the map fold-out.

 

Animations (just rough tests) were all done in Cinema4d.

 

Great! Reminds of realMYST a little, in a good way. Only not so dead and lifeless as Myst! The laughing people frighten me.

(Any chance of a demo with the mouse speed cut to maybe 1/5 of what it is? It's so fast I can't make it across thin bridges or get into doorways without multiple tries.)

 

very cool dude i like it



you should do a tutorial

 

Guys I am new to this and I am looking for some script to go up a ladders, any suggestions
Thank you

 

what we did for this little test is just set the angle of climb to fairly steep and the character controller just climbs. Beyond that I don't know. This technique makes the character travel too fast up ladders, but they do go up them.

However, in our current game we will have proper ladder climbing so I'll keep you posted.

 

Thank you for the info, will try that but keep me in mind whe you get the other code.
Thank you again