Unity Demo: Hex

Hi all,

I've only been using Unity for a few weeks but I'm really pleased with how fast things have come together. I've been very impressed with how fast demos can be constructed. I've been quite motivated to get something to show on the forum so here's some images and a vid cap from my first milestone "Look and Feel".

The project has a working title "Hex". It's primarily a test for tech and capabilities, and a learning exercise for me. The game is based on the Mario 64 third person style camera and I have in mind a style of art with colourful, stylised, low poly models. The gameplay will be fantastical, whimsical, non-violent platform puzzles and with a strong magical theme. Most importantly, the game should be fun to make and play. I'm working solo on this to see how much content I can crank out.

I'm also testing out Lightwave as a content tool as that's what I use at work. So far so good.

Here's a quick sample video (DivX) and Quicktime

 

The screenshots sure look nice for a few weeks of unity.

I can't see divx movies from where I am right now but will look at it tonight.

 

Really nice work for a few weeks, gotta get a web player version up soon . Gives me new inspiration as I'm going solo on my project as well. Hope to see more

take care,

~t

 

Yeah, please post this as webplayer so we can drool...

Always nice to see such things in real action.

I don't care if your webplayer could be a little big. Its just a fact of downloading a little longer

 

Wow, looks cool. You're main character is freakin me out though.

 

Nice work, I too cannot wait to see how this turns out... Keep us posted! 8)

 

Proto ... simply fantastic! Keep us all posted.

 

excellent work - especially for just a few weeks - have you moved to unity from a different engine?

welcome ; )

 

Yup that's right Dr Jones, I've been working on this project for a few months in Torque but I've mostly focussed on building the art assets during that time, hence the switch to Unity wasn't a major knock-back. Thanks for the comments all

As for the web player, it's still pretty small (4Mb) but I have some undeveloped areas that need plenty of work before I post an interactive version.

 

Gogogo, I'd like to run around in this environment.
Great stuff

 

I would try to enhance your character as it's the one you'll be watching all the time.

 

Hi all,

Not sure if anyone follows up on old posts or not, but I've uploaded the web player in order to gather feedback. The critique is very helpful, thanks all. Also big thanks to the IRC regulars, you're input has been greatly appreciated.

http://www.particledecay.com/HalloweenDemo2

Proto.

 

Very nice, congratulations. I only miss a better camera (with collision detection) and movement controls (I like better to use A and D for rotating the model and W to walk in the direction the model is facing to).

 

That's really impressive. The moon, clouds, rain and lightning were all very well done.
I was getting around 50 fps outside and upper 30s inside. Safari 2.0.4. 2 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo iMac.
Get up the good work. Hope this progresses right along for you!

 

Hey Proto....what are you using for your screen capture?

 

The jumping is rather awkward. In order to get on top of the bed, I had to jump off of the box and sort of float around off of other objects in order to get high enough. It was really hit and miss and made precise navigation difficult.

For cramped interior areas like the house, you might want to consider a different camera system. Right now, it's disorienting having the viewpoint constantly moving around. My suggestion would be to try a static camera position when entering a room which pans and tilts to follow the character, but its pivot stays in the same place, offering the optimal viewpoint for each area. In Beyond Good and Evil, they did this in smaller rooms and it really makes a huge difference.

You've got a really strong start so far and I'm excited to see where this goes. Keep us updated!

 

Thanks for the feedback. Defmech, Gusm - I've attempted some remedial mods to the camera system which is now set to follow with a manual override (meaning W is now "forward"). I found even these simple mods to be a challenge as I'm not yet comfortable with transforms, so I may have to stick with this system and attempt to patch up any problems as they become apparent.

The follow camera has shown up another problem that I need to figure out - the player gets culled when the camera is in a tight spot and it's not pretty.

wadamw, I used a Wiki script for screen cap, it can be found here:
http://www.unifycommunity.com/wiki/index.php?title=ScreenShotMovie.
I put it together with Apple QuicktimePro and Motion (and DivX Pro).

yangmeng, thanks The Wiki grass and the Nature pack were of great help in putting the environment together. I'm eagerly awaiting Unity version 2 as I'm hoping there'll be a whole new bag of tricks to play with.

 

Good graphics but how many polys are you using in the first room?
I get 3 fps in my work pc, p4 win2000 geforcefx5200.

 

I got one of these. I had this not long ago with that watch out for trucks sim.

AC

 

Unity has an IRC??? Boy I had no idea... found it.

Your game looks nice Proto, hadn't had time to mess around more than a minute but I like the looks. The camera lock system works fine too, that's neat!

2 cents of grammar: the grimoire should read "your mind is empty" (as in "your input has been greatly appreciated" ).

 

Thanks benblo, I snuck that fix in. It'll be one of many typos I'm sure.

Hmm sounds like a cache error Targos, try a forced refresh reload.

Lka - wow that's a very low framerate. I'm not too worried at this stage as there's "plenty of room for optimisation" (i.e. I haven't done much testing yet). Thanks for the warning.

As I am setting my own tech target for this project, I'm planning to test performance on OS/hardware/software purchased within the last 5 years. That's not to say that I won't try to accommodate as wide a range of users as I can, and to that end I'll probably end up with two versions in order to take advantage of the creative opportunities newer setups offer. At the moment that would probably involve building two players using different project settings, but I've also been placing the more "expensive" effects and meshes on their own layer as I build levels, so that I can kill non-essential eye candy if I really need to.

I'm getting around 15-30 (inside) and 40+ (outside) on my 2.5Ghz G5 Tower with an ATI 7500 (edit) 9600 (Safari), and similar on a Pentium2 3.2Ghz with a GeForce7800 running XP (Firefox). I'll be able to test on a few more systems in the next few weeks, and along with feedback like this I hope to have a good sample of new, new-ish and older configs.

 

I doubt it; can you even run a 7500 on a G5? I'm getting about that, with the same machine with an X800, so I expect that's what you have. I suspect the house would benefit a lot from portal culling, so you only draw the room you're in at the time instead of the whole house.

--Eric

 

Web players are limited when it comes to FPS. So if his card can handle that FPS and that is near the limit that OTEE set then your card even though it could handle much higher FPS is beeing limated to the range his card can handle. -Jeff

 

Yup, framerate is limited when playing in the browser. It's just not a limit that we set, but something the browsers impose. Fortunately it's pretty fast, so your game doesn't go overly choppy because of it.

To avoid this limitation, go to full-screen mode and see what you get.

Also note that it's not that performance is being lost, so this won't limit how complex the game can be.

d.

 

I know that; I was running full-screen. If an X800 is getting 15-30fps, then a 7500 (very old card) would probably get about 1.

--Eric

 

Ooops yes that's an error - it's a 9600, not a 7500.

I think I may still have a 7500 somewhere in a big box of retired technology that I couldn't bear to part with.