VoxelIsland - Tilebased Minecraft-Like RTS game.

I fixed all the bugs i wasn't able to fix yesterday. One was with changing cameraposition while in taxticalmode. The other one was an annoying voice bug. Also some sound bug with wrong PlayerPref savings for sound/music volume.

- I added an introscreen with some sounds i also used in Don't Trust Henry.
- I added a Game Over screen. So its possible now to lose if all 3 mainbases are destroyed!
- Pressing the F key is switching al dynamic lights on/off. With dynamic Lights disabled i get up to +15 FPS which is pretty cool while stress testing with around 2.5M Polygones.
Im positively surprised how well Unity manages large Polygone counts. Even better then 3ds MAX!


Oh and greetings from my voice-actress. She made a new voice-recording and 2 different voices are work in progress.

Instead of gifs/pictures i have some sound files for you. =D

http://www.file-upload.net/download-7782908/BuildStorages.wav.html
http://www.file-upload.net/download-7782909/EnegyLevel02.wav.html

What do you think?

 

OOOOH yes, Unitys culling and rendering performance is hardcore.
I also was positively suprised when I found out that I dont have to take care of it at all. Unity rocks !

well, to be honest I think the voice acting sounds a bit unsecure and has some sort of funny dialect to it... its decent. (am I to harsh ?)
nice style though ! fits the mood perfectly !

 

At the start of this, I was expecting just another voxel game like the rest and never read through the thread, but today I did... and I have to say I'm glad I took a look! Your game looks very fun and has a unique twist on the voxel world. You're cutting no corners in this game, and it shows. Your art style is great, and the simplicity really compliments it well. I'm tuned into this game development now, I can't wait to see the finished product!

 

@rbx775: Hah, yes. She is not a professional voice actress and its her first game project, so i guess no wonder to be a bit insecure for the first time. But i think its pretty nice fitting, as well. But i think shes doing her job pretty well. Shes just loves videogames and making stuff for games too. Im haveing a pretty heavy dialect as well if you would hear me talking.

@xKroniK13x: Thank you very much im honored to hear that.


Gameupdates for today:
-Im actually working on better performance. writing a script which maskes invisible chunks to get much more performance and bigger-scale worlds to explore.
-Im also working on an upgrade script. Which is for upgrading buildings. Im thinking of at least 3. levels to upgrade for much of the buildings. Every Upgraded buildings hase different meshes so there is some new modeling-work for me.
-Im also overhauling the meshes of some older buildings. I want them to be more in the artstyle of the Battery and the Storage. Which means there will be no big change in the models. Just some minor tweaks to keep it in a fitting artstyle. Also some cleaning and mesh-optimizing.

cheers!

 

Hey man,

Im following this from your first post off, and I want you to tell I really like your game (type and style)
I have played minecraft for a year active, 3 years ago, + I love RTS games, take C&C Generals Zero Hour, my favorite game (10 years old, who cares) its a fun game... So in fact, this game is a perfect match between those two... I first thought I understood how the gameplay would be, but by the time when u posted more I started to doubt about that when I saw features like tactical view and stuff I was (and still am) confused...

What is that tactical view for?? Just a handy top-down viewer??? Or does it give ... anything special (that's what I think)?
I mean, I like to make an airport where I can build airplanes, select them (in both views), and say: "Hey, here is the enemy base, bomb it!"

And there we go... My bombers totally destroyed your freakin base.

Or am I thinking really wrong??? Is this game a Sim City game? I really don't know :S

 

Can you make a vid of al the buildings and how you build them

 

Sorry for slight late response, thanks for your interest. Game is looking great and I love the different modes and cameras that are used for war and building. Its very clean and neat. :]

 

Any chance this game will be online? I was telling a few of my friends about it and they liked the concept a lot, it'd be really cool to be able to combat over the internet with them - sorta like a voxel command and conquer.

 

I just realized that you have GIFS in the Unity Forums. No, I mean GIFS in the UNITY FORUMS. How did you manage that, I thought they were not supported?

EDIT:

I think I figured it out. Somehow if the file is able to be opened with windows media player, if can be imported. Interesting.

 

You....Just upload a GIF file? Just directly to your post even..... I do it too ever since I saw this thread.

I cannot wait to try this game!

 

Indeed. The ideas simply come pouring out of this thread don't they?

 

Hello folks! First off, im very sorry for the long break between the last Update. Got some heavy university stuff to do! But its over now and i got much more time for the project, now. . And there are some other really great news.




I reworked some of the buildings, to ready them up for the new Upgrade-Feature. First is the Industry-complex. So there are 3 tiers of industry buildings. The lowest is the left building. It is pretty cheap and has a bit bigger energy/production-ratio compared to the high-tier buildings. The others am pretty expensive but will provide a really big ressource boost and a nice energy-performance. The biggest problem with the High-Tier buildings is, its actualle pretty nasty if a bomb drops on them. So better safe them with defenses.

As you can see. I added some debug stuff, too. Getting average, lowest and highest FPS-Counters is pretty neat for a game like that.

Im also reworking the GUI. The Building-Icons will soon be changed to rendered Building-icons. I also want the gui to, reveal more building info in the future. Which leads to some nice 3d Text popping out of the ground. Which i will show you in one of the next updates. Tommorow you will get a little gif which shows you how Upgrading works!

Im actually working on adding all the features to the game needed for a gameplay video. Im really thinking about a kickstarter/indiegogo campaign for that project so an ingame Video is neaded. But i dont want to push to much in that direction, before i get the important stuff done. Sadly, i can only show you gifs of gameplay at that moment.

Thank you very much xKroniK13x. I really glad you and your friend like the project so far. Sorry for late responding again! And for your question:
I really want that game to be a multiplayer experience. So yes it is planned!

@ Herjan: Thank you very much. Im glad to see some other C&C-fans around here. And i can understand the tactical view is a bit irritating, so far. But don't get to confused about it. Just let me explain it to you.

There are different factions battling on islands, in voxelisland. So, the naturl borders seperates the factions from each other. War between other factions will be, per missiles and landing crafts filled with troops. So in future, tactical-view is for attacking the enemy. Selecting Targets and watch your unitys/Missiles Hit the target. You are watching the combat and can see if your tactic is working. Think of a mix of dungeon keeper and battleships. There are limited posibilities to interact with your troops after they are send to the enemy territory, but it will add a lot of realism to the combat.
But i guess this discussion will lead to a lot of other questions about combat. I propose, you should totally try "Metal Marines" on the super Nintendo... im a huge fan of that oldschool game and the way the combat works in that game.

 

I hate to rain on your parade, but it seems that the Voxel terrain isnt written by you at all, except place holders and buildings, the voxel is taken from a minecraft unity3d game ( which is open source ). I think heading over to your "own" terrain is better.

Also id like to see save and load features

 

Where did you find the evidence of this?

 

Looks good! Actually, like some others I thought that the detailed buildings and low poly terrain clashed a bit at first, but the cube-y particle effects really help to root them in the game world.

Keep it up!

 

I can understand that some of the features are looking like some other Voxel-engines around. They are basically looking all the same, anyway. And yes there were some terraine features in the beginning of the project who were-Open-source. But on the other hand, its not fair to reduce my work to placeholders and buildings. The raycasting stuff for buildings, the sperical build and bomb stuff. The GUIs,all the building-stuff, The Voice-Manager, Camera-movement, shaders and tactical view, and a lot of terrain-generation is all written by me and thousands of code-lines long. Please show me Voxelengines with all that stuff first! Its like saying someone using unity3d and not creating his own gameengine. And again, everything i wrote as an update in this thread is Made by me.

But to keep it clear i will add a Link to the open source stuff i was using in the beginning of the project, on the front page, to prevent further misunderstanding.

Cheers!

 

I remade some stuff for the building script again. The plane is showing the size of the building. Its also planned, that the plane is showing you the reason why you cant build in that position. For example: X = no good terrain, HammerIcon = not enough ressources, ThunderIcon = Not enough Energy.




Cheers!

 

Yay! Update!

Glad to see your continuation. How are you going to do building damage?

 

Hey! Nice to see you again,too =)

Every building will be destroyed by one rocket hit. So you can say. Everything that changes the environment, destroyes the buildings as well.

Cheers.

 

Sounds interesting, ever thought of building ground supports to prevent terrain destruction?

Anyway, seem this yet? The style kind I reminds me of your game I a cartoonish kind in way. Still loving those particles

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/659943965/planetary-annihilation-a-next-generation-rts

 

I was thinking about stoneblocks that could take 2 ore more hits....but this will lead to some other problems in world gen because you can simply dig around them and will have floating buildings. Currently the buildings are checking if there are blocks underneath. (same like the enableBuild() function)
If not the Gameobjects are destroyed.


edit:Another idea was to add shieldgenerators which will draw large voxel spheres in game. (But this is just an idea)


Sure i know about planetary anihilation. I Love that game so much. Since its the spiritual succesor of total annihilation its no wonder that it has its analogy. =)

 

I was looking through minecraft clones on youtube a few months ago, to get mine started ( i was bored ), and i found it, but although the atlas texture is really really cool, looking neato Lewnatic, make sure you add building that can rotated ( q, and r buttons ? )

 

its fine, just give credit, and if the game is commercial, make sure you ask MrWishmaster ( from youtube ) appropriate permmisions. i also love the art style! amazing work, make sure theres a "point to the game", like add residential buildings, so that your isle can grow ( eventually some builders will be hired to expand land )

 

Interface Update:

I remade parts of the GUI today. Building batteries and Storages increases the caps, destroying the storages and batteries decreases the caps again, which is working nicely so far. I made a small graphic for you to show how the GUI works ingame.

 

Nice, very clean. Like how this is going (the "-" in the energy section gives me a really good feeling).

 

I think you've got a confused design style in place. In that I can see the concept and the thinking behind your approach and dig it, it's just your design aesthetics is distracting away from the goal. Here's my design critic and keep in mind this is just constructive feedback and i'm not an expert of any kind.

- Settle on scale. The terrain cubes have steep / high cliffs consider matching the building with the terrain or come up with props to convince the end user into believing in the miniature RTS camera view you're going for. Either increase the building sizes more or break the terrain down by another 2-resolutions (ie subdivide the cubes twice) and then you'd be home free.

- Qubicle is your friend. The building designs are great but if you're going for a cubic look then maybe redesigning or importing them into Qubicle to voxelize them would be great aswell? ... that or google "Low Poly Paper" and apply that design style but come up with a way to make the two blend together without the current jarring style. I absolutely love low poly look and its extremely easy to do outside of Unity3d in any 3D design tool (cinema4d is easiest given its displacer / reduction adds).

- Colouring - i'd recommend you add some minor coloured decals to the buildings in that if you're going for pure white (for test ignore) then adding some minor decals to it could make them pop more as again these represent symbols in your design. The human mind can over time formulate an association to symbols over a long period but the initial learning curve (cognitive dissonance - incentive vs behaviour) can be your pain point here so give them more to lock onto as a pattern to which represents each building.

That being said, i hope you take this in the spirit it was meant (encouragement) and continue to push on with the game. "You never fail until you stop trying" keep going.

 

First off. Thank you very much, for taking so much time to comment on this project. I will try to take the same amount of time to give you a proper answer to your feedback and try to explain you my design toughs about voxelIsland, which are not written in this thread, yet. Im really loving constructive feedback. So thank you a lot for that!

I must agree to your statement here. Sadly there is one main aspect of the game which is not implemented yet. Its a very fundamental part of the game which will smooth the design a lot more. To be honest. I'm not planning to make a game which looks like exactly like minecraft, and i really want to get rid of a to blocky design. The main feature to reach that goal is the ramp like in the lil screenshots here.


Reaching this goal will also lead to the feature of adding ground units and ground combat which also isn't implemented yet.
Another critical point are the trees, which are really big and a part of the cubic-world engine im using. Its actually not a big point deleting them and change them with crossed planes which are just 1x1-Block size, which will fit much better into the game. But it would lead to some other aspects which need to be implemented first, like woods and forest code to create large numbers of trees in a natural way. I just hesitate to go over to the tree part, when im not fully working on that stuff. Because my current working shedule priority is Interface and performance.

Like said above. I dont want to go to much in the blocky look. But thanks for Qubicle. This tool looks pretty nice. I was already trying some voxelizer plugins for 3ds MAX and Blender. They are nice too and can create voxelmeshes out of normal meshes. The "Low Poly Paper" reminds me a lot of /po/

Yeah. In fact something like decals are added for the different factions, but its more like color-shemes. like in this example picture!

I want to keep it clear and compatible. Which is in a ironic context to the story of the game. (But i dont want to spoil to much, yet.)
Also the particle clouds will change in the future to a more related color.
Like Industry buildings = orange Clouds. energy buildings = Green. Warfare = Black, espionage = purple. etc.
Im also a big fan of minimalistic graphic whit lightly desaturated and clear color shemes.

And again, thank you very much for writing all this in this thread! I appreciate your feedback and kind words!

 

Awesome no further comments from me as now I see where you are going and present you with both thumbs up... I look forward to seeing where this project lands!

 

Townhalls, and people? This is looking like a competition between Zynga and EA (SimCity vs CityVille)

 

Cool, I assume that every team / player can choose his color? Like in C&C
Color is indeed cricking it up Its still very white, but its not done yet (I suppose).

 

The best thing would be, to add a color circle.

 

I definitely dont want to add towns and people. No Facebook plugin either. And i will never forgive EA for what they did to bioware, bullfrog and westwood.

 

Lol, otherwise your game was already sucked up

 

alright then, so whats the point of the game, rule the island?

 

Update - Performance


Im currently trying Unity pro, to fix some performance issues. Got some nice workarounds for engine functions i upgraded for better performance. In pros profiler you can clearly see the peaks for rendering the chunks. A loading-screen with a limited Island Size will fix the peaks in future.

cheers!

 

Niiiiiice. I suppose the scripts part is the voxel generation? Seems to really beat up your CPU.

 

The stuff fixed is related to the position of the Cursor on the Voxel-Terrain and raycasting. The stuff which needs to be fixed with the map size is related to chunk-processing(The peaks in the screenshot). I let the feature of an endless world-generation in the sand-box mode of the game, even after release. I want to give the players as much options as possible. But i will mark it with a warning sign...because you will get around 2.5Million polygones on screen (without buildings!) if you zoom out to max and around 20 fps (which is still okay i guess) on a mid-class PC. Its nice for stress-testing, though.

 

Yeesh, that could be pretty intensive (I am scarred from optimizing problems you see). Thats interesting, I didn't know raycasting used that much memory, I would have assumed it would be chunk updates.

2.5 Million? Terrain only? Woweewowwow. Thats going to be awesome. What are the draw calls like? Does lighting present a problem? Sorry about the questions, I'm just an ametear trying to pry secrets from a pro.

Thanks for replying, its really nice to have someone take time out of their busy day to reply on a forum.

 

Raycasting is not using much memory. Its using CPU, and even more if you use it for chunk generating! Polygones use a lot of GPU for examplet.Draw calls can be pretty high if you zoom out.. Around 50-10000! max(thats the reason why VoxelIsland won't run on iphone. ). But you can get them to a nice 1500 if zoom half way in.

And you are welcome! Im not pro... still a random guy trying to learn stuff!

 

That sucks... Only 10.000... You have to make sure you only render the VISIBLE blocks, not the invisible blocks under the visible blocks... Or you must zoom very very much out, but you have to make a zoom out limit ofcourse... Or there is something wrong with your code, when I have something around 10k blocks on my screen in Minecraft I have still 200+ fps...

Thats called: Well written (and Java <3 )
I don't say Unity is bad, but Java is better! heheh

 

Update - Gamemodes


Not much for today. But i added a button to changes world sizes in sandbox mode. The strings for the world sizes are the following:



Endless: Generates an endless world.
8x8 Chunks = Very Small:
16x16 Chunks = Small:
32x32 Chunks = Mediuml:
64x64 Chunks = Large:
128x128 Chunks = Very Large:
256x256 Chunks = Gigantic:
512x512 Chunks = Epic:

see you guys around!
Cheers!

 

Update - New Resources

I added 3 new resources for upgrading and to create consumable stuff like Rocket fuel. The resources are randomly generated on the map an can easily hauled and stored. Every high-tiered building will need one of those resources. For example the Tier 2 industry factory will need 3x Carbon. The tier 3 industry factory will need additional 5x Carbon. Rocket fuel is created by oil and is consumed every time you attack enemies with rockets. Rockets can be upgraded as well, and in lategame its possible to mount rockets with nuclear warheads.


Click link for full view

 

Niiice, resources !
This is getting more and more interesting every update.

I guess you can also destroy resources with long range attacks if you cant reach them, or am I mistaken ?
(to deny it... Would be definately mean )

 

Exactly! So you better be fast collecting them. Or build missile defenses near your tactical resources. Oh and, every building upgrade is optional. So you can still win the game if your tactical resources are getting hit by enemy missiles.

 

Update - Virtual Reality and Engine Updates

Hello guys. Im currently working heavily on improving the engine, and adding new features. On of the features is enabling the AA on high settings. Which had some minor but noticeable graphical glitches.

Im also adding 3 new buildings.
And having my first VoxelIsland tests with the oculus Rift.



Cheers!

 

Looking Great Man

 

I wish water worked that way in minecraft lol. It can get annoying with the different levels.

 

Update - Oculus Rift

Its really amazing to fly around your game with the oculus Rift.
For occulus support i need to change the Unity GUI to a 3D GUI, though. This will take some days.


@Lancer: Thank you very much!

@jessee03: Oh! I wasnt aware, that minecraft doesn't have that feature. lol. Nice to hear that you like it!

 

Very cool. Create a kickstarter, i guarantee you'll have instant success. Seems the world loves Voxile gaming.

Best,

Jon

 

Update - AA-Bugfix

Antialiasing finally works without bugs. There was a problem with the shader. But only if AA is activated in unity. In the screenshot you see the bug(white block). Every block has a annoying visual grid drawn on the voxel-surface. Im really happy to finally fix that annoying issue.



click for larger image: