Games [WIP] Open World Forest Game

I hope to get something ready for feedback Friday. Thanks

 

I'm happy that you found some inspiration from my project but there is a few things to keep in mind:

It may appear that I did a lot of art first, but there is a few considerations:

1. I knew that regardless of the gameplay factors, the art in my game would always be the same (because it's a simulation, the design will not change dramatically)

2. My main role, beyond designer, is artist. So while contracted programmer is taking care of his work, I am doing art. I try to do my art iteratively, which means much of my initial work is only done to figure out workflow and performance needs.

3. Not my first game + I am working with contractor who has many shipped titles under his belt. Even still, doing an open world is a lot of work for only two people. And our game only has player decisions to make. There is no AI or gameplay beyond walking and using a few interactive tools. A soon as you introduce animations and AI, your work is multiplied by a thousand.

4. I am a subject matter expert in land navigation. I don't have to figure out the design of the game, only how to translate it to 3d. Sticking to what you know makes the job much easier.

5. Getting a realistic forest to run with good performance requires a lot of knowledge on the artist part. Additionally, doing the work of optimization requires tons of manual labor. There is no way around it - you will have to rebuild your models many times to find the right balance between aesthetics and performance. If you are a stickler for things looking perfect, you'll never finish. Got to be able to compromise.

That's not to discourage, but give a better picture of how much work you are creating for yourself.

 

I can’t tell if you are deliberately not using Chernobyl in your name, or if it’s just a typo, given the theme.

 

@unit_dev123 1st off your using HDRP. the rules are different from the built in renderer, as i hope you know. As far as any "open world" senario, youll need a way to split up terrain into "chunks" and stream it. I recommend SECTR by procedural worlds, or something like it. Meaning it will load chunks of the terrain as the player moves around, and not load the complete scene at one time. And Occlusion Culling makes a huge difference, as well as other "tweaks" .

Be careful what assets you use, as you mentioned a hdrp water shader (https://github.com/flamacore/UnityHDRPSimpleWater), as not all water shaders (for HDRP) are very performant, you should look around, there are better available.

With HDRP everything you do, or add, can make or break performance. Make a back-up of the project, set up a test server, and cover-your-ass.

Oh, and the 3rd person controller, stop messin around and get Ultimate UFPS 3rd person controller, will save you a boat-load of time. Remember, your HDRP, and 1st person controllers dont work with HDRP, as they require more than 1 camera, and with HDRP, DO NOT use more than 1 camera, it KILLS performance, big time.

 

Looking good!

 

Its not a script but a wind shader. In that video all he did was take a wind shader from a demo package and used it, as writing your own shader would take a bit of time. I bought a few wind shaders (HDRP compat), and tested them to find the best performant one. The: HDRP Nature / Foliage, won. Very performant, and good options. Not to mention, its only $10 on the store