WolfQuest demo live

We are giddy with pleasure (and sleep deprivation) to announce the release of a public demo of WolfQuest.

http://www.wolfquest.org/demos/index.html

The main WQ site is pretty pounded right now, so we also have a pair of alternate download links:

http://www.eduweb-labs.net/wolfquest/WolfQuest_Mac.zip

http://www.eduweb-labs.net/wolfquest/WolfQuest_windows.zip

I want to specifically thank Russ Lunsford (Lurid), Garen Rees, Lucas Goss, Sam Kalman, Joachim, and Ray Nothnagel (StarManta) for the incredible contributions they made to this project.

Cheers,
Steve

 

hey congrats doc! downloading now ; )

 

Wooooo!

Grabbing now, will check it out tomorrow!

 

Awesome guys! I was really impressed with your presentation at the Unite conference and I'll download this tomorrow morning when I get into the office. Looking forward to studying your terrain artistry in depth since it's something I've been neck deep in since finishing the island demo and diving into the next project I'm currently contributing to.

Congrats on this milestone!

Ethan

 

Nice! Downloading as I type this...


Edit: ok, so I gave it my first few minutes test drive, ate a few rabbits and my initial response was that the camera controls felt a bit too jerky. Notably I'd be running after a rabbit and the lil' bugger would break right (or left). So I'd follow him running to the camera's right but instead of the camera automatically staying behind me I have to keep pressing S while also holding down W to run. When I did that the camera would get quite jerky in its motion... Not too unsettling but something I thought I'd mention. The terrain space looks great and overall it has a nice polished feel to it. I'll give it some more time later. Thanks for posting it for us all to see!

 

i still need to get some more free time to play it thoroughly but so far i'll basically echo what higgy mentioned - the camera should be alot smoother easier to control.

the terrain + skybox you got set up gives a great feel of sweeping open space even in a smaller screen window - very well done ; )

 

finally had some time played for quite a while.

what i liked:

- the hunting system. very fun realistic - taking down larger prey especially, it felt like i was in the nature channel ; ) i didn't bother with the rabbits but took out some coyotes here there as well.

- the wolf - wolf interaction, had some cool non-violent encounters.

- the scent view is a nice touch (though it didn't seem to help me that much)

- the music is great - very 'deadwood'.

what i disliked:

- the wolf control camera, it is very frustrating. you can get somewhat more comfortable with it the more you play but IMO its just too non-standard jerky. to me a vehicle like contol (wasd / arrows for all movement a smooth follow camera) with a mouse based focus icon would be much more practical. it would be cool if you could get the head turning to look at where the icon is as well.

- the compass / mission icons:

- IMO there should be at least a simple indicator of the distance to various targets. maybe a target far away could be dark grey a target very close could be white like you have it now. you can go for ever before you run across something, which is fine realistic, but i kept thinking maybe that wolf to the east might be just over the ridge ; )

- there's a disconnect between when you get within range (when the white compass icon turns off) and when you can see your target. this can lead to you wandering in and out of a target area trying to figure out where the prey is (once i spent 15 minutes trying everything i could to find a wolf that just was not there).

overall i like it so far, the realism sense of place are fantastic, but the usability issues kept taking me out of the moment.

; )

 

I love it! There's so much more wolf behavior I'd like to see in a future version, but especially "crouching". Stealth is an important weapon in a wolves' hunting skills and it would seem more life-like if you were to add this.

Hope to see this in every school in the country!

 

Very nice game. Soundtrack fits perfectly and animal animations look great.

One bug i did find was if you howled and then started walking, the wolf would glide across the terrain.

 

I didn't have any problems with the camera being jerky; it's a somewhat unusual control method but I think it works. It ran pretty smooth on my G5, but sometimes just barely...for some reason the fps was generally less than half of what I get in the island demo even though the density is much less. Is it because of the huge terrain?

Speaking of huge terrains, I'd agree with some sort of distance indicator, and also the disconnect that drJones mentioned was kind of a problem. It seemed like your target (whatever it might be) doesn't appear until you're almost on top of it. These things can lead to a lot of running around without anything happening, which might be realistic but eventually gets somewhat boring. I also had a problem with a wolf encounter where "run away" didn't do anything, and then the other wolf got kind of mean. Although I was eventually able to get out of it by choosing some other options. And finally, in some cases at the default view distance from the wolf, the camera can be below the terrain, which naturally doesn't look so good. (See attached pic.)

But overall, despite those criticisms, very nicely done and it definitely stands out as something you don't usually get to do with computer games.

--Eric

 

Nice! Great to see it up Steve!... looks great... I played it for a bit ... ate a few Elk... very cool!

-Vince

 

nice game - beside all this shooters and racers

when i switch the window/screen_resolution to 640x480, 800x500, i cannot hit "done" in the setupmenu

 

Congratulations, Doc! Beautiful stuff. The animations, environments and GUIs are top-notch. I think I'd agree that a more traditional third-person camera control might be clearer - I tended to follow the arrow instead of using it to navigate. The arrow divides your focus, and doesn't add much. Now, if you were able to click on point on the terrain and go to there automatically...

A distance cue in the compass would be nice, but even better would be a top-down map overlay, with colored, moving dots. Although I guess real wolves don't have that.

I got stuck in a few places, and the camera does go below the terrain sometimes. I've had this problem in my third person bits, perhaps a raycast distance and Y adjustment script on the camera?

Best of luck with this project - you're preparing the way for a million Unity environmental sims to come...

 

Thank you very much!

The minimum usable screen size is 800x600. We haven't tried to restrict the resolutions below that.

 

G'day,

I like the idea of the game, but even under "fastest" settings this thing is SLOOOOW. It's so slow that I can't bear to struggle through it. Everything is fine until I encounter a group of Elk or a rabbit, and then everything freezes until I get the Elk out of view. When I hit spacebar I jump and BANG ... it jerks in a big way. Very disappointed ...

I've never had a game under-perform before ... maybe the "new" Unity games ( from Unity 2.0 ) are going to render my once comfortable imac useless ?

24" Intel Core 2 Duo / 2 Gig RAM / GeForce 7600 GT

JW.

 

Your computer certainly should be good enough, so I'm not sure what the problem is. What resolution are you trying to run at? Try knocking it down to 1024x768.

 

Yeh Doc, it doesn't matter what I do, this game is just bogging down. I've had numerous games perform beautifully but Wolf Quest is on the other end of the scale. It's a shame because I wanted to play it. For the life of me can't kill an Elk ... even if I seperate one from the pack, because it gets too jumpy to understand whats going on ... when I finally stop I'm quite a ways past the Elk I'm hunting. Very annoying

As Homer would say ... Doh!

JW.

 

Out of curiosity, are you changing the stat bonuses at the start? We haven't properly tuned them, so if you chose to be a "fast" wolf, you may have unpredictable results.

 

Hey Doc,

no ... not changing anything within Wolf Quest, just small player size with "fastest" setting.

JW

 

Congratulations! Looks superb.

 

I'm not 100% certain about this, but it seems that when you jump, it replenishes your fatigue... which is odd since jumping should moves you faster than running and it should be more tiring.

 

Everyone, thank you all for your notes.

I want to let you know that since we have now had over 15,000 downloads of the demo, we've gotten a pretty exhaustive list of problem reports. The kids have been banging on it very hard and have found a lot of stuff.

We may be asking for some targeted testing of specific features on specific hardware, just to get some more practiced eyes on those issues.

But you don't have to feel like you have to report any glitches here. We've probably heard about it already.

Thanks again for your support and interest.

Best,
Steve