Hey!
I’ve been getting to grips with Unity and developing a prototype of my game over the past 6 months and finally feel like things are going in the right direction. I’d like to keep some sort of diary on the development and figured I can share some of my methods and get some critique from you guys as I go :). I won’t bore you with details about the game - just yet. The title should tell you enough
I’ve got a bit of a backlog of work, so I’ll be starting with one of the first elements I worked on for the game. The Ocean. I decided to render the ocean client side - based directly off the camera’s frustum. This was a little more involved than I expected - but Unity performed really well at this.
Advantages
Unlimited Ocean Size (to floating point atleast).
Scalable tessellation for lower spec machines.
Dynamic spacing of quads dependent on viewing angle.
Disadvantages
Quite expensive - all verts have to be iterated on every frame to move with the camera. Even with caching this isn’t good for mobiles.
Complex shader - to save on performance I have the shader calculate the normals/ tangents, again this is quite expensive and quite hard to work with (for me atleast).
At certain angles waves will run awkwardly along edges - causing triangle waves
I know there’s many ways to approach this - and I’m not too sure if this ended up working out the best. I’ll be updating next with the shader work I have done.
Thanks!
So here’s the next part. The ocean shader. I’m not finished with this one - but for the time being it has a few of the elements i need (skybox reflection, animated waves, foam, boat reflections).
You can see some of the issues I spoke of at the end of the video. Should be interested to solve them. You can also see I’ve started on some simple buoyancy.
this looks quite promising. Not a lot of good naval combat games out there I really like how the shaders look. Let me know if you need a hand with naval sound effects. In the meantime, bookmarked.
Thanks SuperSlonik - I’ll keep you in mind
Had a little fun playing around with different ways of rendering all the rigging that’s going to be on all the ships. I want something quite dynamic that can have a lot of nice reactions to the sails changing direction/ weather and damage.
This uses really simple pendulum physics and unity’s line rendering. Should be able to have around a hundred of these on the ship without an issue
Hey!
Realized I really ought you update this thread more often! Over the past few weeks I’ve been finishing off a lot of the networking and general game flow - unfortunately none of this is easy to show off (yet). So here is some little bits to tie you over
Implementation of a 3D Menu. We have something quite exciting in mind for the menu - so getting a fully functioning 3D menu that has all the functionality of the Unity GUI was important. I’ve done a first pass on this over the past few days and can’t wait to see it with some art.
And here is the first look at the medium class ship in Brine. I haven’t started texturing yet - but the hull is almost complete and ready to test ingame.
