Check out our D.R.O.N.E. game, which is made with Unity! In the coming months we’ll have a demo available…
The comments on the engine reveal are funny, many people simply can’t believe it…
D.R.O.N.E. is a community driven sci-fi multiplayer arena-shooter with focus on creativity. It’s currently in development by Five Studios Interactive. Compete in an ever growing number of community created arenas, with your own unique drone designs, to become the smoothest drone operator in the galaxy.
We kept it a secret for many months and we’ve been asked a thousand times, which game engine we use… We are totally excited what Unity is allowing us to do, both on a technical as well as on a creative level.
The arenas are built with the in-game editor. The footage is recorded in-game with an internal pre-alpha build.
wannabe’s devs… NO excuse, work at it like any one else. Games like this will show more and more its not the engine, its the devs fault if they can’t make a game look good to many wannabe’s or lazy devs want there game to be built for them or to look good out of the box… Devs like NATH, Tom, and Team, will show you it can be done in Unity… If you work hard, and take the time, to learn your skill… you will make a great game. in any engine… I been telling people this for many years… Game development takes time to learn, 3d modeling, shaders, texturing etc.
Congrats Nath, glad to see you guys are hard at work and your game is progressing, I heard many people asking me what engine, and I said YOU WILL SEE…
Is that the speedtree shader that Tom is supposedly working on? Because speedtrees don’t look that good in unity…
And if you drop speedtrees into a scene at that density, your frames drop through the floor, long before you have added a game, even after optimizing them to the point where pop in is ugly. So, how does that work?
Very nice work. Was it tough? What can you talk about that could be improved in Unity that would’ve made your life easier? What parts of Unity functionality did you feel you need to replace and why?
I feel that the game needs a mention for how nice it all is and how fun it seems.
Thanks Recon! I think which engine matters as there can be a limit to what you can achieve simply because the engine doesn’t allow access to it. One reason Unity is awesome is for its expendability: Custom shaders, compute shaders, command buffers, etc…they are taking this to a whole new level with the script able render pipeline.
Yes Tom made custom SpeedTree shaders. The issue with frames drop is that each speedtree has a seperate draw call and Lod group. This taxes the CPU and GPU. However Unity implemented DrawMeshInstancedIndirect where the transforms can be stored in a compute buffer. This reduces bandwidth between CPU and GPU, further instancing reduces draw calls. I recommend to look into Vegetation Studio, it is implementing this: https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/wip-vegetation-studio.479244/
At the moment we still haven’t optimized this and each tree has still it’s own draw call and Lod group. And we are CPU bound by this. We already have very good frame rate on high end and optimizing this will be the next step. Another thing we use is dynamic occlusion culling, currently only on triangle level.
Thanks, well what makes it sometimes tough is not having enough low level access. However Unity is addressing this with the script able render pipeline, which is totally awesome. Also looking forward to the C# job system. We use our own terrain/grass solution which runs on the GPU. CPU doesn’t have to do anything for it to update, etc. Unity is addressing this with a new terrain system they are working on.
agreed, but I see to many people making shit shaders, shit models, shit animations, just trash, and blame the game engine…Steam is full of games, of people saying, UNity!! Not again, it will look terrible, run terrible etc…I see this for years and alot… This is NOT due to the engine, this is due to experience… from the dev team… Unreal will see this more to, since more people are using… I see it already with contract work, people want the game to be made for them, they plug in an asset and the game is made… That is a huge issue, and why Steam , Android has suffered, another reason why Unity has suffered with this kinda of reaction to games being made from Unity… anyways best of luck…be sure to work on that networking, that can make or break the game… to many games, make there games look pretty, and there networking suffers. not saying your game, but I see to many people spend 95% on graphics and UI, networking, game play are after thoughts.
Yes agree, that this is a major issue. I remember that steam Greenlight was a good place to go a few years ago to build a community. But now Steam had to replace Greenlight, because of being flooded with such content. Unity has this issue with the forced splash screen for free version and it can be removed on the pro version…
Yes definitely, gameplay and networking are our first priority. If that’s not good no matter how pretty the game it wouldn’t last long…
So, what does most graphical mean? The screen is saturated with 100% graphics? It has a hard drive footprint to rival Halo MCC? Inquiring minds need to know!
Meaning, some companies, spend 95% on graphics, and forget to worry about game play, networking, this tend to happen, not saying Nath would do it. But it does tend to happen…FF MMORPG, was nearly remade, game was awesome looking, but that was it… The game fell flat, so need a steady balance. But I know Nath, he won’t let that happen. He has a ton of passion for game development. They will be very successful, I have no doubt. He and Tom, are the few I know on his team, they are hard workers, and have a ton of passion, and experience… Having those few things are half the battle and I learned in this industry hard to find hard workers. I have a ton of respect for these guys, and wish you guys all the success. This game should sell like hot cakes on Steam. XB1 PS4, are seeing more games from Steam and doing even better in some regards, something to consider in the future.
PS: The videos are looking better and better since we first seen them they where great then, but even better now, keep up the great work. Did you decide on an KickStarter yet ? how many followers your looking for? I would consider a forum to, since its multi-Player, atleast later on. This helps keeps your community together anyways… and keeps them hyped and talking…
I am in awe, well done Nathaniel and Team! You are are leading the way. Do you use any of your awesome assets The quality and performance seem out of this world. You should make how to’s and offer / sell those so all Unity developers can make top quality games.
Now I suppose the next mission is to get your title out there and create the media hype it deserves! Good luck, I am sure it will do very well.
Well, it goes hand in hand really. That said, Unity, barring some special cases, has excellent performance compared to some engines, and will run on almost anything. (Yep, even that Intel Atom netbook in the cupboard, just need to do shader optimization first)
Yes but Unity allows in many ways for optimizations like custom shaders, compute shaders, new script-able render loops, etc. On high end hardware we have it already running pretty well. But there a ton of things we can still do to optimize it more.
(only kidding)