I’m newbie in Unity and game development. As a start i decided to create minecraft-look game, but with different mechanics and without “pixel design” restrictions. There is my first attempt:
It contains simple first-person controller and noise-based terrain generator. And i have some questions:
how to make good lightning system for this game? Ambient light + direction light (as on picture) is a bad option because of caves. I think there must be better solution than change ambient intensity. What color i should use for directional light? Can you tell me about common lightning strategies in unity?
Materials. It’s ugly now. It’s just a 256x256 textures with autogenerated normal maps and bumped diffuse shader. As you see - sometime it’s hard to detect edges. Picture is uncomfortable for eyes. How i can fix it?
I’m already reading it and have discovered some interesting moments. But i haven’t found answers for given questions. Maybe i’ll found answer. But…
But over 100 pages… from 2010 year… some techniques are old, some only for pixel-styled ones. I’ve more specific problem - i want to create block-world game with AAA elements and more complex models for player, animals, whatever. Also i don’t want to use sprites.
I don’t want to just copy minecraft lightning system (some discussed about it in the thread), i want to create different one. I want to create realistic materials for cubes, realistic fog and rain effects, use fractal algorithms for world generation… Because i possibly can and because it’s fun.
Just keep reading, there is a lot of interesting stuff in there that will catch your eye. Probably everything described there isn’t outdated for a minecraft clone, but some things may just not be suited for your taste. Volumetric lighting calculation is also discussed throughout, including RGB and sun channels, ambient occlusion and unlimited vertical lighting from the sun.
After several experiments today i decided that high resolution textures and materials are bad option for box-world. And there are two ways:
Procedure generation of textures (repeating texture on flat surface is very uncomfortable for eyes)
or procedure generation of meshes - so there will be no boxes in the view, only in model
And i think way 2 is easier and more interesting. For both ways fractal generation is preferred option. It may be a main feature - all generators in game will be based on fractals.
I think it will take at least month to write this logic. I will post results in this thread (or give a link for new thread in another part of the forum). So, if you interested in how it will look - subscribe) If you have experience in similar tasks - i’ll be happy to read your advices.
