Imperium
Public Imperium Benchmark Now Available!
See the world of Imperium for the first time, in REAL TIME and test your machines performance and post your results here! Just state, your average FPS, and what graphics settings you had on.
Windows 64 Download link: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/65183439/Imperium%20Benchmark(Alpha).zip
Mac Download link(Coming soon)
Imperium Benchmark Video
Official Trailer
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About Brilliant Games And Myself
Hey everyone, welcome to the official W.I.P page for Imperium. Before I talk about the game, let me introduce myself and give a little history. My name is Robert Weaver, and I run Brilliant Game Studios. I also run a recording studio called Brilliant Red Studios. For years I have been developing and selling assets on the asset store. What you probably don’t know, is that these assets aren’t just for selling on the store, they have been the tools and ground work in preparation for this game and others like it in the future. So you can say this game has been in the works for near 2 years now. Well I am finally ready to dive straight into a project that was originally too big for one man.
The World Of Imperium
Imperium is an open world, first person, sandbox, single player, RPG. I started creating the world of Imperium in the fall. When I finished the basic terrain it was put on hold for a few months due to other projects and releases. I have not tried to measure the exact size of the world but its around 3-4 kilometers across. The alpha version that will be publicly available soon, but will only give the players access to about one quarter of the world, but I assure you this will still provide hours of gameplay. However, this game is still in the early alpha stages, much about the world and its size will change I’m sure.
The Story Of Imperium
The story of Imperium is fairly minimal. At the beginging of the game your entire family is killed right before your eyes because of a family tree debt way down the line. The king held your family responsible for this 100 year old debt and killed them. Through the rest of the game you create your own story. You can either gain power and trust from the king and get close enough to kill him, or you can raise your own army and overrun his kingdom. These choices are up to the player. Many of the quests in the game will be dynamic, as well as events.
The Technology Behind Imperium
Like I mentioned before there are many assets I have built in order for this game to function. Many people in the Unity forums have debated whether or not a large open world game is really possible in Unity. Well I assure you it is! Below I’m going to talk about a some of the systems running Imperium.
Path-Finding
Dynamic Navigation is the pathfinding engine for this game. This is the asset I pride myself in most. The entire world is covered in 9 high definition Navigation Grids that switch according to the player location. I do not wish to toot my own horn on this one, but the entire world of 9 grids(Each grid is 700x700 nodes) only takes about 2 minutes to build, and runs perfectly smooth in the game. If you’re a developer in need of great pathfinding, please just go out and buy this path-finding engine, its hard to convince people of the greatness of my pathfinding, but just believe and go get it. You won’t regret. 
Heres a link to the thread if you’re interested. http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/154639-Dynamic-AI-Project-Navigation-Released
AI Behaviour
Advanced Fantasy AI is my oldest package. Yet I still love using it. Its open source, easy and fast to set up, and great smart Fantasy Style AI. Its not for every game, but if you want Fantasy Style AI that works instantly out-of-the-box, then this is it. I will be making modifications to this AI as the game progresses, and may include some of these changes in an update. Heres a link to the thread. http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/125753-Fantasy-AI-2-0-RELEASED
LOD And Dynamic Loading
In order for an open world game to function, you can’t simply place thousands of objects in a scene and expect good performance, this is where Smart LOD and and my dynamic loading systems come in. Smart LOD handles the larger objects in the scene like large rocks, cliffs, and buildings. I have also used Smart LOD to load sections of areas. Smart LOD can instantiate(Load off the hardrive) levels of detail rather than ever level already existing in the scene.
For Smaller detailed objects around the world, I designed a system just for this game. It works the same as the AI spawning system I talk about below, where the prefab used, the position, rotation, and scale of the object are saved, but the game object itself does not exists in the scene until the player is in range. Here is the link for ‘Smart LOD’. http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/148432-Smart-LOD-RELEASED
AI Spawning Editor
The AI spawning system ended up being more complex than I originally anticipated. I created an editor where you can place, edit, change AI, but the AI don’t actually exists outside the players ‘boundaries’ during gamemode. The system remembers all the positions and settings of the AI and instantiates them according to the players position, all the information about each AI is personal and is stored. I have yet to push things further and have AI that explore when the player is not around, randomizing things like this could give events that are completely unpredictable, like having enemies run into eachother and random battles would occur.
The Bounty System
Just like the spawning system, the bounty system ended up being more complex than originally thought, but the basics of it are done for the most part. When i started creating the bounty system, I wanted it to be as ‘real life’ as possible. Lets be serious, its not like this world has a state of the art C.S.I at their disposal. So no bounty will occur if no one sees, and even if someone that isnt a guard sees this, he must physically go to a guard and tell him. THEN, yes now that guards know, but what about the rest of the world? Bounty will not exists outside of the town for at least a few days, so you have time to either clear your name, or kill every guard in that area if you so please.
Levelling System
This is one of the area’s that is in very early stages. Information on this is coming soon!
Screen Shots
Just another sun rise in the world of Imperium
New day night cycle(Sunset)
Day night cycle(night time)
W.I.P of the main city. Right now it lacks detail, its current purpose is more for background
Plus I’m already creating a 24 hour clock… But I may or may not have some genius secrets up my sleeve for shadows. 