For some recent screenshots from WolfQuest, trot on over here:
http://www.wolfquest.org/bb/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=301
And in case you’re wondering, yes, this is a 2.0 terrain.
We’ve been very tight about releasing live demos because we don’t want the fans to nitpick it to death yet. But we’ll be publishing a demo next month and look forward to what y’all think.
Cheers,
Steve
no pics there.
Looks like you need to login to see attachments:
“You do not have the required permissions to view the files attached to this post.”
Sorry everyone, but my skills as a forum admin are still very crude.
I’ve fixed the permissions on the WolfQuest forum so you may now see the images without registering.
Thanks,
Steve
AWESOME
Have you guys looked at “The setupMachine 2, TSM2” for maya? for $100 you get a pretty cool tool for rigging quadpeds
Great work man
AC
Looks great! I bet you’ll benefit from the new terrain engine in 2.0!
Looking forward to the release 
very nice doc! definitly has that nice ‘sweeping vista’ feel. the gameplay looks interesting - i’d love to try the demo. be sure to let us know when you release it.
one crit: your GUI textures suffer a bit by comparison - the colors are too saturated IMO and the texture is quite blocky.
but overall looks great so far ; )
As a matter of fact, one of the several animators we hired started out with trying to rig the wolf with TSM 2 and he had a heckuva time getting it going. I don’t recall we had problems with getting the TSM 2 animations into Unity, but we ended up switching animators and leaving TSM 2 behind.
I can imagine that TSM in the right hands could be pretty useful.
Thanks a lot for the compliments and suggestions. By “blocky” do you mean you see artifacts in the GUI image (which ones?), or that it just seems like it doesn’t hang together with the look of the environment? I have fixed the textures to have better alpha channel masking, but I imagine there is room for improvement.
Of course these screenshots are fairly compressed JPG, but it’s true that the actual textures have fairly hard lines in them.
If anyone cares, a few details about how we did this.
The skybox is made with Terragen 2, using the Yellowstone USGS Digital Elevation Maps and the same models for the trees as we used in-game. (Terragen is a lot more natural looking than Bryce, even though Bryce is cheaper and possibly easier to work with). In particular the terrain artist created a water mask to make the river using the actual water course layer from the GIS data.
The in-game terrain is also a DEM smoothed out with a Windows application and imported as a Unity 2.0 Terrain heightmap.
Garen Rees did all the vegetation models and textures (nothing but the best!).
The vegetation and ground textures are placed according to the Google Earth images for the location.
I worked very hard with both Garen and the landscape artist to try to match what you actually see in Yellowstone from the top of Specimen Ridge in the northern part of the park, and I also adjusted the lighting to get the skybox and terrain to match colors properly.
This is using the “beautiful” setting, which takes advantage of antialiasing and anisotropic filtering.
Probably most people here care about how stuff is done in Unity. It’s very nice-looking indeed, and even static screenshots suggest the herd behavior AI is probably quite realistic.
–Eric
I mentioned the other tools since folks often ask about how to integrate art assets or what else to use to create them. We’ve spent most of our time until about 2-3 months ago on art assets, so those are still very much on my mind.
Russ Lunsford wrote a full-featured boids-type flocking system for the herding, along with a Finite State Machine a lot like Mat Buckland’s system. Those together have created some great herd and predator/prey behavior we can use for many kinds of NPC animals.
Russ also figured out how to make NPCs avoid trees that are part of the 2.0 Terrain.
the shots look really great…
one thing that i noticed immediately though, was the lack of shadows… some sort of shadows (don’t have to be exact, blobs could work here) for the wolves and the horses…
i know this is a wip, and there’s probably still a lot to be done, so this is just an observation…
good luck…
–Mike
the blockyness is mainly the thin black outlines - though it may just be jpeg artifacts as you said. IMO the yellow is too saturated (as opposed to the green red bars which i think fit better overall) - though this is really just my opinion - it draws your eye away from the scene which has a more muted pallette.
very cool ; )
Good point – It’s true that those UI graphics were designed before we did the final color balancing of the landscape and skybox. It’s also the case that the target audience of the game is for somewhat younger kids, so we tend toward brighter colors for that age group. We also need something that will stand out strongly against a variety of backgrounds.
Great project, thanks for the details, Doc. You guys are plowing new ground with this, and I think it’s going to benefit all of us. Eventually all kinds of interest groups/NGOs/foundations/educators will want content like this, and you’re proving not only that it’s possible, but can be done through grant money.
Since y’all have access to Unity 2 (grumble grumble) I assume you’re using built-in multiplayer/networking? When I watched your demo a few months ago, it referenced a multiplayer mode, and I thought “wow, they’re writing their own network code on top of everything else…”
Thanks! We certainly have a lot of pressure on us from the NSF to prove this can be done with grant money!
We haven’t delved into the networking stuff in Unity 2.0 yet – our development has focused on the basic gameplay – but when we do, we will use the 2.0 networking layer and try to avoid having to write too much networking code of our own.
Cheers,
Steve
Sorry to come in late here but nice work Steve! Lookin’ good. 
Ooh yeah!
This is completely dependent on the 2.0 terrain engine. The only hand-placed tree model is the snag that the elk carcass is lying next to. Everything else is placed by painting on to the terrain.
(And if you don’t like how it works when 2.0 comes out, you can partly blame us since we helped define the functionality).
Ahh, so! The only thing unlikeable is that we don’t have it yet.
“Manual” terrain and trees and grass are no fun now, knowing it will all soon be moot. (I think a wolf needs to sneak up and bite this guy very hard)