NuVera Online Still Moving Forward

Community Showcases
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NuVera Online, a 3D virtual world experience for grown ups (this means you must be 18 years of age or older to register), has been a long time project of two people. Tim Pelham and myself. We have been working for nearly 6 years now on the project and have a lot of great things to show for it but even more to come.

Currently we are working on implementing vehicles, starting with our Zip, a bouncy fun physics filled buggy based on the concept vehicle from Volkswagen called the Buggy Up.

The concept of NuVera is to inspire exploration, creativity and socializing. We offer a wide range of options to help drive these three elements for our users.

With exploration users can either visit one of our two main locations or one of the many user created areas. In the NuVO created areas, Sunset Harbor and Tutorial Island, they can go swimming, hiking, shopping, answer trivia questions at the terminals, learn the basics on Tutorial Island and get free items while they are there, and soon we plan to also offer fishing. User created areas are 100% user created using their own 3D models and importing them using our exclusive editor. For those that are not a user developer they can purchase user created environments and objects and build up their own private and public areas to share with friends. Denizens (paid members) get some great perks, such as flying, that improves the over all exploration experience as well.

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There are many ways to be creative with NuVera Online. Whether you want to decorate an environment and use it as a public area, become a DJ in your own club, or become a developer and import your 3D models (or just paint the models others import to your liking), there is a lot you can do already and we are building on that regularly. We offer a lot of developer related tools in the client that assists those that wish to sell their products to others. Mannequins that work as display terminals for products, sales terminals, media materials to show off your works as well as signs, free gift boxes and a lot more. When building up your environments there is a lot of really cool tools available including environmental controls that allow you to alter the sunlight and fog settings (creating better and more realistic shadows) and actual game skyboxes so that there is no more preset bubble domes that other VW’s tend to use. We are working at also including day/night cycles and climate controls. Real time shadows are only a part of the experience as the water, hologram and glass shaders in the Unity3D engine really make the environments and objects pop with realistic elements.

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Socializing is made easy with both the web profiles and the in world events. Many users create weekly or monthly events that are open to anyone wishing to attend. Having live DJ’s makes this even more exciting with the option to have live streaming radio stations. Even without a DJ you can place down a TV unit of your choosing and opt for YouTube videos or a website with streaming videos. Gaining Achievements in NuVera gains you titles you can choose to use to let others know a bit about you from a glance. If you are a chatty bunny you can get the Talkative title or if you are a content creator you can don the Developer title. This is a new element recently added to NuVO that we plan to build on as we go along and has a really cool swirly ‘level up’ effect :smile:.

Our current goal is to get our Zip up and in world and in the next quarter we hope to add in collections (collecting different items in world to complete a full collection will gain you special currency that will allow you to purchase limited edition and retail items). From there we have a rather large list of additions we will be adding in over the next year. Although we are officially out of Beta we are not finished with adding in new and exciting things for our users to do and experience on a rather regular basis. Somethings may take us a wee bit longer to implement as there are only two of us and only one is a programmer but we have funded this 100% from our own finances which makes this a truly indy project.

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Looks like a lot Second Life, but awesome work !

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Thank you. I suppose there are a few things similar to SL. NuVO and Sl are both a virtual world so there is that :slight_smile: However we don’t have prims or sell properties like they do and of course we are using the Unity3D engine which is not associated at all with the OpenSim option. The water shaders, real time shadows, environmental controls and skyboxes set us apart quite a lot as well, so… we are prettier hehe

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Developer Journal #39

In January of 2013 we had a major server crash that was quite devastating. With the help of our fabulous users we were able to quickly recover and proceed forward with renovations and updates to the existing system. We have since added in the Zip, our first of many vehicles.

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We have also added in a new mail system that allows users to check and send mails directly from in the client without having to go to the website. This has been very popular with a lot of our users, particularly the developers making sales of their models and being able to send thank you notes to those buying from them.

One of our main areas is Sunset Harbor. We realized that now that we have the Zip and are planning more vehicles we needed some actual roads so we implemented one road to get started and planned to update in increments. However, after adding in the one road and getting feedback from the users we realized that Sunset Harbor itself was not nearly as large as we had initially thought. Walking or running in the area did take some time and was very enjoyable but with the addition of flying and vehicles … well not so large after all. So we decided to move forward with not just updating Sunset Harbor but actually redesigning it all together, from the ground up.

When I say from the ground up I mean exactly that. We spent some time and researched the pros and cons of replacing the existing Sunset Harbor terrain and found that by replacing the terrain we had the most freedom to execute some of the larger plans we had in mind. We also knew that the original Sunset Harbor was not planned out the best way it could have been which meant we needed a rock solid plan in place for how we would design and build the new Sunset Harbor.

Planning Stages

The first step was to figure out exactly what we wanted this new area to look like. For me this was all about the landscape. We wanted it bigger and we wanted it a lot more interesting visually. We wanted plenty of places to explore and interesting things to see. After going over some rough design ideas we also agreed to make it an island so as to better encapsulate the area and provide more clear cut borders.

After tinkering in several programs we ended up taking a look at World Machine which is a great program for generating terrain height maps. This allowed me to quickly iterate through several different terrains and find a good starting point for what this new area was going to look like. The other benefit of using World Machine was how it generates more realistic looking terrain features over manually sculpting a terrain.

Making the area larger was very important, but naturally the balance there is ensuring we have enough time and content to fill a much larger area. The new island at this stage was shaping up to be several times the size of the existing terrain for Sunset Harbor and we were really excited about the possibilities.

We had already done some terrain sizing in the Unity engine to get a feel for what was going to work so we just needed to pull in the generated height map from World Machine and see how the terrain felt.

Looking at the new island map it was easy to not realize just how much bigger the new terrain was, but as we can see from the below illustration it was quite a bit bigger.

Illustration showing the scale of the existing Sunset Harbor to the scale of the new island.

As we can see there area is quite a bit bigger and offers some great opportunities for exploration.

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The Details

At this stage we were happy with the terrain and agreed that this was a great foundation for the new area. With that step of the planning in place it was now down to the details. We had to decide what was the best way to proceed in filling this new land with awesome content.

There were two parts that needed to happen next.

  1. Determine what points of interest we wanted in the new area and where they were going to be located.

  2. Layout the road network and how the avatar would get to these locations, either by vehicle or on foot

We started jotting down all sorts of ideas on various interesting features and points of interest we wanted on the new island. This was based on what 3D assets we already had, what we could afford to spend time in making or what could be acquired. Once we laid out all of the points of interest on the map we started to get a better idea of where we needed roads.

The design of the roads was probably the trickiest part of the whole endeavour as we wanted to ensure we had interesting roads that worked well with the terrain, but couldn’t afford to spend a lot of development time integrating in a larger road network. This lead to the idea of breaking down the road project into three parts:

  1. The main asphalt roads which would be actual geometry.

  2. Gravel roads which would extend off of the asphalt roads, but would be painted on the terrain.

  3. Walk paths which would be extended off of the other two roads and intended for just the avatar. These too would be painted on to the terrain.

We also decided that, given development time allotted, the main asphalt road would be a closed loop that would go around the island which allowed for our gravel roads to easily extend the road network without worrying about how to properly tie in fancy road intersections.

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Once we had the road map in place we could start building the main road. I wanted to ensure we got the main asphalt road in first as many of the features would be built around the road. We could have worked reverse of that as well, but getting the road established first felt like the right way to go.

As we did with the existing Sunset Harbor road we decided to use EasyRoads3D to build our main road. It’s a great tool that allows us to better visualize the road and have it flow naturally with the terrain.

After several iterations of road testing we have the road setup the way we wanted it. This is pretty much where we are at right now. From here we can start work on building up the various points of interest such as the new plaza, lake lodge and a lot more.

As we continue to progress I’ll be covering more of the development so that you can get a better idea of what it is that we’re doing and how it is that we do it.

Until next time… have fun out there!