A long while ago I was working on a game in Unity, it ultimatley changed switched and shifted. Became some sort of Sci-Fi thingy, so in my spare time I decided to continue on with the original concept of a Dragon age / Witcher / Skyrim mishmash in Unity… As I need something to keep this thread around here is an obligatory picture:
Although not really focusing on graphics for the moment :).
Basic AI / Waypoint Nav system, with basic interaction. Press E key, player turns around comes up to you and says hello whilst on their duties… Currently you only have the option to say goodbye, how rude?
Basic Inventory system, pretty much click a button and it swaps various character meshes out.
Basic UI, you can exit the game which is nice.
Some interior stuff that needs some “defacto meshes swapping out”.
Basic level / skill system, bit too linear but it’s on the list.
Two quests made, slightly more interesting than fetch me a potion. P.S Get it your self, trying to save the world here sheesh…!
Story line that doesn’t make much sense at the moment, which is cool…
So, before I start on the laborious artwork bit outside of stock asset store stuff (which I didn’t post, what’s the point?)… Wanted to get some feedback on style, the art will dictate really what the game is… Mechanics are just mechanics, they will be <Insert any TPS / FPS RPG game title here> type mechanics.
I was thinking of something a little different, I suppose the idea is from Fallout “future past”… If any fans of DR. who here, I was thinking something like Gallifrey… Again if you’re a fan of the series, you’ll of noticed that Dr. Who pretty much grew up in a shed, but it’s one of the most advanced civilisations in the Galaxy.
As it’s on the cards I might actually be using Unity (again), I’ve been heavily researching into custom shaders / rendering / post etc. here is the result as part of “Shadows Stuff”…
Wow! Gotta say I am impressed. That’s one of the best, if not THE best, forest shots I’ve seen made in Unity. Would love to see it without DOF to see how the detail and (anti)aliasing looks at a distance. I’m looking forward to see your progress on this! Great stuff!
Love those screens.
I’m a mac user mainly developing for iOS but thinking of making the leap to desktop games so its great to see what can actually be achieved. So many questions
I’d be interested to know what kind of FPS you are getting at the moment and the spec of the pc running them.
Would you be willing to share a breakdown of how you achieved those screens i.e tools used to generate the terrain, shaders, post fx etc.
And if you do get 35fps can you share your secrets
After a lot of tweaking, I’m now getting 60 FPS on our dev machines. Which is either a Radeon 390X / I7 5820K / 32GB DDR or the same with a 780TI.
No probs, I’m using world machine to export normals / splats / HM’s. If you’ve never done that before, there is a splat example that comes with it… As I need tiles to be streamed at distance I’m using WM PRO.
Shaders are mainly custom, last night I was experimenting with Alloy which gives similar results and is along the same lines as what I did. For example inverse square falloff on lights etc. and my own (old) implementation of GGX although I really like the deferred decals in Alloy and area lights, so it looks like I’ll be using that from now on.
In terms of post effect stacks, well it’s deferred / linear and HDR on the camera with a custom chromatic abberation / depth of field (which isn’t great in them screens IMO), SSDO and I’m using Unity’s cinematic post effects for touch up’s (colour grading) and tonemapping (via Aces). I also used Unity’s cinematic bloom…
I’d be very interested to hear your opinion on the free Lux shader framework. It supports all kinds of goodies like dynamic snow and rain. Afaik it comes with some terrain and tree shader too.
Thats excellent thanks for sharing.
Good to hear you’ve got 60fps. Where did your best gains come from or was it just a case of little gains here and there?
Did you have to sacrifice anything on the visual quality to get that fps improvement?
I’m currently trying to use SpeedTree billboard / alpha’s (as grass planes) to speed up everything whilst trying to get similar results… In terms of amount of grass / performance if I use the terrain system instead of using mesh based grass (which has shadow casting / AO on it etc. which makes a massive impact) I can literally get three times the amount at three times the FPS / msec rate.
At the moment visual quality has tanked because of it, but I’m trying various techniques to find a decent balance.
All in all the game has to work at 60 FPS medium settings on a GTX 470, so I really need to pull out some performance gains somewhere.
Just thought I’d do an update, I’m re-hashing an old project I started in the Unity 4.1 days … Just sorting out the general look whilst cracking on with the artwork (did this as a demo for TOD)… Most of the combat systems etc. was done years back:
If I could consistantly make it look like this all the way through, am I on a winner? P.S there might be some odd artifacts from the temporal anti aliasing, kind of like the screen moved whilst the screeny was being taken… Performance is 60+ FPS so that’s good.
Looks great! I really enjoy seeing quality graphics in Unity.
Just a couple of small crits is that I think the path texture is a bit lacking contrast and color, and also in the bottom image it might look better to have more of a hue difference between the shadows and highlights with color correction - the yellow/orange is too uniform imo.
Aye, that’s the issue with PBR… You need occlusion maps etc. for it to look right… Also some POM probably wouldn’t go amiss either. I can’t remember what I did with my old terrain shaders, so looks like I’ll have to re-do it…!
I’ll also have a look into the shadows, in UE the shadows pick up small amounts of ambient lighting. I’ll poke Unity and see if they’ll do anything about it, if not I’ll look into that too.!
The forest ist just WOW… Looks like real life 
… Just sorting out the general look whilst cracking on with the artwork (did this as a demo for TOD)… Most of the combat systems etc. was done years back: