There’s lot to do on this project yet, but I thought I might try a build, and let you see what I’m working on.
Tonnes of known issues:
-it is not fully textured (the path textures that do exist, actually lead you to the terraced area.
-window, arch balcony and bridge do not match up perfectly with the walls. They did in Cheetah where I placed them. I have two ideas that address fixing this.
-the world features light maps on the walls/paths, and dynamic lighting on certain added objects. I may get rid of the dynamc lighting (because the resolution - even on high - isnt that great. So, that means baked on light maps on the objects, but we’ll see … Also, I would like to improve the lightmap in general, perhaps by breaking up the wall/path object into more than one mesh.
-more adding things coming, like a columned loggia around the wall in the terraced area, certain little sculptural features in the small courtyards that are already built but not placed (cupid statue, flower urns).
-when this is done and built, then I will check out its performance and decide whether to add more ideas to the whole scene.
One thing you might want to look into for a finished version is colliders on the walls. Using the spacebar, I can climb the walls and go wherever I want without having to bother navigating the maze.
You’re right about the speed. It’s a bit slow. But I don’t want to speed it up a lot, or I’ll puke like almost did last night I might actually switch the mouse look to a left/right arrow turn instead of the strafe.
Yes, I found out how to climb the walls also, quite early on. At the moment it’s useful for testing, but I plan to get rid of the ability in the future. I wondered if there was some setting or script for the character that would make it impossible to ascend certain incline degrees.
Here’s something I’ve been pondering. At the moment, the look is a cartoony. Eventually this will be a chat world allowing a limited number of people to visit. The avatars will have to be built to match the “look”. Do you think it’s too cartoony, or pleasant as is?
I quite liked the artistic direction, although the walls could use a little more detail or difference around the maze. I think that you can really go for whatever look you want so long as it is consistent.
I’m guessing that you’ll remove the path that makes it easy to find the goal as well?
The walls will have more detail. I was starting to go for an adobe look because it fits the shape of the walls really.
The walls will eventually all be topped with terracotta, as they are topped in the area around the terrace. If you go to the terrace and look down you’ll see this on top of some walls.
In some places, I want to swap out the terracotta toppers for some vegetation - as if something started to grow as it does in gutters and between sidewalk cracks. I would then create a different texture for that particular section of wall with vegetation trailing down.
On the ends of every wall that does not connect to anything, there will be a finial. The finials look exactly like the finials on the window, arch, balcony and bridge objects. On the corners of low walls, I’ll put a terracotta urn with flowers. And also in the middle of the smaller courtyards dotted throughout, there will be surprises on pedestals.
I used Cheetah3d to make it, but I did export some pieces into 3dStudio Max to tweek and then imported them back into Cheetah. Oh yes, and the trees were made in max - I made them originally for another project. The whole thing is actually a learning experiment for me being the first time using Cheetah and the first time using Unity.
I suppose there is. If not, maybe you could put an invisible collider “ceiling” over each part of the maze. A fairly coarse one would probably suffice, it wouldn’t have to match every dip and rise of the walls.
Yes I am (west side of waterloo out past U of W along Columbia) and am occasionally around Guelph hanging out with my family. JeremyAce is close by too (a bit north) and so is another fellow Unity user from Toronto who I met at the Unite conference (but can’t recall his name now … lousy with names).
Small world eh. Nice to know when I get a full-time game studio going there are people close by to jump on board (after I pocket a Lotto 6-49 that is, unless you know someone with a few tens of thousands to risk).
