I was never planning on having wind dynamics for those elements anyway(it could still be done with my method via vertex animation per chunk)…I can still have destroyable objects…I can simply say…put a fractured wall in front of a cave entrance after the fact…it would not be attached to the terrain whatsoever.
but the performance hit per object(with a worlds worth of objects) is greater than the performance hit that I get using my way… each chunk can still have LOD’s but we are talking about chunks that are around 8k verts…some less some more…not terribly expensive on slightly older to modern hardware…in the screenshot above the entire world seen is just over 500K…and I am allowing myself a world budget of 1mil…I will be under that I’m sure…but once imported into godot adding actors will add some overhead…I’m still confident this is the right way.
Sure, this way is perhaps the best for what you want to achieve.
What will be the game about ? Rpg story driven ? More rogue like action ? or free sandbox roamin and exploration ?
It’s going to be a simple open world action RPG…for instance there will not be quest items that you have in your invetory and such…it will be tracked ofc what is going on…if you killed 100 goblins for old man Mc Guffin etc…but no real dialogue choices…think like the old zelda games where you would talk to npc’s and they would just say things that gave you hints about what was going on in the world…
…anyway…posted a new video showing a bit of the world, now that it is generally complete. https://youtu.be/tx9LY0GpibA
I have the trees really large and there is not a lot of smaller clutter(take note of his scale in homes or next to a fire) to help make the scale look more correct…I also have the camera set back a bit…I get it…does seem small, but that is also kinda the direction I want to take…
In re-reading this before posting…it sounds like a bit of an excuse, but I assure you…he’s scaled the way I intended
I’m doing a week or so of fixes and tweaking before I add any more features…I fixed(re-wrote) the swimming directly after the video…now I am fixing some combat…don’t remember if it was shown in the video…but somehow swords no longer worked and arrows were being shot out of his knees :)…both are fixed, but I have a long list in front of me that needs to still be handled.
The open design is looking great.
About the look, perhaps you can try some light shader effects on top of your actual basic shader ?
Perhaps some cartoon effects with very light border lines, or some shader making shadows looks like pencil drawings , or pixel resolution effect. I think adding some light shader style effects on top of your actual textures and shader could make your game get a more interesting graphic style and look.
The open world design is great, this reminds me of “Short Ike” game
I think like this game perhaps it’s best to make it a progressive exploration instead of allowing full exploration from the start to make a more interesting game. For example unlock new areas as you get new gadgets or new skills.
I have considered more shaders, but TBH I don’t want to alienate any players. I will release this on linux as well…and I know not all linux users have crappy computers, but the ones I know…well they certainly do :). I want people to be able to run it…I may consider some screen space stuff that can be enabled in settings…but that is down the road still.
as far as open world “locks”. They are going to be there…there will be gates and mobs to control the flow…I want to give the player enough freedom to get into trouble and challenge themselves…thanks for all your comments btw
another video has been uploaded. I realize, only now, that I never zoom the camera…besides random person…I have had other messages on other forums and FB about this…rest asured…the camera does have a zoom
Now this is what i want to see when it comes to GODOT !!!
More showcases on a technical level as well as on a visual scale…
(Nice work man just show us more, how much more can you achieve…)
whew…finished refactoring all of the combat…so everything is back to working normal…AFAIK? eventually something will popup…so I am going to start working on more of the story driven aspect of the game…NPC’s…I may go dark for a week or two…I may not…kinda depends on how well it progresses…the ideas I have written down will hopefully work out as I expect…but more than likely not…I’ll see
Thanks Fred. Godot is completely capable(I’m less capable than the engine)…it’s about the creator and the vision, more so, than it is the engine…this is my first project with it…I picked a bigger project on purpose, before I go and try and make something with full inventory, dialogue, item and quest sytems. I imagine(at this pace) it will be another year before the game is done…I do have a full time job :(.
Implemented simple dialogues for my simple npc’s today…it wasn’t a days worth of work on the godot side, but most of the work was deciphering my scriblings from the design side…Then coming up with graphics that fit with the game.
Sorry it has been a while since I posted an update…
In general I have been unhappy with loading times for the game and it has caused me to rethink how I am setting up my world and level(s) in general…
The original plan was to just have a large open world, and have dynamic loading and unloading of “actors”(npc’s and enemies) with a simple spawner and distance check…a spawner would have a list of actors to spawn and keep track of some of their key stats like where they should be depending on time of day or how much health they had.
but since it takes over a minute to load up I took a few days to consider what I wanted to do about it…did some research on threading and thought about the basic logistics in general…
in the end I decided that there would be an overworld that would consist of all the exteriors of homes, enemies that help determine player path(like ones that are too tough to get by) and entrances to caves etc…
this leads to having all interiors loaded as separate levels…much like the elder scrolls games. I feel like this would be a better path to take…feel free to speak out if you have any advice. I will take it into consideration as, I myself, am not master of Godot…that’s the whole reason I started this “small” project…to get to know the engine in all it’s aspects…
with that being said…it will change the world in enough respects that I have decided I need to just scrap the world that is there and make another one, more in tune with my plans.
aside from that I have been working on the story boarding, which may just end up turning into the cinematics portion…I think some still images with dialogue is enough for a simple game…I don’t really want to force the player down any particular path and I think lightly hitting on some key points should do the trick…and push the notion of exploration…
I just wanted to make this post to assure whoever is following this, that it is still under development…it’s not gathering dust or anything…and I have not just magically “dropped” it in favor of a new project :).
Godot is not designed for open world, it is very new to 3D, and it lacks lot of optimization features (that perhaps will be worked on much later releases).
It’s suprising the loading time is so big ? While the tiny open world is not so gigantic ?
I think textures size and materials is the most problematic and Godot textures loading and streaming is not perhaps not so good and not optimized enough (like no internal format high compression when import textures).
One solution would be to change for a bigger features and open world tools 3D engine like Unity or Unreal for example as easy to learn as Godot. As you’re just starting a game, this could be a good investment as there is a lot of jobs and freelance work related, or an investment for future projects more pushed about some advanced features you would want to use in your games.
The other solution is re design your open world like a mini map ith entrances to villages, caves or exterior maps, perhaps something similar to this but with more verticality
I’m not using textures…not entirely true, I use one texture on some models(pallete texture) and for the UI…obviously…and the world is fairly large.
but no, I know what the issue is. My world consists of a ton of special meshes…loading all the unique geometry is what is eating my load times…godot is fine for open world…it’s no UE5 but it’s sufficient.
on a side note, I’ve already gotten my load time down to ~20 seconds…and I am ok with that…I still have to redo the world…it needs to function a lot differently now…besides it will give me a chance to fix some issues I had with gliding/climbing and swimming anyway.
finally something to show…I put up another video…took a while, I had to refactor a lot of code to make sub levels work…this is not a very exciting video, but I wanted to get something out there.
