Untitled RPG project prototyping
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Im testing trees and shaders. I was able to get the trees looks the way I liked, but it has its own problems. Since its just Depth Pre-Pass enabled, its giving me all kind of weirdness on leaf mesh section and also every time I look at tree tops, my framerate drops by 10-15fps.
However, I really like the soft look of the trees, it feels quite natural to look at.
Note: Im using Vsync at 75fps
This at least partially answers a question on whether Godot 4 could handle a skyrim/fallout style game, another thing I'm very curious about testing the game with is large scale static worlds as I think there could be a lot of potential in that area.
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Lethn
Yeah, that is my goal as well. Actually this leans onto the first thing you said as well. My goal is to ((try)) to prototype RPG akin to Daggerfall/Morrowind. So we'll see.
The big letdown for me concerning Godot, at least in this first iteration of No4, is that there is no any built in terrain implementation. Today this is a must in any engine. Especially terrain that relays on chunks, world partition and vast scale.
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VMblast I may be able to help you a bit with that, just so you know, I've had quite a bit of success importing terrain sculpts into Godot from Blender. What I do is I get a regular plane then subdivide it enough for things to be smoothed out nicely and go to town with the sculpting tools, what I found interesting is the texture paint seems to import fine as well. I haven't done anything particularly fancy as of yet but I have managed to make a basic island that looks alright, this is what I came up with, followed a water shader tutorial and I need to tweak the meshes for that to work all cleanly but that came out nicely too.
It may even be worth doing some terrain generation in Blender itself and then exporting the results, sculpting I feel allows for a lot more control.
Well, you can write custom shaders in Godot, meaning basically anything is possible. It's just that a lot of stuff doesn't come built in. But I don't think there is any limit.
cybereality
Yeah I got that would be the case.
Buuut...me no coder, code burn eyes, me went blind...
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VMblast I have one question, so if anyone see's this, especially from the coder side, Id appreciate a reply.
Is it possible to do this in Godot, to recreate this kind of tech? (maybe minus GI as this is already in)
Depends what you mean by that. Are you asking if you could implement these in the editor without modifying the engine core source? Perhaps some, probably not all though. Some of this could perhaps be implemented as a GDExtention, so outside the core, but probably still needing C/C++.
VMblast The big letdown for me concerning Godot, at least in this first iteration of No4, is that there is no any built in terrain implementation.
I wouldn't hold my breath while waiting/hoping for that. I recon it might appear as a officially supported GDExtention addon down the line perhaps, but it's unlikely to make it into core feature set I think(this is just a guess tho).
I also frankly wouldn't be in favor of having such bloat in the core anyways. Thinking of Unity as an example here, though the same applies to engines like Unreal or Cryengine, in my experience the built in terrains are rather limited and not very good and not conveniently extensible so I wouldn't use such in the first place, personally. But an officially supported first class add-on if you will, would non the less be a welcome sight of course.
I do have to acknowledge the Unity one is itself technically a script/add-on that's bundled with the engine tho.
Megalomaniak
Yeah I do understand this ethos, I mean it is good in a sense. You make terrain exact tailored to needs of your project. The only downside that I could see, is that for low tier projects, which could you like a default standard terrain work, that would be taxing on the time and budget.
Added some broadleaf trees for testing.
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VMblast This is the problem a lot of people don't realise who think they can make their own game, when it comes to programmers who know what they're doing it's either money upfront or they walk. I mean, if it's just a friendly collab project, there's nothing wrong with that, but you seem to understand that realistically when it comes to projects you're not going to get any programmers onside by yourself without money because being blunt all of us here can and do make projects similar by ourselves no problem. 'Revenue sharing agreements' are a joke to anyone professional, I'd avoid that like the plague because it's just a way to scam free labour from earnest people on the vague promise of ROI which would barely hold up in court as a verbal agreement.
This is why I advise, learn to code, even if it's painful initially, it will be worth it, I've surprised myself at how much I'm enjoying programming now and I hated maths in school.
VMblast The only downside that I could see, is that for low tier projects, which could you like a default standard terrain work, that would be taxing on the time and budget.
Ah, but there already are terrain plugins/addons that you could modify and cater to your projects needs if you have the skill and/or the resources for or just try to live with the limitations of as they are if you can't afford to do more with them. It's just that the godot project hasn't yet gotten to the point where it has the capacity to adopt some of these addons as 'official' yet.
For terrain see for an example Zylanns. The caveat of course being that 4.0 was only just recently released and the plugin hasn't yet been updated for it.
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VMblast That's a difficult one that I can't answer all myself because it does depend on person to person or what project is being worked on, I imagine the fairest way would be to do it after certain targets have been reached with the project generally so you'd get paid based on if you have certain gameplay mechanics in and functional which seems like the most sensible approach to me. Obviously you wouldn't want to do it by line and yes maybe per script would be a good idea and price things depending on how big or complex it is. By line encourages programmers to mess around and add more than necessary instead of making their code efficient.
You can't really pay programmers by hour or anything like that in the traditional manner because for instance I can code in my sleep, so how the hell would you calculate that? It is a problem that should be talked about more amongst employers and people wanting to pay programmers properly.
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VMblast The big letdown for me concerning Godot, at least in this first iteration of No4, is that there is no any built in terrain implementation.
If you need a landscape generator, you can use free third-party ones for now. Making a whole continent by hand, of course, somewhat tedious.
By the way, Boreal Orienteering somewhat disappointed me. Yes, there is a very nice landscape, but repetitive trees with straight trunks on which the leaves do not even flutter.
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Tomcat
Thanks! Good to know.
Im using World Machine for the terrain gen.
Yeah Boral Orienteering is fully static and repetitive, however it is good proof of concept and prototype. For me personally as an artitst it was of great importance of how he achieved vast forest look, with very soft and natural shading of the trees and foliage overall. Ofc its not like 101% photo realistic, I think only maybe UE5 can achieve this today (and maybe Cryengine, its good with foliage).
But the soft look for the foliage overall is what Ive been after, its actually how we perceive foliage, feel it, we filter out noise, our brain do it automatically. So that prototype is very interesting in that regards.
Also it is very, very good with performance.
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Lethn
This is good talk actually. So if the work is priced by the gameplay mechanic, how would you define that? In term, like player character, but how deep? If its RPG akin to something like Morrowind, is one gameplay mechanic just character motor? But what about lets say, combat, and how complex?
What about enemy AI in similar setting, and its combat? Enemies in-fighting? What about interactions between NPCs and player, between npc-npc?
Note: Im talking about prototype here, pre-alpha, not full game ofc.