Developer Diary 72 - Eerily Dark

It took some hard work, but the forest rooms are done. The mood is incredibly dark and strange. It's not exactly made for screenshots. All anyone can distinguish in the screen above is a spot of strange green light and that's it. But when you experience it in VR it reaches its peak immersion. The ground is covered with bushes and grass, and it has a really realistic feel to it. The next task ahead includes meadows and open areas. The difficulty here lies in creating a seamless transition from the dark woods into the bright light of day. Once I have a template for these open spaces, I can incorporate the maze from early 2017 and the dharmapala palaces in combination with the already finished bridges and towns.

Developer Diary 71 - Back To The Beginning

I finished the blueprint spawners, but when I traveled my own world it felt void, empty and dark. Without life and color, depressing in every way. As beautiful as those screenshots in "Developer Diary 70" looked, they lacked in atmosphere and character.

In late 2014 I came up with my very first concept for Lakini's Woods. At the time I had been working with Unreal Engine 3 and a couple of basic assets I took from the game "Thief 3". The idea was to set up the entire game as a forest maze, based upon a series of rooms that create the illusion of a very deep dark forest. I had no idea how to accomplish this at the time, but I managed to lay down a basic playable UE3 demo and created a couple of playable levels, that included zombies that would chase me throughout the woods:

The atmosphere and the overall feeling during gameplay was great. Each room had  a white ceiling and a point light, which was responsible for "faking the sky". This concept had many advantages: It greatly limited the amount of foliage visible to the player, there were no lighting problems related to dynamic day/night rhythms and it gave me the opportunity to plan each segment and each room meticulously so I could optimize VR performance in every corner of the world.

I think I found a way to merge the original concept with the landscape segments and the world creator blueprint that I built throughout early 2017. Instead of landscape segments, the world creator spawns so called "forest-rooms" in predetermined sizes (500m / 1000m / 2000m a.s.o). They will now snap together and connect accordingly, creating a fluent tunnel-like maze. The dharmapala palaces and the villages are contained in very large rooms, that use an artificial sky sphere to create the illusion of a very large and open space. These large rooms can also be implemented into the world creator blueprint. I just may have found a way to get rid of all my problems ...

Developer Diary 70 - This is what it should look like

This is a sample of a randomly spawned village next to a dharmapala fortress and a bridge structure.

These images have two purposes:

To give me a clear reference of what I want the blueprint spawners to do (the one for the bridge, for the palace and for the villages) and to boost my ego after days of failed attempts at dealing with destructibles.

Developer Diary 69 - So close, yet so far away .....

What you see in the image above is a testing session, which helps me determine the optimal destructible mesh settings for each architecture segment. It's what I've been looking at for the last two days. And I'm sick of it.

I'm nauseous from the VR lag during in-editor test playing, because even though it all runs on 90 FPS without the editor load, when the editor is open it will still split the framerate in half to 45 FPS. I constantly feel like throwing up and none of the things I want to implement seem to work. And I can't figure out why. The 4 towers up front are all destructible meshes, with "impact damage" enabled so that I can test the effect of dharmapala and player projectiles on these structures. The palace segment in the back is part of a "dharmapala palace blueprint", which contains destructible meshes and collision volumes, that trigger a predetermined destruction as soon as the corresponding element (in this case "earth") collides with the collision volume.

But instead of destroying the pillar at the base, it just disappears. No matter what I do. I'm way below the chunk limit of 2000, I have set the segment on visible, I've tried other destructible segments in place of the pillar and every time I trigger the collision volume, these fucks just disappear instead of breaking apart. I've even set the mobility settings on all 3 different options and tested each one to no avail. The 4 towers up front seem to react to the impact damage of player projectiles, but they split into uneven parts and the collision of each chunk is a nightmare, even though I haven't changed the base scale of the model (as written in the unreal engine documentation). The walls of the tower appear hollow when it's split into chunks, which kills all possible immersion this effect might accomplish. There is no fix for these holes. Complex chunk collision and chunk merging is just not implemented for Unreal Engine yet. The only possible fix would be a custom split of the model; in other words I need to rebuild it and split it up manually, then fill up the holes and create a parent blueprint that enables physics behavior for all mesh segments. When the segment collides with a projectile, velocity is applied to all mesh chunks..... I'm so tired of it.

I've made lots of progress over the last few weeks, as I fixed most of the palace segments and created fully working LODs that allow the entire palace to be rendered in 90 FPS, even with foliage and during dharmapala chant animations. But in order to reach the next step I need to give every segment the ability to be influenced by various elemental effects and it just won't work.

For the next weeks I need to focus on some audio design work for another development studio and also continue on the renovations of my house, which is incredibly frustrating, because I'm running low on patience. I just want the alpha to be out there. I want this thing to lift off ...... I've been working on it for more than three years now ..... and it's god damn time for the alpha ..... I'm so close to it .... only two complex blueprints to go and I can't figure them out ..... it drives me mad ......

I guess this frustration is all part of the way. But some days it just eats up my motivation. Knowing that there is a chance, that I will need to recreate those meshes with basic geometry again, as I have already done two times now, fills me with dread.

Just need to keep at it I suppose ......

Developer Diary 68 - Preparing for Alpha

I reworked almost all of the architecture assets to make them look decent when the player character is moving through them. They contained a ton of texture stretching errors and Z.fighting at times. I also reworked the LOD settings for the dharmapala palace assets. The next step is to create blueprints for the palace and destructible meshes of each building segment so the player will be able to destroy the palace through earth elemental forces and spirits to reach the top in order to gain access to the dharmapalas lair.

The first palace will be underwater, and contain the Manta. The second palace will only consist of a single floor and contain the earth spirit so the player can use the Manta to reach the top. The third one however will have multiple levels and require the player to use the earth spirit to destroy building segments in order to climb it.

The remaining cathedral and church building segments will be used in "townspawners", that create cities of varying sizes, including churches and chapels. These cities are abandoned, but the player can use them to take cover from the creatures chasing him or find valuable resources close to them. Traders are also located inside those cities.

Still a ton of work to be done, but once these blueprints are completed it's finally time to compile an alpha version of the game.

Developer Diary 67 At Night

Developer Diary 66 The Palace is done

Now the hard part starts ..... calculating correct LODs so it works in VR ...... and setting up a script that randomizes the palace construction .....