new game engine for uru?

[Wamduskasapa]

"young Whipper-snappers" ??

"but you youngies don't ever listen! "

heh, I'l be turning 45 in October.... Sure wish I felt young.

Andy, I still have 20 years on you, imagine how I feel.....

[andylegate]

Well guys, I'm afraid I ran into a MAJOR brick wall with CryEngine: We can't ride the buildings.......

There is nothing set up for free movement on a animated objects. They do have elevators and vehicles, yes. But with those, the player gets "pinned" to those entities, and you can not move while it's moving.

I did try several tricks, such as making the buildings into Ridged Body Meshes, with physics, and then I could ride on the object.......but I was being shaken around like a rag doll! After talking to the guys over at CryDev, there's not much that can be done about that......

You see, in order to do what we want, you'd have to still do a "Sub World" type of deal. That's just the way it works. Only in CryEngine you can not move the built in terrain. So it's not something they have. Of course all this means is that an Age like Gahreesen (or walking around on the train like in Er'cana) is not possible. But everything else that you want to do is (except snow......I don't think they have snow fall....rain yes.....other particles yes....they even have TORNADOES for goodness sakes!!!).

However: Unreal SDK 3.0 DOES have player movement on platforms! Pretty easy to do too.

So I'm going to put CryEngine on "pause" and give Unreal SDK another go. I never did do an outside Age. It too has volumetric lighting. Let's see how it stacks up against CryEngine's rendering (I mean they are still in beta to, they just released the August Beta of Unreal SDK, hehe, new beta's each month).

[Paradox]

I did try several tricks, such as making the buildings into Ridged Body Meshes, with physics, and then I could ride on the object.......but I was being shaken around like a rag doll! After talking to the guys over at CryDev, there's not much that can be done about that......

This is exactly why subworlds were implemented.

[Brice] actually iirc the subworlds were a physics hack
[Brice] the idea was when you are in a moving space you are in a subworld for that space which is Not moving
[Brice] so the physics thinks you are still
[Brice] so often the avie has to move between subworlds
[Brice] sometimes with limited success....
[Brice] we had trouble (again iirc) with the avie sitting on a rotating object that was really rotating. Force would get imparted to the avie
[Brice] we did the sw's initially i think for elevators for a similar reason

[andylegate]

Well while I was messing around with Unreal's SDK, I discovered that you can use what is called a "Mover Actor". You can take your object (in this case the Training Building or the Well Roof), and you make it a "Mover Actor", then, instead of baking your animation in Max, you set up your rotation animation in Unreal's Matinee program, and trigger it with Kismet.

When I tried it out with a simple platform, sure enough, it works! You jump on the mover and you are able to walk around just fine.

This is important as just like CryEngine, in Unreal, you can not animate or move the Terrain, yet players can still move around on animated objects, as long as they are put in the scene as a "Mover Actor"

Okay, so big deal, that's Unreal and not CryEngine, right?
Well, yes it is a big deal, because on their forums I was talking to someone that created a script that allows players to walk around in his aircraft he designed. He pointed out that I should be able to do the same thing for what I need in Gahreesen.

Of course I'm not a programmer, and would not even know where to start. But today, I discovered something. The scripting that is used in CryEngine is: Lua!
And that is something I was messing with in Christian Walther's Pipmak game engine!

So basically, the answer is: Yes. You can have a "Mover" like in Unreal, but you have to make the scripting for it yourself, and you then create a New Entity that uses that scripting, which is Lua.

So, I'm off to mess things up very badly, hehehehe. Since my knowledge of Lua is about the same as Python (and they look a lot alike too, hehehe).

[Aloys]

I only ever saw Lua being used for GUIs or various interface works.. Didn't even know it was used in CryEngine.
It's great that it can allow you to right up the physics in different way tough.
But that make sense, that kind of engine need a robust and versatile physics engine; especially seing how it's used in pretty different games.
It's too bad such a setup isn't natively supported in their editor though.. (some buttons and menus are always better than lines of codes, right? )

[andylegate]

While I'm waiting for my new friend over at the CryTek forums to help me out with the "Mover" Lua script, I thought I would do some work and see how Gira would look. Gira's textures always look kind of funny to me. But I think in here, they are shaping up to look pretty good. Lots of work to do still in here, but not too bad so far:

[Sirius]

Wow. Great.

Isn't the bone across the water a bit weird ?

[Aloys]

Very good choice with Eder Gira here Andy. Looks really good.
How hard/easy was it to import compared to Garrison? It might be a smaller area; but it looks like there are many more meshes..

[andylegate]

@Aloys - Oh yah......Gira so far has been a LOT harder than Gahreesen Exterior because as you said, there are a LOT more meshes to bring in. Couple that with trying to make the textures look good too (I never really liked the rock texture there, but if you replace it....well then Gira doesn't LOOK like Gira anymore, hehehehehe).

So far this has been a very interesting journey, and I have learned quite a bit:

Unreal SDK: Editor's UI is very intuitive, easy to navigate and learn. Lots of tutorials and information on "How To" out there for it, many professionally made. "Publication" of your work is available with the SDK.

CryEngine SDK: Editor is not very intuitive, has been very hard to navigate and learn. Many video tutorials out there, mostly made by fans on YouTube, however, most relate to the CryEngine 2.0 Mod Editor, and not the new SDK (well it's brand new, so DUH!). No way to publish your work yet. The new SDK was put out with out a way to make your own HUD or UI at this time, due to license issues with ScaleForm, but will be resolved and the "Publication" Feature will be with the next build of the SDK (in other words, the only way to "play" what you've built with the new SDK is, IN the SDK Editor right now.

Even though CryEngine is a lot harder to use in my opinion, some of the things it does just blows my mind. In that picture in my above post, did you notice the shadows in the shallow water? Those are dynamic. The water has volume too. Dive down in it, and it looks like you are really under water, water clarity is controlled by the "fog" of the Water Volume.
Ridged Bodies: IE they call them "Pushables", we call them "Kickables". Did you know that you can set up the physics for a "Kickable" in CryEngine and if you set it's density to less that 1.0 it will LITERALLY FLOAT IN THE WATER VOLUME????? Heheheheheheh. You can make a ship, for REAL, hehehehehe.

I love the dynamic shadows. Take look at this picture here:

Here, those leafy plants are rectangle meshes. The textures have transparency of course, but the SDK takes that into account and makes the dynamic shadow for the area that is visible. The result? Leaf shaped shadows! I also love how the shadow from the rock and other plants interact with each other.

And they are dynamic, here is a late afternoon shot:


You even have the light bounce interacting with the shadows. The bounce and scatter lighting from the rocks lighten up the shadow area in this picture:


Here is another example of the SDK taking in account the alpha channel to display proper shadows (all though I don't really like the grass clumps they have in Gira. Even in CryEngine they look too fake):


But alas, as I stated above, there is no way to compile the game engine with your own HUD or UI design at this time. That is for a later build for them to put out. No word on when that will be. I imagine the people at CryTek figured most people would be very busy making their stuff for now, and in truth, building from scratch is a LOT harder than what I have been doing.

Unreal on the other hand has collision issues. Here is a pic showing the collider mesh for the Gira Canyon. This picture is showing you how the SDK is drawing the collision, as a box around the mesh. If you were to link in and try to walk around, you'd fall through. That's because the collision face is way up in the air:



If you want proper collision, you have to cut the mesh up into individual parts and apply the collision that way. Here is the Rock bridge we use to go over the lava chasam, as you can see, the collision on it fits just fine:


So collisions in Unreal with complex objects can be tedious. CryEngine uses it's Material on objects to set collisions (everything is wrapped in a exact way).

So what does all this prove?
Well, the only thing I really set out to prove was that you could take assets from Uru, and put them into a modern SDK, and still make it look kick-butt. You don't have to rebuild anything. These are the original Meshes and original textures. I only had to change the textures format (Tiff for CryEngine and TGA for Unreal), and make Normal Maps for each (just a few clicks with GIMP and it's Normal Map plugin). That porting it over to another game engine is not as hard as you might think.

Of course it doesn't change anything, since technically, you can't legally port over all the MOUL content to another game engine (you'd have to go underground with that). It also shows that it's possible to have real 3D moving game, but with Riven quality rendering. Something that I've shown Mark (yah, his jaw dropped at the videos and screen shots), and hinted heavily at about a "Riven Remake" heheheheheh. But of course I wouldn't hold my breath on that. Without funding, etc, etc, etc, etc.

And of course I don't think there are too many here that are interested in creating a new type of MOUL (Mark II that is, "Loosely Based On" ) MMO using one of these SDK's since many here are understandably very loyal to Plasma (all that time invested into it, and it's open sourced, so of course I understand that).

But it is a shame to see how wonderful looking these SDK's making things, but just about all that I talk to on the forums for each are busy making FPS's.......so who has time to admire the scenery or read a journal? You'll get fragged!

I am putting feelers out at their forums however. Maybe I can get some interest generated. Be a damn shame to let something like this go to waste.

[Lontahv]

Andy, I think it's really neat what you're doing, but I can't lie, I think the lighting in Uru looks much better. Gira already has shadows and dynamic lighting and it looks better than it does in the new engine. Gira almost looks like SecondLife in your screenshot (albeit the better-looking parts of SecondLife).

"This" Show Spoiler

vs
This:
http://www.mystwear.com/graphics/Eder_Gira/