[Development] Island Survival - Sandbox Survival Game

[Kazeon]

- Intro -
Hello everyone! It's time for the public testing of my game, Island Survival. I developed it within the last two months (more or less) as part of my assignment of a thesis program. Also as other part of it, I'm required to hold a public testing and to gather some feedback about my game. So I need you guys to test it out and give me some feedback in form of a questionnaire (link below).

---

- LINKS -

Game download links (412 MB):
- Mirror 1 - Google Drive

Link to the questionnaire: LINK​

---

Complete Presentation: (Webpage)

Hardware Recommendation:
- RAM: 8GB
- VGA: NVidia Geforce GTX 950M
- CPU: Intel Core i-7, 3.6Ghz
- Available Disk Space: 712 MB

Software Requirements:
- OS: Windows 7/8/8.1/10/Vista
- DirectX 11+​

---

- Media -

 

[Kazeon]

Hello everyone! It's now time for the public testing! I've updated the main post, check it out!

 

[GhostWolf]

I don't know exactly what type of feedback you want.
Take everything I write on face value, it doesn't devalue your effort in any way, and you have a working game prototype, not something many of us can say.

1. The loading screen is long. If it's doing some procedural random generation, that's fine, but show some kind of progress to the user! If the level is static, I don't see a reason why it should be this long.
   
2. The game is VERY laggy on my high-end machine (albeit by today maybe it's more medium-high range), and the graphics quality does not show it. Are you properly instancing materials and shaders?
3. The footsteps sound as if they are practically on my left and right ears, rather than being a meter and a half below, it's very distracting and annoying to the ears.
4. The walk mechanism seems to store velocity up to a threshold gradually, and then it is burnt gradually when there is no input. This makes for movements that feel very unresponsive.
   
5. What on earth is that jump sound???
6. I jumped on one random rock and instantly found an invisible wall.
7. You can very easily get the velocity-storing bug that you see used in most speed runs of games. It happened to me randomly while again jumping around rocks, where I collide with them while jumping, and then the next jump I suddenly get thrown forward with lots of velocity that was stored. It happened so fast that I didn't even get what the exact trigger was.
8. Momentum seems to not be kept when dropping off edges. While very common in 2D old school platformers, not exactly fitting a 3D first person game.
9. It's very easy to get yiffy collision responses that make you jiggle around, rather than clean stops, when colliding with multiple polygons, e.g. by rubbing against a wall.
   
10. The blur that is applied in water is still applied when swimming with the camera out of the water.
11. The transition between the water shader and the outside shader both takes a long time to take effect, and is instant, which makes for an awkward visual. Consider some gradual transition between them (e.g. the usual water dripping down the camera).
12. In general there are no transitions between animations and rotations. Crouching, elk that instantly rotate to face you...
13. I lost health from jumping from a 1 meter high rock.
14. A wolf didn't notice me until I literally touched him. He wasn't facing me, so I don't know if it's just based on a cone of vision, or something else.

I didn't go into actually testing the crafting system, but the UI and such looked good from a quick glance.

 

[Kazeon]

Hey, thank you so much for testing and the feedback! But I prefer you to help me with this little questionnaire because it's quite important
Island Survival Questionnaire

So regarding to your feedback:

The loading screen is long. If it's doing some procedural random generation, that's fine, but show some kind of progress to the user! If the level is static, I don't see a reason why it should be this long.

It was preloading all animated textures. Most of texture has dimension of at least 2048 x 2048 px that's why it takes some times to finish. It'd only happen the first time you play the game btw.

The game is VERY laggy on my high-end machine (albeit by today maybe it's more medium-high range), and the graphics quality does not show it. Are you properly instancing materials and shaders?

The game was built for high spec computers. But in the very last moment I managed to add the setting menu to optimize the game performance. Have you tried accessing it? Make sure everything is at the lowest.

The game is very heavy because of some facts, like immense island size (more than 10.000km² (explore-able), actual size is 25.000km²). Total of 35.000 units of trees and foliages (6.500 of them are interactible). And there are more than 200 animals. It's not like I haven't optimized it tho, well, I have, a lot of them. But Unity just wasn't natively meant to handle that amount of objects. It'd require extra optimization techniques like terrain clustering, etc. Which would take some times to achieve.

The footsteps sound as if they are practically on my left and right ears, rather than being a meter and a half below, it's very distracting and annoying to the ears.

I'll improve it later!

• I jumped on one random rock and instantly found an invisible wall.

• You can very easily get the velocity-storing bug that you see used in most speed runs of games. It happened to me randomly while again jumping around rocks, where I collide with them while jumping, and then the next jump I suddenly get thrown forward with lots of velocity that was stored. It happened so fast that I didn't even get what the exact trigger was.

I'll look into that.

Momentum seems to not be kept when dropping off edges. While very common in 2D old school platformers, not exactly fitting a 3D first person game.

It prevents player from climbing up cliffs.

It's very easy to get yiffy collision responses that make you jiggle around, rather than clean stops, when colliding with multiple polygons, e.g. by rubbing against a wall.

Yes, the movement needs a lot of works.

The blur that is applied in water is still applied when swimming with the camera out of the water.

That's a very strange bug. It's probably due to low frame rate.

In general there are no transitions between animations and rotations. Crouching, elk that instantly rotate to face you...

Yes, there's not yet.

A wolf didn't notice me until I literally touched him. He wasn't facing me, so I don't know if it's just based on a cone of vision, or something else.

Yes animals have their own vision and hunger. They won't attack you if not hungry.

Thanks again for testing it out! But please consider to answer the questionnaire.

 

[GhostWolf]

Look at it like this - my hardware can very easily run Crysis on the highest settings at 60FPS. While Crysis isn't the heaviest game (as much as it was hyped to be), I think you can agree with me that its graphics are more advanced than yours. Your game seems to run for me at ~20-25FPS (just based on the feeling, didn't actually test it) on medium settings at best.

I have some experience with UDK and UE4, but not really with Unity.
Still, most concepts are shared.
Due to culling, it doesn't generally matter if there are 500k trees if I only see 30 of them.
Instancing materials and shaders is something that people seem to not know about for some reason, while being a huge performance consideration. Are you using it?

I really can't see anything else that could hurt performance that much. Even if your shaders would be ridiculously complex, with the amount of polygons rendered to the screen, I doubt the shaders will ever become a bottleneck, unless you are doing some extremely complex deferred rendering not yet seen in any game.

About loading - if you are generating things that's fine, but consider showing the user some sign of life.

I don't understand the response about falling off edges - if I run and fall off a wall, I expect to keep my momentum and go forward, it's very weird to suddenly completely halt and fall straight down. I am not sure how that's related to climbing on edges.

 

[GhostWolf]

Just for clarification - I cannot think of anything else rendering-wise that will hurt performance so much.
Obviously there's also the logic side, which I know nothing about, but again, cannot be at this point more complex than AAA games that easily run at 60FPS on my computer.

 

[Kazeon]

AAA games must have been optimized for years by team of highly experienced developers, while mine is only two months old developed by me only (this game didn't exist two months ago), and the time is running out. I've done what I can do to optimize the game in the very last moments, but obviously there are still A LOT of things needing improvements. But as matter of fact, before optimization, in my PC the game also runs at 20-22 FPS at lowest setting, but now it runs at 45 - 55 FPS.

Try disabling the skybox, it costs a lot of performance (it's not mine btw).

 

[Kazeon]

Due to culling, it doesn't generally matter if there are 500k trees if I only see 30 of them.

I have experimented with it a little bit also, and you are right. But then the fact is, it's not a problem of rendering that's causing the poor performance. Instead, in Unity, number of objects simply affect performance a lot even if those objects literally do nothing (like those trees in my game).

 

[GhostWolf]

You are presuming things that can be disproved quite easily - people have made big games with Unity with plenty of objects, and they work fine.
In the same way culling culls off rendering, it also culls off things like updating objects.
The engine uses some form of scene graph for this.
This is all standard game engine stuff.

I keep pointing at instancing because that is something that, at least in the case of UE4, was sadly up to the developer rather than the engine.
That is, instancing should be the ONLY way to make materials and shaders, but instead you get the choice (and indeed in UE4's case, this was actually the more straightforward choice!) to create a separate material and shader for every tiny object, and performance goes down to the floor.

If objects do nothing, they do nothing. Why would you assume they take any sort of significance in processing time?

I would suggest you to actually profile the game and see what takes time, but I have absolutely no idea how that works with a game engine.
Probably like it would work for any C++ application, I guess.

Again, for the given level of detail, be it polygons, textures, animations, amounts of objects, and so on, your game should definitely run at 60FPS.
It's not like Unity was born yesterday, it's a mature game engine.

 

[Kazeon]

If objects do nothing, they do nothing. Why would you assume they take any sort of significance in processing time?

Because I have proved it? When I disabled those objects the FPS explodes to >60 FPS? When I disable their scripts it didn't affect the performance any slightest bit?

You are presuming things that can be disproved quite easily - people have made big games with Unity with plenty of objects, and they work fine.
In the same way culling culls off rendering, it also culls off things like updating objects.
The engine uses some form of scene graph for this.
This is all standard game engine stuff.

In Unity there are two kind of objects, static and non-static. If I set my objects to static the FPS will explode but then it'd not be interactible. I'd be very very very impressed to see a game (made with unity) with large world size and with thousands of interactible objects runs at 60 FPS, without spending a lot of money buying AAA quality optimization assets from the asset store.

I'd take a look into that "instancing". But fyi, for objects, I don't use any particular shader other than standard Unity shaders.

 

[GhostWolf]

 

[Kazeon]

Sorry I don't have times to watch the whole video. It seems to run smooth indeed. But are all the trees interactible (can be chopped down)? Does it have day night cycle? Just asking.

Forget what I said, setting the object to static does not help, it only affects build time.

 

[GhostWolf]

Objects being static is just for some rendering and pathing optimizations, but shouldn't be a complete game changer.
The Unity docs themselves say you should NOT use static objects for forests (memory vs performance), this is not an issue.
There is a really big bottleneck somewhere for some reason. Without profiling only guesses can be made.

 

[Kazeon]

You are right. I did some more diggings and found out that the skybox could use some optimizations. I also have implemented region clustering for rock objects and animals (it was only done for trees). I'm not sure if it will introduce new bugs since the implementation was kind of rushed lol
Anyway, an update is incoming...

 

[Kazeon]

Okay, updated. Here is the new download link: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1wS4bGEGqzYnUvNVCXMhHKcrPKI847GcL

In short it includes a number of major optimizations. It shouldn't be so bad now.

 

[GhostWolf]

It runs a lot better.

I tested the different settings and checked the GPU and CPU utilization.
The computer worked more or less the same amount when all settings were on lowest or highest.
The only thing that made a difference is lowering the resolution.
This might mean you are pixel bound, but to get that you'd need some really complex pixel shaders, or a whole lot of over-rendering, which I don't see any evidence for. Pretty odd.
If I were you, I'd try just having the built-in objects, and disable things like the skybox (since you said that's an external script).

Speaking of the skybox, I have no idea what its shader is doing, but it's very pixel-y when you look around, and only looks good when the camera stops moving.

Consider even using the simple built-in stats, if you don't want to actually profile.
Unity - Manual: Rendering Statistics Window

 

[Kazeon]

It runs a lot better.

Good to hear!

The computer worked more or less the same amount when all settings were on lowest or highest.

I think it can make noticeable impact on lower-spec PC. Well, it does in my (other) low spec PC.

If I were you, I'd try just having the built-in objects, and disable things like the skybox (since you said that's an external script).

You can disable the skybox via setting menu btw. When it's unchecked, the skybox will be completely deactivated.

Speaking of the skybox, I have no idea what its shader is doing, but it's very pixel-y when you look around, and only looks good when the camera stops moving.

I lowered the quality a lot. I will add "skybox quality" option to the setting menu in further versions.

You seem to know a lot about rendering and shader related stuff. And I'm very interested to learn some of those, especially shaders. I should learn some from you. Are you familiar with making shaders on your own?

 

[GhostWolf]

Of course the settings will affect a lower spec computer, what I meant to show is that the problem is not with the settings being high or not, because I get the same slowness regardless of the settings, and indeed, the same average CPU and GPU usage.
A thing to note - the GPU is always 100% busy, again regardless of settings or what is viewed, unless the resolution is lowered.
Since I tried with the skybox disabled, as the rest of the settings, I guess it's not it, although I am not sure why a skybox should be expensive, are you not simply tiling a texture and translating its coordinates or something similar?
I will stress again that you should profile the game!

I don't have that much experience with game engines, just worked on a small part of a game in UDK and UE4, but I do indeed have experience with writing graphics code.

 

[Kazeon]

Of course the settings will affect a lower spec computer, what I meant to show is that the problem is not with the settings being high or not, because I get the same slowness regardless of the settings, and indeed, the same average CPU and GPU usage.
A thing to note - the GPU is always 100% busy, again regardless of settings or what is viewed, unless the resolution is lowered.
Since I tried with the skybox disabled, as the rest of the settings, I guess it's not it, although I am not sure why a skybox should be expensive, are you not simply tiling a texture and translating its coordinates or something similar?
I will stress again that you should profile the game!

I don't have that much experience with game engines, just worked on a small part of a game in UDK and UE4, but I do indeed have experience with writing graphics code.

I will dig into that further later.

For now, graduating the university is my main focus. I'm still confused how on earth am I supposed to get 30 feedback?! LOL! That's the minimum requirement btw. It's been running for days but even at this point I still have ZERO response on the questionnaire. But that's typical hive anyway, can barely ever be anything helpful even on smallest request (at least to me that is). LOL

Well, exception for you of course. The game is now much more playable thanks to you!
I will be sure to come back and reach you when it's time for me to learn some graphic related stuff
Anyway, thank you again for helping me. So much appreciated! See ya!

 

[GhostWolf]

I absolutely don't care about that fake questionnaire that exists to prove nothing and is only needed for professors that have no idea how the world works, nor do many people probably even visit the game dev forum or download 400MB unknown executables

I can fill it with nonsense, if that's yet again the important thing of so called higher education, rather than knowledge...

That being said, if all you want is to get fake feedback as you are required to, just let your relatives fill it or something?

If you want real feedback, post it in some legit game dev forum, but I am assuming (and indeed, hoping) any actual game dev will answer you like I did, with information and suggestions, and not some lame required questionnaire that's devoid of any meaning.

I'd write all of this in the questionnaire itself, but I doubt any kind of professor actually looks at the answers for even one second.

/Edit
Actually I just now really read all of the open questions, and that thing boils my blood just due to how IRRELEVANT it is.

 

[Evil92]

Hey, i just went ahead and tested your game aswell.

First things first. Thats a really nice game you created there. I think you earned some praise.
Obviously it does have some similarities with other survival type games like Ark Survival, Rust and so on, and that is completely fine.

Second, I can not and will not provide feedback on how you can improve your game code wise but I do have some suggestions if you want to
implement some quality of life stuff.

I do like the general feeling (I do play survival type games rather often and do have a few thousand hours in ark) and you do have a solid basis
to work with. Your snapping is so much better than the existing snapping system in Ark for example. Sadly with snapping in general the creativity
of how to build stuff "freely" will suffer but that is to be expected.

Pathing of Animals is rather clunky and I think that is a hard part to get smooth aswell. Animals tend to turn in one quick motion (doesnt matter
which side you are attacking from) and they straight up face you and start attacking. They do get stuck aswell and might even vanish under rocks.
That aside, I know that you created the game as a single person and you do have limited resources aswell.

A few other things are:
1. If you are running with torch you can see the outline of the sea
2. If you want to implement some quality of life services, hovering above items in the craft menu to see what they need to craft aswell as
being able to use hotkeys when hovering above items to use them would be very nice
3. sounds like eating should have a cooldown if you spamm them (berry spamming is rather bad for my eardrums)
4. Like Ghostwolf already said walking feels unresponsive
5. You can place structures beneath foundations if you spamm click and move mouse (sometimes it lets you see a green outline for a splitsecond)
6. Plants can spawn inside house

Performance wise:
I did run the game on full settings, everything on max. My GPU reached 55°C and the game was super smooth. Build a little house about 5x5, did
some mining / gathering and killed a few things - although i died from bears and hyenas
Im currently using a R9 290X (sapphire tri oc) with 4GB gddr5 GPU

Questionnaire stuff:
When designing questionnaires it is very important to follow a few guidelines since people tend to not answer them.
The most important thing is anonymity! I cannot stress that enough. Always include a paragraph where you say that you will not give the data provided in your
questionnaire to third parties and that names are not used in your thesis.

If you are designing questionnaires in the future you might want to read the following source (I am currently working on my bachelors thesis aswell
and am dependend on people answering offline questionnaires)

The source is:
Dörnyei, Z. & Taguchi, T. (2010). Questionnaires in Second Language Research. Construction, Administration, and Processing (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge.

Dont mind the "second language research" stuff. The first 50-100 pages are the most important ones. You might want to skim them somewhen if that helps you.

Once you replied and assured me that the data from the questionnaire is not given to others and names are anonymised, I will go ahead and fill out the form.

Edit: It might also be worth a shot to go to the several existing WC3 or survival game discord servers and just pop a link to this thread. Some people might pick up interest in testing a free game.

 

[Kazeon]

@GhostWolf, well, I'm doing this just for formality. And actually I know how to make good questions. I made 20 of them but then when my prof evaluated it, she asked me to remove 17 of those, so only 3 were left... And those are the ones with shortest answers LMAO
She said people won't bother to answer bloated questions and now I see her point. Even with such simple questions people doesn't bother to spare their time for it, let alone a serious questionnaire.

@Evil92, first, thank you so much for testing and the feedback!

I do like the general feeling (I do play survival type games rather often and do have a few thousand hours in ark) and you do have a solid basis
to work with. Your snapping is so much better than the existing snapping system in Ark for example. Sadly with snapping in general the creativity
of how to build stuff "freely" will suffer but that is to be expected.

Hehe me too! I played Ark for so long too! Well, I'm glad to hear that! I wasn't sure if the snapping system has anything good in it, but I'm glad if you think so. teehe~

Pathing of Animals is rather clunky and I think that is a hard part to get smooth aswell. Animals tend to turn in one quick motion (doesnt matter
which side you are attacking from) and they straight up face you and start attacking. They do get stuck aswell and might even vanish under rocks.
That aside, I know that you created the game as a single person and you do have limited resources aswell.

Yeah, it's kind of rubbish indeed. I cringed every time at how it damages the overall quality of the game. As like the other things are quite decently made, and there is this clumsy animal system that is so underdeveloped. The path finding is slow as hell also. But thank you for the understanding, it would take more times to make the smooth version of it indeed.

If you want to implement some quality of life services, hovering above items in the craft menu to see what they need to craft aswell as
being able to use hotkeys when hovering above items to use them would be very nice

Aren't those already supported? If you hover over an icon in the craft menu it will display the item's information and its crafting requirements. But for inventory hotkey, you have to right click on the icon first before using shortcut keys. But yeah, your suggestion is definitely better. I will implement it later.

3. sounds like eating should have a cooldown if you spamm them (berry spamming is rather bad for my eardrums)

Yes, but wouldn't it be even worse to eat one berry at a time whereas we have hundreds of those?
I can add a delay for the sound effect tho.

Plants can spawn inside house

Anything can spawn under house for now, there is no validation for that matter just yet.

Once you replied and assured me that the data from the questionnaire is not given to others and names are anonymised, I will go ahead and fill out the form.

Well, in the end your name will be inside a big list of respondents and I'm sure people won't even notice your name in there. Unless they are seriously observing the whole list, which is very unlikely to happen. And which answer you choose will not be visible to anyone else other than me (if I want to), but well I'm not going to read each person's answers, rather to get the statistical data of the whole questionnaire.

I will surely consider your other suggestions. Thank you again for your feedback! Great comment right there

 

[Evil92]

Aren't those already supported? If you hover over an icon in the craft menu it will display the item's information and its crafting requirements. But for inventory hotkey, you have to right click on the icon first before using shortcut keys. But yeah, your suggestion is definitely better. I will implement it later.

Oh yeah. It is implemented if you hover over the item in the crafting menu itself. Just thought for convenience if you hover over the resources and not the item itself in the crafting menu, that seeing how much of that certain resource you have would be nice.

Yes, but wouldn't it be even worse to eat one berry at a time whereas we have hundreds of those?
I can add a delay for the sound effect tho.

You should definitely be able to spam them, just some sort of cap to the sound itself. It'll be much better with some sort of delay I bet!

Well, in the end your name will be inside a big list of respondents and I'm sure people won't even notice your name in there. Unless they are seriously observing the whole list, which is very unlikely to happen. And which answer you choose will not be visible to anyone else other than me (if I want to), but well I'm not going to read each person's answers, rather to get the statistical data of the whole questionnaire.

Oh I see. We have to encode our data for our thesis so names would not be seen anywhere, just an overview of the data plus the analysis of it. But I assume thats fine anyway. I'm going to fill out the questionnaire later and maybe I get a few others to do so aswell.

Keep up the good work! I know that it is crucial to keep motivation up and frustration as low as it can be especially when programming.

 

[Kazeon]

@Evil92: Hey, thank you so much for the participation! I'm pretty busy right now, my other lecturer gave me other game project LMAO! I mean, wtf! Things are going pretty crazy here.

 

[Kazeon]

It would be great if I can get more responses on the questionnaire I really need those...

 

[Daffa]

I like the title, it reminds me of my map Island Survival, which is like 100x worse than this

Anyway, I am downloading it and will be back with a feedback soon. Surprised you're doing a thesis right now

 

[Kazeon]

I like the title, it reminds me of my map Island Survival, which is like 100x worse than this

As I noticed. But that's understatement, your map has interesting concept and surely has potential. You know, top down group survival game? I rarely see that :]

Anyway, I am downloading it and will be back with a feedback soon

Looking forward to it!

 

[Kazeon]

Hmm.. forgot to announce the update. But here it is,

DOWNLOAD LINK - Googlo Drive

Update v0.2.0:
- Night time brightness has been increased
- Optimized cloud & night sky quality and performance
- Meat objects' shadow removed
- Fixed stair building component snapping bug
- Improved UI
- Better icon for torch
- Improved (reduced) loading time but at cost of lower texture animation precision.
- Animal corpse will now last for 5 minutes (was only 30 seconds)
- Optimized palm trees colliders
- Water reflection intensity increased
- Improved item tooltips design
- Requirements to craft sword has been reduced (temporarily, for testing purpose)
- Requirements to craft bow has been reduced
- Now crafting one arrow will produce two arrows at once (with same requirements)
- Chance to trigger heavy storm weather has been reduced
- Instructions won't be displayed when placing a campfire to avoid confusion
- Now instruction displaying behavior doesn't interrupt building process
- Campfire heat bonus is reduced from 7 to 5 degrees celcius.
- Fixed bug where campfire doesn't reset player's heat bonus when destroyed
- All building components (including campfire) has been temporarily reduced
- Dead tree animation duration has been reduced for optimizations
- And many more...

 

[eejin]

I have played the game and filled in the questionnaire and have a few remarks:

You should really add a N/A option to the multiple choice questions in the questionnaire. The instruction questions weren't applicable to me since I have already player Ark extensively.

When sprinting you can't strafe as it will stop sprinting. This is really annoying.

Movement also feels a little clunky.

The player's arms are just hanging there the entire time. Perhaps lower them when not used?

It is also a direct copy of Ark Survival Evolved. Try and make the game a little more unique.

 

[Kazeon]

Thank you so much for participating!

When sprinting you can't strafe as it will stop sprinting. This is really annoying.

Actually it's inspired directly from Ark also, which only makes sense. If you can sprint while strafing you can dodge animal's attack so easily and you won't need to make better weapons.

The player's arms are just hanging there the entire time. Perhaps lower them when not used?

I tried to make thrid person camera mode, but working on the animation was not easy at all. But when it's done, that weak-looking clumsy arm will be replaced by more muscular one, and it won't hang on the screen all the time.

It is also a direct copy of Ark Survival Evolved. Try and make the game a little more unique.

Definitely. I didn't give enough time to make my own survival game idea when I submitted the game concept. So I just copied Ark, which happen to be my all time favorite game, and Ark happen to have quite a basic survival mechanism too. But as unoriginal as it is, it's still original enough as a thesis game project.

 

[Kazeon]

I decided to continue the development of this game. I'm really intrigued to work on a new game with very unique and original concept, but there's just not enough affordable assets to work with, it's not feasible at this point. So instead of doing nothing, I will just continue to work on this game, it got plenty of positive feedback anyway.

My plan now is to remake the whole island, to change the setting into a tropical island. I've also just bought a new set of animal asset containing 26 different species (with a very very good price if I may add ). I will add a lot of new area variations as well: mountain, caves, some actual rivers and waterfall, swamp with proper animal population, etc. I also added roughly 35 new variations of vegetation. I also made plenty of visual improvements, including better cloud quality and performance, better environmental effects, etc. But that's all just for the start. I'm looking forward to make a lot of other significant improvements, I got a long list of those here. And lastly, I will probably change the name of the game later.

That's just a brief let-know announcement. You probably want to visit the project page at moddb too. I will occasionally make devlog articles about important addition/improvements for the game there. Stay tuned guys...

 

[Daffa]

Glad this continues on

 

[Kazeon]

The project lives on!
I've been tweaking the game's visual like derp nerd for weeks now.
I want to showcase what I've achieved so far. Even tho some of these pics are kind of outdated and I'm too lazy to take new ones.

Anyway! Herewego!

1. Improved color scheme and post processing jobs

2. New Character (no clumsy skinny arm anymore)!

3. Ultra cloud quality!

 

[Daffa]

Nice! Is it for public soon?

 

[Kazeon]

Not quite. It will probably need several months to complete. : )

 

[Kazeon]

I just added this yesterday: a new, improved water. Made upon standard water asset, modeled after Ark's water itself.

Unlike the previous one, it has more definitive reflection, color subtraction, and depth fading. It also supports caustic field, more responsive to sun, moon, and ambient light. It's much heavier than the previous one tho (due to the reflection technique), but I'm still working on it.

Close look

Color subtraction + light reflection

 

[Kazeon]

Hey, I made some improvements into the water surface. Now it's much more realistic, and performs at stable ~35 fps (depends on scene complexity and number of rendered water surface levels). Still unable to reflect the cloud >.>

 

[eejin]

Looking good, at first glance I thought you had posted a picture. You might want to enable AA for the horizon which looks a little jagged. Keep up the good work!

 

[Kazeon]

Hey, thanks for the comment! the AA was enabled, but I only used med quality AA in that pic.

Btw, I will post some improvements again. It's still much related to the water.

1. Improved distant water color subtraction

2. Added new "wavy"-er and more realistic water bump map

3. Added underwater effect with smooth transition and distance fading
This one includes a couples of shaders I've just finished several minutes ago. I'm slowly getting devoured by the dark magic of cg programming.

 

[Cokemonkey11]

The recent screenshots really seem to improve graphics quality over time. It's a shame my PC probably can't handle it.

Over the years I have collected/played quite a few survival style games, and I can say the variance in funness/quality ranges quite a lot. I'm betting yours is pretty fun.

Good luck! I may try it out in the future.

 

[Kazeon]

The recent screenshots really seem to improve graphics quality over time. It's a shame my PC probably can't handle it.

Over the years I have collected/played quite a few survival style games, and I can say the variance in funness/quality ranges quite a lot. I'm betting yours is pretty fun.

Good luck! I may try it out in the future.

Yes, atm I'm focusing to improve it's graphic quality. And right, it's quite heavy and can use a lot of optimizations. I still have a lot to learn in order to do that. And if you are familiar with other AAA survival games, mine is still nowhere to be as fun as those, but I'm still working on it.

Thanks for the comment! And welcome back!

 

[Kazeon]

Now that I've managed to apply a new reflection technique to the water surface, I guess I will post an update here.

This new technique can reflect anything (including clouds, shadows, etc) properly, without distance limitation, and without unnecessary extra-rendering overheads. It's pretty much the same technique used in most AAA games, since it's much less costy and, in many cases, looks better than the previous one, disregard of how many water surfaces there is in the game. It has some drawbacks tho, for example some unwanted reflection artifacts and view-port related issues. But since other games tend to ignore these issues, I will do so for now.

So this is how it turns out:

Other thing worth mentioning, I also managed to make the previous reflection technique reflects the clouds. It might not look as pretty but it eliminates both issues I mentioned above (artifacts and view-port issues). So both techniques will be available for selection in the setting menu.

It's not like I just kept working on water all these times. I've also wrote a custom script to procedurally populate the island with grass and foliages. I will also later wrote similar script to populate it with trees, rocks, etc; paint terrain wetness; and so on. So completing the island will be much faster when it's done.

 

[Kazeon]

Hmm.. The new script helped me to create much more detailed environments.

Also this is the underwater effect currently looks like:

 

[eejin]

Thats looking really good! Some more underwater scenery might be nice.

 

[Kazeon]

Thats looking really good! Some more underwater scenery might be nice.

Yes, I will add corals, sea creatures, etc to populate the sea later. Thank you!

 

[Daffa]

Nice underwater effect

I'm up for more tests once I'm back.

 

[Kazeon]

Hello! Now I want to share a tool I have been developing for several weeks. It's a pack of generation tools to help me finishing up the island in "no time"! Here is a video demonstrating how it works (the workflow).

The video quality is rather disappointing despite of my effort uploading it (2.5 Gigs). But anyway, here are two more examples of environment I made with the tools.

Broadleaf Forest

Meadow

 

[KILLCIDE]

Awesome stuff! I'm a big fan of survival games.

Did you still need more people to answer the questions?

 

[Chaosy]

grass and tree models are dope.

 

[Kazeon]

Nice underwater effect

I'm up for more tests once I'm back.

The game hasn't been updated. : )

Awesome stuff! I'm a big fan of survival games.

Did you still need more people to answer the questions?

Thanks! But I don't need the questionaire anymore.
Same here. I love survival games too because of Ark.

grass and tree models are dope.

Those are just free models. The "premium" (paid) ones are multiple times better ^^