Project Eternity - Update #49: Water, Trees, Day/Night, Lighting

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Odsidian promised they would release a video showing some gameplay elements and they have delivered. I think it looks beautiful. Whats your opinion?
Welcome. Today's update is a big one, though not by volume of text. Today we’re showing you our game in action. Specifically, we're showing what we've been doing for our exterior environments. The Infinity Engine games were known for their art, and we wanted to hit the high standard of visual quality established by games like the Icewind Dale series. We also wanted to introduce dynamic elements into the environment that were mostly absent from the classic games, like dynamic water, movement in foliage, and dynamic lighting of the scene.

In a 2D game, this required our programmers and artists to come up with some creative solutions. What they came up with surprised us initially and it continues to amaze us. While we are still working on refining some of the dynamic elements, we're very happy with the progress we've been able to make and hope you feel the same way. Special thanks to Hector Espinoza, our lead environment artist, and Michael Edwards, our rendering programmer, who did a lot of amazing work to bring this environment to life.

Thanks go to WorstUsernameEver from GB.


More information.
 
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Looks amazing. I'm very impressed by what we've seen so far of the unity engine (Wasteland 2, Torment, Project Eternity, etc).
 
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Aye I really like this. I watched it this morning. Finally, for the first time in ages, have a line up of games I want to play - Project Eternity, DD: Original Sin, and the new Torment game. Course they are all down the road but I can still play the death out of Skyrim till then :)
 
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fantasy rpg galore. bleah. We'll surely puke our guts out. But hey, we needed it to move on. move on !
 
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Looks absolutely gorgeous. While Fantasy isn't my top choice of RPG setting either, if it's done it should look like this!
 
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I think the water spray effect at the bottom of the waterfall looks a little off - a bit repetitive and bland. But that's only criticism I can think of. Love the video!

It's fantastic to finally see the working character models as well. The sense of scale is amazing. I hope it's possible to zoom out that far in the game and it's not just a demonstration for the sake of this video.
 
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I think the water spray effect at the bottom of the waterfall looks a little off - a bit repetitive and bland. But that's only criticism I can think of. Love the video!

Yeah, that and some of the motion blur is a little too obvious. Otherwise it's marvelous: I watched it over and over to catch all the details. I might not be able to play the game because I'll be too busy looking at all the sights… :)
 
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Looks good - did notice some skipping with the animation (cyclic) and a rather unnatural swaying of bushes, but hopefully they can make foliage animation a bit better. I guess they're just doing an obvious layered render using billboards and blending. They'd probably have to dynamically modify the billboards or have many small billboards to allow for great 'realism'. But to be honest, I have yet to see any game (even 3D) which nicely animates trees or foliage. In most the trees sway in time…like a metronome… kind of hypnotic :p
 
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wow, that is incredible. I am super impressed. This game could sell really well I think. I will be picking it up for sure.
 
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Very nice… I'm feeling pretty good about my $150 pledge now. :)

BTW, I just realized that I've spent over $1K in the past year on a dozen Kickstarter games with nothing to show for it; You know what they say about a fool and his money.
 
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Dude… well whatever brings you happiness. :) My total is nowhere near that: $200 or so. But I've enjoyed the process and feel like I'm promoting the hobby.
 
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Does anyone else think - "so what"? What I want to see is some interesting areas to explore and combat tactics and party control for them.


Yeah that's kind of the way I felt. Don't get me wrong it looks nice but lighting and water splashing are the last reasons I backed this game.

Since its a kickstarter though I'm sure they feel obligated to put out information regularly no matter how small it is.
 
A little more info from Josh Sawyer regarding the video. Source: Obsidian forum post

To answer a few comments and questions that have come up in the thread:

* The baked-in 2D lighting will not shift with time of day. This is an acceptable trade-off in our opinion because the shadows can be very high quality and it puts no burden on the system. We really do want this game to look great and run well on a large spectrum of systems, so we want to be careful about processor-intensive lighting operations.

* Dynamic objects (like the characters) can cast dynamic shadows. We are already exploring how we want additional dynamic lights in the scene to a) light the objects and b) affect their shadows.

* There are some known character animation glitches we weren't able to work out before we finalized the demo. Our idle is very subtle right now; it will be more pronounced and include fidget animations in the future. The walk animation is also new and hasn't been tweaked much. Finally, there is some odd blurring/artifacting that appears in the compressed videos of the characters, which is why the walk cycle seems to have a blur/stutter in it. That doesn't appear in game.

* The scene where the characters enter the scene and the sabre guy walks across the creek is our current default zoom level. We currently control zoom on the mouse wheel. It can get closer than what's in the demo and as far out as the "wide" shots, so you have a lot of flexibility there.

* We are still experimenting with the tree, grass, and bush animations. Our goal is for them to look natural but add life. If they are distracting/odd or too still, that doesn't work.

Thanks for all of your feedback.
 
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Is this afaik the first time zoom was confirmed?
 
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I haven't read a confirmation on zooming before at least. Happy that it's in, especially since we can zoom out quite far. Not a big fan of "zooming" that is barely even noticable.
 
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Looks pretty cool! Almost unbelievable it's a 2D environment. I wonder though, if they have to pre-render this stuff in 3D to produce the baked-in lighting, do they really maintain the advantages of doing a 2D game?
 
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