Airborn is an Action Adventure based in a fantastic world on flying islands eons after the world has collapsed from overexploitation. You will start exploring this world through the eyes of Piño a boy who wants to become a messenger one day. UDK Demo hitting the Web in Spring 2010.
its update time
(view original)
Post a comment
Description
brand new update on our environmental modules.
Very awesome as always. Keep up the marvelous work!
Beautifully done. As always one of the best stuff - judged artistically - I have ever seen.
Looking at the rocks it's the first time for a small critic. Having such a huge complex structure made of relatively small parts makes the whole appearance a bit boring and generic. There are no visual highlights. Try to give the eye more interesting variation and vary more the size and shape of the rocks. It's better to have a small number of giant parts which define the core of the rock visually and play around with the smaller parts for completion.
By the way where are the dandelions?
while you are right on the bigger scale of the rocks, we still have production times to think of, a smaller scale version gives us much more flexibility for the creation of islands. You have to keep in mind that we have to user our Modulesystems to build a hell lot of islands and not just this one with unique shapes. The whole system has to be flexible enough to create not only large partions at once but also smaller scale details for ramps, tight corners and such.
If you look more closely you'll even recognize how often pieces repeat ;)
In spite it's a pity loosing visual quality at the rocks which are - you said it yourself - an element which carries the whole world in your game. There is nothing wrong about having modules and repeating them. My advice is the creation of a small number of bigger modules which can be repeated as you do it with the smaller ones. The effort would be small but the result, the positive impact on the visual quality, enormous.
while of course i have to agree, keep in mind that the rocks have been made with the 3rd person player perspective as a goal, not such a wide angle you will not see when in ground gameplay. I understand you claim and agre to it to a certain degree, i think the graphical quality doesn't suffer that much to be exchanged for less flexibilty. We have to keep a lot of things in mind, one of which also is the texture budget, the player perspective, the time we can invest in each locations and such. Though i think allowing some scaling of the rocks with a clever detailpass in the shader should be doable to have a bit more variety in bigger walls.
In my opinion it's the right decision. Often the small things make the big difference.
When I have understood your plan of the game right you are able to fly from isle to isle. So you will often see the rocks from a bigger distance. Every time you will head to an isle the variation of the size of the rocks will pay off visually.
its not sure yet how we will implement the sky, it is likely that we are doing more lowpoly representations of the islands, as you will not be able to stop and hover anyways. So giving them some rougher shapes shoukd be no problem for the flight.