Sea Titans - Pirate Theme Survival/RPG

[Captain Murphy]

I finally got the new player controller, motor, and swimming (WOO!) working. We want the player to be able to swim and dive underwater to find things, so the controller had to be pretty specific. When also realizing that ships move a bit funny in games you will quickly understand why the characters are usually 'locked' to a certain position when moving.

It may not look like much, but this is like 20 hours of work! Disregard that it is a capsule, it is just representing the character itself before adding in animations, IK, etc.

You can go anywhere on the islands (barring certain angles to climb).

You can stand around and watch the sunsets and rises while listening to the waves and wind.

If you are lucky you may find a test vessel to look at.

You can even take your capsule for a night time dip (clothes optional).

 

[Pieter Boelen]

I'm not sure I understand the specifics, but I do understand that "looking simple" and "being simple" are most definitely not the same thing!
Sounds to me like you managed some impressive feats.

 

[Dat Scharger]

That's some really weird dude you got there.

I wonder if you include him as some unlockable.

 

[Captain Murphy]

Well I almost burned the entire weekend doing work on the game, but actually made decent progress.

• Fixed jitter during world shift (floating point origin shift)
• Fixed jitter of sky during world shift
• Cleaned up world load/unload code to smear the function over multiple frames
• Fixed several issues with array size and location for node tiles
• Updated the node tracking class to accept Int32. The world is now up to 2,147,483,647 squared.
• Added new events to allow hooking into the world node loading
• Added new textures for land masses, more detail and prepping for a different shader for terrains
• Added a new vegetation system that allows for super dense foliage

The world jitter was the largest time sink. When the world streams in a new node (island tile) I was able to make that seamless for the player as it is now spread out over multiple frames so it doesn't try to load too much at one time. The real problem always came when the world moved under the player to keep the area within floating point bounds. There was always a slight blip when it happened. I spend a number of hours chasing down the tiny differences in the vector points to eventually get it looking near seamless. I could then move on to some more fun things like adding dynamic vegetation!

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Wow, sounds like you managed to crack one helluva difficult nut there!!

 

[Captain Murphy]

This might end up soiling some shorts...

 

[Captain Murphy]

Wiring in a low poly but high fidelity character model into the character controller/motor. I think this is going to take the most time as there are lots of animations to get wired into different states and velocities. Should be fun!

 

[Pieter Boelen]

This just keeps getting better and better!

 

[Captain Murphy]

Character now has a house on the beach under construction!

 

[Captain Murphy]

DOWNLOAD

The first download is available. Simple setup of walking the player through to a new game setup, then letting them pick the size and density of the world and explore it. There are currently a limited number of tiles, so the world is not super 'different' but it does function as it stands and will be getting a lot of updates over the next couple of weeks.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

DOWNLOAD

The first download is available. Simple setup of walking the player through to a new game setup, then letting them pick the size and density of the world and explore it. There are currently a limited number of tiles, so the world is not super 'different' but it does function as it stands and will be getting a lot of updates over the next couple of weeks.

Congratulations on this first public milestone!!

 

[Dat Scharger]

Considering the scope of the game, a ship of the line is a bit large for the world. More than likely we will evaluate our ships as they grow but so far going just to a 3 masted ship (roughly sloop of war size) is probably the max.

Aaaw, not even galleons? .__.

 

[Captain Murphy]

Aaaw, not even galleons? .__.

The ship the player has is going to be something of a 'home away from home' so there will be decent sized vessels, but we don't want to go too large until far into the game as it makes the balance of resources and storage too easy.

Here is an example of the styling we are leaning toward.

So I did a bit of math this morning to get some idea how large the world really was, or could be, depending on how large the player makes it. If we make a couple of assumptions, primarily that a ship will make somewhere in the whereabouts of 7-10 knots (3-5m/s) and a world is 20 x 100 tiles then it would be a distance of approximately 51 km from corner to corner. At max speed of 10kn it would take the player 2.83 hours to make it from corner to corner, barring anything getting in the way (like pirates, merchants, towns, quests, etc).

As we add in more content and biomes the world limit will slowly increase to allow for ever more complex and massive world building. Currently the actual storage and saving system can allow for a size of in32 x int32, so that means a world could theoretically be 2,147,483,648 x 2,147,483,648 tiles, with each tile being 500m x 500m, so a world could be 1,073,741,824km x 1,073,741,824km, or roughly 3 billion times more surface than the entire earth. Oops, kinda overdid that one.

 

[Captain Murphy]

Update on the world loading/rendering.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Currently the actual storage and saving system can allow for a size of in32 x int32, so that means a world could theoretically be 2,147,483,648 x 2,147,483,648 tiles, with each tile being 500m x 500m, so a world could be 1,073,741,824km x 1,073,741,824km, or roughly 3 billion times more surface than the entire earth. Oops, kinda overdid that one.

 

[Homo eructus]

Here is an example of the styling we are leaning toward.

Nice! This is how a proper stylized/cartoony ship should look like and not those abominations from Sea of Thieves

 

[Captain Murphy]

Here is an early game vs late game ship concept.

Player ship concepts.

 

[con20or]

Looks and sounds great - downloading on itch now. This is from the same team developing Tides of War (i have that in my itch library too). Is this a new generation of ToW or totally different game?

 

[Captain Murphy]

Looks and sounds great - downloading on itch now. This is from the same team developing Tides of War (i have that in my itch library too). Is this a new generation of ToW or totally different game?

This is a totally different game. ToW is on hold while we work on more assets for it. Let's just say good ship models are hard to come by. We could use less quality ones but don't want to settle for them.

 

[Captain Murphy]

The last of the low poly stuff should be out soon. Tonight started with wiring in the character system (UMA) which will allow us to create a wild variety of NPC's and let us add in custom character functions as well, so that the player can design and build the character how they want. For now I am spending my time wiring all of the controller items up to the model and animations, once that is functional it will be time to get back to working on the save/load system of the world.