Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzzf_JgcMKhhMCQbp4Y960AFacebook https://www.facebook.com/theLastOfTheAmbaras/?ref=aymt_homepage_panelHi Guys
This project swallowed countless hours now and i felt its time to present it and get some feedback. There is much to say, so i will structure this post into some subtitles so you can scrolls through and read the passages you are interested in. If you want a more in depth explanation of some aspect, I will extend the text later.
But a picture is worth a thousand words so you may start on my YouTube channel. I recently released a first DevLog. This thread will lack screenshots because anything visible I want to present at the moment can be seen there.
DevLog: - FIRST OF ALL: WHAT IS LAST OF THE AMBARAS?
It's a 2D RPG game in a completely new fantasy world, based on my own lore and my own rules. I dont want to leave many words about story now,
because there is still no story implemented in the game (its all in my head and written on paper), but let me give you a short introduction.
The empires Vaugaloth and Nagrond are ruled by two of the oldest families of the known world. The Ambaras reign in Venthal, in the Crystalline Citadel and in the present, the lost most of the power they had in old times. There are just a few of them left and thats what gives the game its title. On the other side of the Grey Sea reside the Cravacus, a proud house which emphazies honor and traditions. There is an old hatred between these families and it needs just a small stumbling block to newly inflame the war between them. When you enter this world, it seems that this little rock suddenly has fallen...
- HISTORY
Spring 2014, I just started to devolop a game, quite planless, since I just wanted to do some cool stuff with the things I learned in university.
Up to Fall 2014, I build a prototype of my game in Java, starting with a simple console-text-RPG up to some cheap mouse-drawn assets and a little guy i could controle with my keys. I noticed my pleasure creating video games during this time, so I decided to create some serious concepts based on my own game-expirience up to this point. I painted many assets with a graphics-tablet for a game that was just in my head, but I never put by this hobby, so it evolved over time.
Finally since january this year I code in C++ using SFML. I did a complete redesign of my Java code, starting with a tough core-engine, wrote a main-loop with clean timestep, set up asset-managers and I racked my brain about efficient resource handling and XML-parsing. The first time of coding was quiet hard, because I came from Java my C++ expierience was outdated and additionally writing the raw base of an engine is not very exciting at all. But practice makes perfect, thats for sure.
- ENGINE
Lovely called Ungod-Engine after my name. I tried to build my code as generic as possible, though I dont think I will use the engine for stuff other than this game in the next years. But genererally I think its useful to stay as generic as possible, so you may can use the same code for multible purposes.
In its core, my engine works as almost every other engine too, so I dont want to leave many words about that here. Its based on a entity system and mainly uses a quad-tree to store world-content.
The quad tree is one of my favorite data-structures when handling 2D content, and its due to him, that my open world-concept works as intended. During update (especially collision-detection) and rendering process, the engine just retrieves the entities that are around (or directly on) the screen in an efficient way, instead of iterating over vectors of millions of pointers.
- WORLD
The Game takes place in a huge open world. My goal is to realize this without loading times at all to ensure REAL open world feeling. So how is this done? Currently my worldmap is just a single quad tree, which can indeed store a huge open world map, but 500k trees loaded independent from the distance to the player, can easyly fill the RAM. To solve this problem I came up with this: The world will be seperated in chunks. You can see them as squares in the 2D space. All entities in a chunk can be stored in a xml-file on the hard drive and the engine just loads the chunk containing the player and the 8 chunks surrounding this chunk. Every chunk will has its own quad-tree with entities. By storing a pointer to the currently visited chunks, its possible to efficiently retrieve the only world data relevant at this point: Those which is near the player. When entering a new chunk, the engine will automatically deallocate the memory from old chunks and will load new chunks in a seperate thread. This way I get a huge open world with dynamic chunk management and no loading screens at all. At least thats the future plan.
What about world design? Well the plan is, to procedurally generate a huge open world map (based on the chunk system explained before) and fill it with random content. The editor is now a tool to handcraft the content of a chunk and i will use it for example to create fixed cities in the random world.
(some points comming soon)
5. Inventory/Items/Skills
6. Enemy-AI (finite state mashines)
7. Art (not about coding at all)
8. Editor
9. GUI
10. Sound
I think thats enough for an initial post. I will extend the text with code if you want, but at this time its hard to say what could be an interesting while at the same time short and pregnant code passage to present.
So long ~Ungod
