Splintered Core CRPG - Updated 6/10/10

[soggie]

Actually no, you start off as an unsold slave who's thrust into an arena to fight for your life.

The "quiet little village" is a flashback, which serves as a tutorial which is completely skippable.

Good to hear. I was a bit worried that it would all start in that 'peaceful village', where the local 'priest' would tell you all the 'history', point out what holy relic you need to take from the 'bad guys' and send you on your way...

Keep up the good work, and keep the visuals coming.

On the issue of "plot twists", no I don't think my plot has any of that. The general idea of the plot is that you're a slave who through a stroke of luck gained your freedom, and with nothing left to lose you begin your search for a legendary city in the south rumored to be the last haven for mankind in the wasteland.

The plot then builds up from there as you explore towns to search for information on that city. It's a pretty non-linear main quest - heck, at some point you can even choose to forget about the main quest and settle down in one of the towns for good, assuming if you have a good standing there.

The focus is in the journey. The people you meet along the way, the unique charm of each town, and the things that you do in them. Admittedly, the main plot is just a flimsy excuse to get the player to travel to new locations, just like how the GECK is pretty irrelevant to the big picture in Fallout 2.

I hope this would be a breath of fresh air in comparison to 99.9% of RPGs who feature a big bad villian/evil god/conspiring boss/genocidal alien wanting to destroy the world, who can only be stopped by the farm boy in a remote village who went from zero to hero and succeed where millions of others (most of them having far more experience) fail.

 

[soggie]

sea, thanks for the seal of approval. I really do hope that the Vietnam War-styled jungle environment with constant rain would be a breath of fresh air in comparison with the desert wasteland archetype in post-apocalyptic games nowadays.

Well considering that the game is being developed on a shoestring budget, I do need to be fairly proficient in all fields to an extend. Having knowledge in those domains also help when you need to commission work. You can talk to them in their language, which makes transition of requirements much easier and less prone to transition errors.

As for level design, having more minds on the subject would definitely be a great help. I'm not sure what I can offer you though, considering all permanent spots in the team have been filled at this point of time. I'd love to have you join our forums once it's up though - community criticism is one thing that I love.

 

[soggie]

Received first art pack and did some quick environmental mockups to gauge for size and style:

Day time

Night time

 

[John B.]

I have to say that I am vary impressed with this, and like the look, and feel that it has going for it so far, most games don't really have the feel I'm looking for, but so far this game has it.

 

[soggie]

Thanks John B. I'm in the midst of writing the map editor and hope to show a video of day/night transition using simple pixel shaders.

 

[John B.]

A quick question thoe, as I didn't read the whole thing as much as skim over the plot is what major part will vehicles play in this, I would love to see some sort of vehicle system implemented.

 

[soggie]

Well, I'm not sure if I can implement any vehicular system in the game other than those similar to Fallout 2. Were you talking about something like Fallout Tactics?

Anyway, vehicles would be extremely rare and incredibly expensive in the game. For one, most of them are either biofuel (most expensive since food is scarce already) or hydroplasma (expensive for mutants, since it is monopolized by the Pure Men), and they are used only by large merchant caravans.

So while getting a vehicle is a possibility (in fact, one of the major quests), it won't exactly play a large visual or combat role in the game. It'll be more like FO2's car.

 

[DexterMorgan]

I like where this is going, keep up the good work.

 

[soggie]

Thanks Morgan.

Newest update: Irrlicht Disaster!

Wasted a whole day trying to shoehorn Irrlicht into drawing something that I want, and ended up with this:

Using this scene construction method:

Compared to my photoshop mockup:

I can safely say it's a long way off. It's pretty confusing to figure out how to do multitexturing without shaders with Irrlicht, let alone texture splatting. After fiddling for a bit, I finally decided that despite Ogre3D's bulk and somewhat questionable love for singletons, it is still my best bet. Heck, the materials script alone makes it worthwhile, and the scene manager seems much easier to extend than Irrlicht's.

Well, I'm back to Ogre now, hoping that this would be a correct decision.

EDIT:

New plan involves doing this:

Let me explain. First the camera is pointed down the Z-axis, and locked to the X and Y-axis. After that, an orthographic projection is used, with a orthographic-like projection matrix on standby in case I want to do parallax effects in the future.

The ground tiles are rendered in conventional 2d isometric method: start from the top left tile (which should be the north edge of the diamond-shaped map), and renders down the southwest vector (as logical Y-axis).

After that, 3D characters and wall/object sprites in 2D quads are rendered onto a different render target, with a custom depth sorting algorithm using a custom scene tree with explicit z-order variables for all entities. The important factor here is to use a strategy pattern to make it easy to swap different draw order strategies.

Assuming that this actually works, the next step would be to use a full-screen pixel shader to simulate day and night cycles. Then a real-time editable alpha mask would be included in the built-in editor to enable real-time editing of the ground tile's texture splatting, which would then be compiled into a release version for the artists to refine the textures and map objects.

All these would probably happen in the course of a week or so, according to my ever optimistic schedules.

 

[SkuLL]

You lost me there. Completely.

But I'm happy to see that things are moving forward!

 

[soggie]

You lost me there. Completely.

But I'm happy to see that things are moving forward!

Don't worry it's just a long and inane monologue to blame the lack of progress not on my own lack of technical excellence but on somebody else's engine.

 

[soggie]

Latest blog updates:

Splintered Core Lore - the Deadlanders

After a hundred years of living in the deadlands, the deadlanders have developed a culture that is frighteningly spartan and brutal..

Handling the passage of time

Time progression in RPGs have always been a dicey matter. In a game where you get the freedom to explore the world map at your own pace, the passage of time has to be handled in a proper way in order to preserve a sense of realism (and to a certain extent, immersion)...

 

[Dreadwolf]

So far I'm impressed. Especially liked the part about the "resolve-meter". Could be very interesting if implemented properly.

But I'm a bit sceptical about the savegame-transfer plans. I really don't want to doubt your abilities and my knowledge of this stuff is limited, but I imagine that this sort of thing would include all kinds of variables you'd have to look out for in the planned sequel(s).
Would be a shame to fail for some too ambitious design choices.

And i really like the concept art & visuals so far.

 

[SharkClub]

Looks nice so far, keep up the good work.