Subnautica Concept Art: Coral Reef 3 - Subnautica
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Join Date: 2013-01-29 Member: 182599Members, Super Administrators, Reinforced - Diamond
Join Date: 2013-01-29 Member: 182599Members, Super Administrators, Reinforced - Diamond
Subnautica Concept Art: Coral Reef 3 - Subnautica
Diversity of environments is a key design feature of Subnautica. We want Subnautica players to be able to experience vastly different and beautiful ‘biomes’ as they explore the underwater world. Of course, no underwater world would be complete without a coral reef! Cory painted Coral Reef Zone 3 to the team visualise what a coral reef biome might look like. Creating an ‘alien’ coral reef is quite tricky, because by their very nature terrestrial coral reefs already look quite alien! We also need keep our desire for diversity of coral life in check: Each new life form is a new model that needs to be created and put into the game. There are financial, performance, and time expenses involved …
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Lava Shot:
Dynamic VS Static Terrain - When it comes to lava, having dynamic terrain would be super cool. Instead of having a static environment with glowing red lava just sitting there (which is still still really neat imo), what if it was gradually changing like our world's lava flows do? Perhaps if you consulted some scientists who study lava flows, you could even design (maybe even copy or import) an accurate emulator (the important caveat being that this is, of course, an alien, fictional world, and creative/artistic embellishment of these things is not only allowed, but encouraged. On the other hand, having things making logical sense adds greatly to gameplay).
Artistic + Purpose/Functionality - I noticed some seemingly random bits of red lava on the rocks in the very bottom left, and I was thinking, wouldn't it be really cool if a bunch of these little artistic elements in the game could have purpose and function in gameplay? Like, instead of just "ooooo, that lava looks really cool and well done, let's go check it out" it could be "Ooooo, that lava looks really cool and well done. I probably should steer clear of that large, bright red crack and collect my lava sample from one of the safer, less red cracks instead. I should also be careful not to park my sub north of the lava since that area is going to be very hot from the current flowing through the lava..." etc.
Coral Reef Shot:
Biotic Synergy - Again, this all looks superb and is going in a wonderful direction. A few things that jumped out at me though (just in case it wasn't already realized by you guys): I feel like the green globs (as well as other isolated life forms) near the bottom next to the sub don't look as good (and takes away the realism, or immersion... no pun intended) as the ones in the top right corner next to a bunch of other life forms, and I'm not entirely sure why. Perhaps our minds have an expectation for coral-like life forms to be surrounded by other life? But I digress... The green blobs per se are fantastic, particularly that they all are very slightly different (at least, I think they're different...). I also love how their offspring patterns are all scattered in different patterns that seem to reflect their surroundings. The way you guys are blending similarity with uniqueness is great, and I hope to see more of it.
Life forms - The game Spore's method of creating lots of very different critters seemed to be very well done if you need more ideas about procedural generation.
Cleanliness - (To point out the obvious again just in case:) The ocean floor looks very clean, almost too clean. I doubt that that's what you're hoping for in the final version, but still... Also, the places with the red grass appear a little too flat (the rich infestation of NS2 is just the opposite and looks wonderful), but I'm sure both of these things will be fixed up in no time in the final version.
Sidenote - A very minor thought: The soundtrack continues to be great, like a really, really good tasting steak dinner. However, it seems like most of the current sound track is all steak dinners with varying amounts of barbecue sauce (basically, it sounds very similar). I'm not sure whether you guys are worrying about diversity of soundtrack at this point, but just as a quick aside, I thought NS2's soundtrack was very well done - embodying just the right amount of unity and diversity. And again, take this with a grain of salt. Making the perfect soundtrack is a difficult task. I'm not sure if this is just me, but it seems the soundtracks are very similar. The cook makes a delicious steak for sure, but would changing things up a little be good or bad for the restaurant? ::shrug:: I can't say.
Keep up the good work guys! Really looking forward to this!
-Perjamin
Good work, as always. However, in the lava-pic I don't really feel like being underwater. Probably because of the color of the background.
To avoid a super long world-creation time, we will probably do it as the player progresses. This also avoids us taking up too much space on your drive, unless you explore the full thing. I think that's how Minecraft does it. Terraria does actually generate the whole thing, but their data is much smaller being a 2D game (it also takes about a minute to generate a large world).
The question of AI path finding in this world is probably gonna be a lot trickier. Not sure..I think Minecraft just doesn't do any, and it's all greedy. And I can see why.
If you have any thoughts or references on this, I'd love to hear! This is fairly new to us, but exciting.
I was just thinking about performance when new areas are being generated, would the player notice any stuttering as it would be done in real time. I know it's not procedural, but for example in skyrim/oblivion there can be very visible stutters when it loads in the contents of new "cells".
I guessed the AI could be tricky, I don't know of any other game that does procedural on the scale you guys are going for.
I think there could be huge number of similarities between the games, from a generation and AI viewpoint.
This blog post briefly mentions their AI goals and talks about clever materials. Materials with different LOD's to create unique walls, pillars etc, from a single material file.
http://www.big-robot.com/2012/03/26/poachers-tweedpunk-and-clever-materials/
There is a lot of interesting stuff over at their site.
Interestingly, Sir, You are being hunted is a game being developed to work on part of the Grand Master Project, which is called Lodestone. As they develop each major section of the lodestone procedural code, they make a game to create all the code they need to fill that area, it's fantastic and inspiring.
They also have a free to play web based procedurally generated racer they knocked up quickly, which is quite addictive..
http://www.big-robot.com/2014/01/
Thanks man! I read a couple articles from them already, but that one looks good as well. Definitely a lot of similarities.
I think he's talking about @Hugh's scuba diving photo
That's pretty cool, btw!
Here's a quite healthy one:
This is a bit less healthy, but it's still not anything looking really like rocks:
But it's a future skinsuit! Probably with nanites!
And of course no water world would be complete without Kevin Costner, so I hope that underwater world will feature underwater Kevin Costner.
This looks seriously awesome.
On a serious comment though - I hope you guys don't do an alpha and early beta. I think that was one of NS2's issues (at least for me). By the time the game was in a polished state, I was bored to death with it. Instead of like the old days where you see a few screenshots, a few trailers to hype you up - and one release BAM! you get hit with full greatness of the game in one big go and you are overwhelmed with excitement and enthusiasm for the game.
Also when you look at gaming news in general, it seems like there are thousands of games that are early access with no release dates in sight. It would just be nice for a change to by a game that is for the most part finished, and near perfect on release.
Its so rare to see these days.
I've learnt by lesson and will never participate in a public beta again, but sadly I made that mistake with one of my most favourite games NS2.
Also, the healthy coral versus unhealthy coral is actually something we've been discussing recently, and hope to actually have as a factor in the game. We hear you. There is definitely a risk of that when giving the public access to in development versions of the game. However, for a variety of reasons, it is still a smart way to go, especially for a smaller studio like us. It gets the game out to so many more people then otherwise would be able to be testing and giving feedback on it, and that feedback is invaluable to the quality of the final product. NS2 was a far superior game on release then it would have been if we hadn't had that alpha/beta phase.
But don't worry, when we first open up early access for Subnautica it will be much further along then NS2 was when we opened up the alpha to the public, and it will not be such an extended period of time between the first access and the final game release, like NS2 had, either.
Thinking this was game graphics made me gasp.
http://www.treehugger.com/natural-sciences/nature-blows-my-mind-colorful-bizarre-world-starfish.html
Starfish are frikkin cool. I love the idea of something that moves very slowly..but deliberately.