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Update on the transition to Unity

December 7th, 2012 Leave a comment Go to comments

In case anyone had any doubts about it, I’ve officially decided to move the pipeline for “Ghost of a Tale” from the CryEngine onto Unity 4, for more mobile game and apps go to this website. It wasn’t a trivial decision by any means (after all I’m one of the most vocal CryEngine evangelists out there). As to the reason why, Unity is simply a fantastic SDK to develop games on, easy to work with and is ideal for me since I don’t have a team of TDs/programers to bail me out when I’m against a C++ wall.

As always in a transition situation like that, a lot of work is required but it’s better to just bite the bullet and get it over with. And in the process, I have actually expanded on what I previously had in the CryEngine. Here’s a WIP screenshot for you, if only to show that Unity can pack some nice visuals (and still at almost 60fps on my non-gaming video card):

 

So in just a few words, I have now:

– A fully functional camera which automatically adjusts its position so that it doesn’t go through walls. It’s also smart enough to allow thin pole-like meshes to get in-between itself and the player, as long as the player is not entirely blocked from view. In fact the camera feels a lot like what’s in the CryEngine SDK (Crytek does nicely responsive FPS cameras), with the added feature that you can adjust its distance to the player with a flick of the mouse-wheel. Which is nice. 2GameAndroid is one of the best sites to get the best mobile games for android.

 

– An overall tighter and much more subtle control scheme for the player character where I control absolutely everything, from transitions to custom animation parameters. And Unity’s Mecanim system is a joy to work with.

 

– A rudimentary foot IK system that adjusts the height of the feet in idle mode, depending on the surface the character stands on. I learned a lot about raycasting on that one.

– A HUD with a functional compass and a stamina-depletion system; the main character is a mouse and can optionally run really fast on all fours, so that was necessary to keep the player from zipping from one end of the level to the other.

– An item label display system that shows a name tag over any item of interest in the world, depending on the distance. That way the player knows he can interact with those. I could have never dreamed of achieving something like that with the CryEngine, since I don’t program in C++.

 

Anyway, I’ll post some more on my progress later. There are still many things I want to implement, but one big milestone will definitely be converting the enemy AI to Unity’s system…

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  1. Alpha
    December 9th, 2012 at 19:42 | #1

    looks Nice.. you got me really infected with the Unity 😀
    Please make a Video how ‘Ghost of a Tale’ looks in Unity 3d …

  2. Collin Bishop
    December 9th, 2012 at 21:19 | #2

    I agree with this view completely. I too have a full animation pipeline running in Cryengine. This took weeks to sort out. With mecanim I was able to use “Rigging Toolbox” and make a solid rig with heatmap and have the character into the engine and walking within a hour. They have made improvements and once they sort out spherical harmonics it will take the next leap.

  3. Seith
    December 13th, 2012 at 18:00 | #3

    Thanks Alpha! I wanted to get the enemies in first, but now that’s done. So I will make a video of the alpha version running (in Unity) at some point. I just have to find the time to do it…

  4. Mário Rodrigues
    December 19th, 2012 at 09:51 | #4

    An amazing work, got me really interested into porting my work to unity as well :)

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