NonLife

A place to show off your latest screenshots and for people to comment on them. Only start a new thread here if you have some nice images to show off!
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Rambus
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NonLife

Post by Rambus »

NonLife Project Information

NonLife is a multiplayer world building game unlike any other. Players collaboratively explore a procedurally generated world in search of valuable artifacts used in crafting items. Players must take advantage of, and transform the terrain in order to survive the dangers that await them.

NonLife features hundreds of photo realistic materials that the player can collect, transmute, trade and use to build their next home, castle, sculpture, or even zombie fort. Examples of materials include Privacy Glass, Slate, Lunar rock, Neon Lighting, and even Swiss Cheese.

Players modify the world by utilizing a wide range of tools. Stencils allow the player to add or remove matter from the game world in a regular and recognizable pattern. Sculptures can be created by using fine detail tools like the chisel. The paintbrush and spray paint can allow the user to modify the surface appearance of the world. Additional advanced tools allow the player even more freedom and power.

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The temporary main menu pays hommage to the HydraX and SkyX demos. Here the island was procedurally generated from Voxels and than exported as a .mesh file

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Programmer art gui utilizing MyGUI

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Early procedural generation of worlds. I'm working towards a vastly more complex generation scheme that will allow for clusters of unique terrain.

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Some of the materials available ingame. The bottom right shows a close up of the slate material. Materials utilize ambient occlusion, parallax, diffuse, normal and specular mapping. Additionally an emmisive channel allows the material to self illuminate as well as glow (through a post process effect).

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A random shot of a room constructed out of matrix like materials. The materials are actually animated and glowing- although that may be hard to see in a screen shot.

NonLife production information

The core technologies for NonLife have been in development for almost two years. The game engine, Nucleus, features a custom scripting system, networked gameplay, variable/database management and complex scene management. The core component for Nucleus is the Isovox library. Isovox allows for visualizing and modifying enormous voxel density worlds. The use of density voxels allows for complex and smooth shapes to be represented. Nucleus takes advantage of several external technologies including (but not limited to) Ogre3D, RakNet, Particle Universe, OgreNewt, HydraX/SkyX and OgreOggSound.
The game engine also includes a variety of tools including game data, world and material editors.
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Many game components are data driven. Ambio is a library I wrote for handling data driven varaibles, events and actions. This tool allows you to easy modify variable files.

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All materials are defined with a .material script, as well as an entry in the palette editor. This allows for advanced effects to be set up, like the placement of doodads on the surface or modified physics properties.

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The world editor features traditional scene object placement and manipulation as well as complex voxel editing (with the option to export built objects as .mesh files)
Last edited by Rambus on Wed Apr 20, 2011 4:08 am, edited 1 time in total.
TechnoBulldog
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Re: NonLife

Post by TechnoBulldog »

Wow. There's a four letter word I'm thinking of that can sum up this entire post.

But seriously, this really is some project! I don't think I've seen anything like this before. I couldn't begin to imagine how you did all of this.

Good job, dude!
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TWO
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Re: NonLife

Post by TWO »

This looks like a very nice project, a modern version of that popular game where you mine'n'craft. Do you have any screenshots showing more of the actual gameplay? The materials look so awesome. But how detailed can the landscapes and the stuff the players build be? Can the voxels be snapped to a grid so you can achieve a flat wall?
Rambus
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Re: NonLife

Post by Rambus »

Hello, Thank you for the nice comments.

NonLife will come with a dedicated server to allow persistent shared worlds, and to maximize the number of players that can share the same world. It will also allow offline single player games as well as limited connection/ co-op style active servers.

The game engine features full octree based level of detail. Essentially this will make it impossible for griefers to over produce cumbersome complex geometry as we can just scale back the LOD if the frame rate is dead. Players may also be able to employ a tool that allows them to 'protect' an area of the game world from other players modifications. This way a player can create a statue or house that cannot be attacked by others. Tools like protect and copy/paste will be enabled/disabled by the server.

I may be able to produce a gameplay video in the next few weeks (showing modifications, materials, PvP and PvE)- while a full gameplay demo is at least 4 months away.
LBDude
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Re: NonLife

Post by LBDude »

That's nice...

Also wondering if you can snap cubes to a grid. Also wondering whether you have global illumination and whether everything is completely dynamic. If global illumination do you have "global" ambient occlusion, for shading caves and underground passages.
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Rambus
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Re: NonLife

Post by Rambus »

Yes, stencils and other modifiers automatically snap to grid (with the option to set to half grid snapping, or to disable snap). Snapping to grid makes the modifications to the world more efficient so I'm trying to encourage it.

My illumination model is achieved by having each light in the scene cast shadows- this is far from optimal. But it does allow for caves and rooms that are dark.

Most things are 'dynamic'. The game world is fully constructible/destructible. Certain objects, like the trees in the screen shots are traditional entities and as such cannot be modified in the same way. They are considered anchored objects in the world. When the voxel that they are anchored to is destroyed they are also removed from the world (In the case of trees they become physics entities and fall down). The grass seen on the island is procedurally placed on the material when ever it is created (and the normal faces roughly up).

I really am not happy with some artifacts produced by my lighting system and am considering replacing it with an alternative approach.
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Re: NonLife

Post by Nodrev »

Wow, very nice shaders, good work!
First time I saw this, I was asking myself about voxel stuff integration, now I got the response :D
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Zonder
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Re: NonLife

Post by Zonder »

looks like their server is down atm
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Rambus
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Re: NonLife

Post by Rambus »

You were fast at catching that :- )

The server is back up- and so are the images.

Thanks for the note.
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Re: NonLife

Post by Marisa »

Cool game, I'd love to check it out!
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