Forged Odyssey OT: the journey forwards

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Forged Odyssey is an action rpg/immersive sim built exclusively for next gen. It's an epic adventure with nearly infinite player freedom, set in a living fantasy world.

From this point forward, things are are going to be a bit more organized. This thread is specifically geared towards chronicling the lead up to the game's announcement. Underlying simulations are incredibly important but now it's time to focus on visuals and the feel of the game. Expect this thread to have less words and more pictures.



The previous OT can be found here.

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This is my animation and gameplay test bed. Iterating is extremely fast because nothing else is loaded.

A while ago I shared a lot of videos of my animation prototypes. Those were similar in concept but now I'm working on the shippable version. Upgraded physics, upgraded visual quality, improved stability, and decreased computational cost.

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So so so much nicer to control compared to older version. Secret was prioritizing player inputs at all costs, even if traditionally that's not how games do things. For example if the player is running at full speed and lets go of the stick, the character stops nearly instantly instead of gradually. It's a violent "stop at all costs" maneuver comparable to pulling the stick in the opposite direction.

Still lots and lots of work to go with making the leg movements look realistic.

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Going the opposite direction, these legs are really weak and have a hard time holding the character up. At the end of the video, the character even falls over.

Excluding ik funkiness and general polish, this is about what it will look like in game if a person is carrying a really heavy load.



My two big things right now are improving leg synching/positioning and limiting how legs can bend.

[Legend]

It's very weird finally working on stuff that is actually player focused vs R&D. Character looks where you look.

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Started upgrading to a full body center of mass simulation. It adds a huge amount of emotion to even a simple movement so I hope I can keep it.

Hands are holding weights to make this demo more pronounced. Hand movement and the crouch toggle are the only scripted elements. Everything else is procedural and dynamic.

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Added some human skin to my android. Helps with seeing what is happening and also helps with personification. I just need things to look nice and be stable.

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Been spending some time refining things, so I built some visualizers for debugging. The cyan line represents our force potential. We can push our body from anywhere within that line by adjusting leg/foot muscles. It's a pretty small area. Without taking steps and repositioning the legs, even a strong breeze could tilt our character over.

This is what makes this work a pain lol. I just care about it feeling good and looking good, but approximations of real world physics keep producing the best results.

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Video of how that debug info works in motion.

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Too stupid not to share.

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Forged Odyssey might end up being a 100+ gigabyte game. Saves a lot of development time if most of my procedural generation tech is baked. Also should make save files smaller and faster to load.

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Very hard balancing all the tech requirements with such a fluid game. Here is some imposter tech that may or may not end up being used.

This method makes the imposter functionally equivalent to a low lod model, although it is completely 2D like a billboard. Only efficient/worth it under very specific circumstances.








Functions by rendering the uv and normals into a billboard and then applying the original material. Does not handle texture seams well but that is relatively easy to avoid. Main benefit is that outside of shadows, it reacts properly to dynamic lighting.

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Decided the best way to do procedural hand animations would be to create a gesture library and blend between an arbitrary amount of them as needed. Blending is done per joint to get much higher quality results than just using blend shapes alone. Of course results get funky when using negative blend values  

[Legend]

Saw this real pic online. Fun seeing how similar it is to this old Forged Odyssey pic.