Pimla Shinks

Hi.

Pimla Shinks is going to be a First Person Shooter that focuses on stealth and obtaining items. I am going to focus on large areas that allow the player to explore and make his own way through the world, which consists of multiple large areas. I haven’t fully completed the design document yet, so I won’t go into the story or finer details until I am happy with them myself. I am aiming to have some multiplayer aspects to the game, and I have been loosely building a framework around this, but I’m still very much focusing on asset building and getting the general ‘feel’ for the game at the moment.



-------------------------- Dev Log 1 -------------------------------

At the moment I’m testing out how to make large scale environments. The video above is part of a 4km squared area with around 11,000 objects (most of them are duplicates at the moment). All of the objects are LibLoaded from a geospatial database that stores all the objects. At the moment the geospatial database is running on a server, which I have done to allow for team development (TODO: I’ll make a video explaining this soon). When I start the game, objects around the player are download from the geospatial database, cached on the hard drive and libloaded into the game. If the object is cached, it is loaded from the hard drive.

The reason I have done this is it allows multiple developers to work on levels at the same time. Since everything is being loaded from a central server, all the developers are kept ‘in sync’ with each other. As new assets are added to the level, they become available to all the developers and if they don’t have them on their hard drive, as I mentioned above, the files are automatically downloaded to their hard drive. Since its running on a server, I have also made a simple front end for it, which you can access from your browser. This is really nice as it allows you to add team members, manage all the assets, view maps of the world and manage tasks which eases the pains of building large scale environments and/or working in teams.

Basically I’ve made a framework that loads the world in from a server, allowing me to separate asset management and loading the world from blender. The geospatial database stores every thing in latitude and longitude, which allows for very widespread environments, I’ve not tested how far yet. One thing I’ve really focused on is allowing you to develop the world while in the game engine. So adding, moving and removing objects is done in realtime (Again I’ll show this in the next video). So if there’s another developer in the same area as you, you will see the objects he adds load into the world automatically. This is what I really wanted, as I don’t have to worry about manually downloading files, keeping in sync with other people and it means I don’t have to worry about keeping files in the correct folders as everything is automatically structured as it’s downloaded. (hope this doesn’t sound like gobbledygook, it’ll make sense when I make a video explaining it)

For deploying the game, having lots of players reading objects from a central server is not ideal, so I have began looking at dumping the objects from the database into a file that can be localy read from the users hard-drive, and will allow for geospatail lookups from their own computer. But I’m not quite there yet and have been focusing on the development side.

All credit for the terrain goes to benj for his wonderful scripts. I’ve finally figured out how to make custom maps with it now, so I’ll post a video of them once they have been more populated with assets.

Some in-game images:








more soon…

It a great Start! The Mechanics that you have described sound very special but also very efficient – and Way above my Head.
So I’ll say something about the Artistry and Stuff…

I see no Credits for the Music, so may I assume it’s your own? Because it sounds gorgeous, like something Boards of Canada would do (or maybe Aphex Twin or Lustmord).
Stylistically, the Environment and the Stein K3 Weapon remind me of Halo.
(The L.o.D. (“Level of Display”??) on the Foliage is gladly just Testing – the Mesh Replacements are too obvious right now.)

This sounds like a very interesting project.I am interested in making a open world videogame myself.I have already started.I would like to make a open world videogame that is sort of like halo.That you have a army in your command.It will have rts elements in it.And have squad based missions as well.There is a little more to it than that.

Wow, looks pretty cool! The LOD is a bit harsh but the environment is pretty good looking imo, cool models. Good luck.

The stein gun looks like it would break so easily. It reminds me of the Gnasher from GoW. Looks very good.

Maybe so good. . . That when you’re done, you sell it? :wink:

Wow man. Just wow.

Thanks! Yea I just quickly made the LOD models, I’ll be going back and looking at how to make the foliage look more ‘full’, and make better lower poly versions. I’m in the middle of making bushes and things which help to fill out the environment a bit more.

And yea the music is mine, glad you enjoyed it. I’ve got another 8 tracks or so that I will be using in the game and I’ll probably make some more. Music is going to be playing quite a big part. Never heard of Lustmord before, so been enjoying his stuff on youtube, thanks for introducing me to a great artist.

Sounds great, do you have a WIP thread for it? Good luck!

Thank you, yep the LOD is very harsh, but it was only really for testing, I’ll change them when I’m a bit further on.

Thank you. I’m not really at the stage of deciding whether or not to sell the final game. To be honest 3D is a hobby for me, so making money from it is not really important for me. I’m very much taking this game seriously, but I am going to have fun developing it and take it as a learning experience and not get bogged down with trying to make sales and things. But if I get it to a stage that I would feel comfortable paying for it myself, and others say they would maybe throw a couple of dollars at it, then yea I would sell it. Can’t be passing up on business opportunities now can we :slight_smile:

Short and sweet. Cheers bud :slight_smile:

This is looking pretty good so far. I like the environment - not you usual first person shooter place. The idea of loading in objects as they’re created is really cool, as well. I’ve been thinking of a game where you literally get to watch the developer develop as you play, and this sounds pretty much like it. Great work!

I think for CC, the light level seems really low - perhaps use a couple of hemisphere lamps to push the darkness up, and raising the sun lamp’s power might also be a good idea. Anyway, good job!

Been working on some of the characters that you meet throughout the world. Here is one of them from the chapter ‘Those without minds’.


Nice! I think the Game Ready one looks more detailed than the Medium resolution. Do you sculpt in Blender? Or Sculptres or Zbrush?

Yea the subsurface scattering seems to hide some of the details, didn’t spend long on the materials for rendering so I might go back and tinker with that if this guy is going to be close to the camera.

Using blender for scultping and everything else, I hate exporting/importing data from various applications. Always feels like something else to go wrong :slight_smile:

I have another question; how do you shoot the Stein? No trigger? :spin:

love this klauser… wish I could be on your project alas I just have no time, but I will keep tab please continue posting updates :cool:

wow just wow…loving the look of it

man this looks fu**ing amazing ! :slight_smile:

Great video, keep it up! Amazing what you can do with the internal game engine :o

Great Job!
I love the environment, kind of stuff I’ll do as well!
It sort of looks alienated, but the post rendering FX are greatly integrated and seem to cause no harm to the frame rate! What are your PC specs?

I liked the concept art, so I made this. Sorry, but it’s not game engine ready. Still, thanks for two hours of blending fun!