Hello there, human and welcome to the PROXIMA UNIVERSE Devlog #01. This is one of many devlogs that we plan to publish over the course of upcoming months. We have handpicked the most interesting and amazing things for you and we will highlight them in this video. In this stage of the project we are focusing the most on feature and system iterations for the game.
We are also working on all the amazing rendering systems that we will need. Whether they are part of our toolset for the upcoming MOD SDK or they are used for the game itself.
Keep in mind that everything you are seeing in this video is footage from the Pre-Alpha and is not a showcase of the final version of the game. Things might change or will be highly improved during later stages of development.
What we are showing you today is only a glimpse of all the great things that we worked on the past months and we can't wait to show you all the other great things. In fact we needed to take out half of the content because otherwise the video would have been too long.
So stay tuned! The next devlog is right around the corner!
Backend Improvements & New Server Provider
While working on PROXIMA we pay a lot of attention to the quality of our codebase. We had to do a lot of work in transition from the prototype stage to Pre-Alpha and one of the most challenging things was switching our server solution which also led us to rewrite a major part of the game code in order to move to native UE4 replication, however the time we invested will turn into a lot of benefits. We had a lot of issues with our previous server provider but now they are gone. The Unreal Networking is powerful and secure, and the new server provider we got in contact with is giving us a great support and technical assistance. So from now on we expect everything to be extremely smooth on this part!
I guess you would agree: network performance, server stability and better protection from cheaters are very important for a multiplayer game. And we want our players to have the best possible experience while playing PROXIMA.
We will continue expanding and polishing our codebase which includes replacing prototype functionality which is based on Unreal Engine blueprints with a C++ code. By doing that we not only intend to improve performance, stability and security of the game but also make a solid base for our upcoming MOD SDK.
But let’s finish with the technical stuff and talk about something more interesting!
Cinematic Trailer
The cinematic trailer we have released in April this year was the result of around 3 months of work. All scenes from the trailer are made in realtime in UE4. In the trailer we wanted to highlight some of the most interesting game features. Such as:
- Dynamic time of day.
- Dynamic weather system.
- The large-scale open-world environment.
But also let you all dive into the atmosphere of the game environments, created utilizing modern rendering technologies available in the Unreal Engine. Pushing the limits of what's possible in real-time - this is what we are trying to achieve with PROXIMA. But we will talk more about this later in this video. One thing to mention: we will release a benchmark for the game in the future which is based on the scenes from this trailer, but also some additional new scenes. Stay tuned for news!
Creation of Haven
We thought it would be great to give you a small breakdown of how we used procedural generation techniques for designing our terrain. For creating the landscape of our first map Haven we used a software called Gaea which features a set of physically-accurate erosion algorithms that can be directed and combined in any way to achieve an extremely natural look. Within a relatively short time we’ve been able to create a realistic-looking terrain with mountains, hills, river channels, and a sea surrounding the island. On top of that we generated maps to define spreading of all biomes that are present on Haven. All of that can be done in a matter of hours, without any manual painting!
We think it is very important to show you this as we plan to make a complete breakdown on how people can mod PROXIMA with the tools we used internally for development which also includes terrain creation. We will release more details when the game becomes available for modding.
Besides the terrain we’re using the same approach for populating the map with the foliage and environmental assets. Trees, ground plants, rocks: all of these can be placed automatically using the combination of Unreal’s foliage tools and some additional algorithms, such as placement maps which can be easily created in Photoshop. The more complex and diverse your procedural set is, the more natural look of environments you can get. In any case this approach takes way less time than painting the foliage completely by hand, but allows to achieve nearly the same results. Here you can see what we’ve been able to do in a relatively short time. But this is just beginning. We’re planning to significantly increase the variety of foliage and add way more details to make the biomes of Haven look even more organic.
However, this doesn’t mean we want to bury the artistic approach completely and give all the work to a machine. No. It’s just a question of using all powers of procedural generation before we can add stuff manually. We still have the ability to go in by hand to paint materials and objects to make certain areas on the map look even more unique.
But what about asset modeling? Sure, we used procedural approaches here as well. We worked in a software called SpeedTree which allows us to randomly generate different variants of trees based on predefined sets of parameters. We designed multiple species of trees such as oaks, pines, maples etc. and combined them to create different woods on Haven.
Animation System
During the development of PROXIMA we invested a lot of effort into the creation of our own animation system. Our goal was to create a system that allows a smooth transition between first-person and third-person perspectives. We were not satisfied with the method that is used in many other games where they use a separate animation set for FPP and TPP view.
First of all this approach makes the animations look too simplified, led by the need to properly fit your arms and a weapon to the viewport. But we wanted the movemented to feel more natural and realistic, so we designed a system that shares the same set of animations on both perspectives, in fact the only thing that is changing is the position of the camera.
Secondly, we wanted to avoid an issue with a slight difference between how your character appears to yourself and how others see you. Imagine you hide behind a rock and you think you are fully covered but an enemy still can see the edge of your body. I think you would agree, this is crucial for multiplayer shooters. But happily, we will not have such a problem in PROXIMA.
And at last we can save a lot of time and resources creating animations because our animation system supports seamless blending of animations created for specific body parts (such as reloading the weapon) with the rest of the body. But of course, what you see is not final. We will continue working on our animation system to make it even better over time. Our next steps will be polishing and cleaning actual animations to make them combine together in a most appealing and natural way, but also improving the transitions between different movement states.
Terra Control Game Mode Features
And finally, let’s talk about gameplay! We are actively working on the first game mode called Terra Control. At this point of development we’re focusing more on developing stable and optimized in-game systems rather than on visual representation of things. Having a solid, highly polished and flexible codebase means we can iterate more features in the smaller amounts of time and minimize bugs and issues to minimum, and we achieved quite a good progress on this over the course of the past weeks and months.
One of the systems we worked on is the Ability System - one of the core pillars of PROXIMA. We will have 3 character classes: Gunner, Mechanic and Protector, and each of them will have a set multiple unique abilities, so making them working smoothly, being balanced and intuitive during the gameplay is crucial. The first ability we created to test our Ability System in action is the Barrier which will be available for the Protector class. The barrier can be spawned to protect you and your teammates from damage. It can be destroyed by the enemy fire or grenades.
Another feature we implemented is a shop where you will be able to buy weapons and other equipment while in the game. The UI is currently very basic but as I already said our main goal at this point is to assure that everything works smoothly and is properly replicated over the network.
In a tactical environment of Terra Control it will be important to know the positioning of your teammates. So we implemented the highlight effect that will outline your teammates when they are hidden from sight.
We are continuously testing the game internally with our voluntary QA team to assure that whenever we open the gates for the Alpha everything is polished and properly working. We prototyped a small test map in order to test how movement and gunplay will work in an environment where the space is limited and the number of encounters and fights are raised to the maximum. We received a lot of positive feedback during the test. By the way If you want to join our QA team you can apply here. Right now this team consists of 30 people but we will triple the size of it in the following weeks and months in order to be able to test the Terra Control game mode with full teams.
That’s it for this devlog. We hope you enjoy it! We still have a lot of stuff to show you in upcoming devlogs. Join our Discord to become a part of our community. Also support our Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign to get a guaranteed access to upcoming Closed Alpha. Stay tuned and see you in the upcoming devlog!
