Underworld Ascendant - Banner Update

Couchpotato

Couchpotato

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Here is the next kickstarter update from OtherSide Entertainment that talks about the games graphics from the alpha video, and posted a video about the games engine.



There has been a lot of chatter about the in-game visuals in the Underworld Ascendant early prototype. Some have called them downright homely.

We take no insult.

As with the games we developed at LookingGlass, our philosophy is to avoid putting a lot of time into making pretty in-game visuals during early development. This enables us to iterate fast early on, rapidly improving game play. The tradeoff is having less impressive visuals to show off with a prototype. For fans who want to see gorgeous visuals upfront, this can be a hurdle.

Good news is that we can and will dramatically step up the visual bar. Not at the expense of gameplay, and not to try to chase AAA games that have tens-of-millions to throw at visuals, but we'll deliver a great-looking indie game.
Click to expand...
More information.
 
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For rpgs with an overhead or isometric viewpoint, such as Pillars of Eternity, it's very easy to have an artist create a couple of very pretty landscapes to represent the final game's graphical quality, and thus rake in a cool $4 million.

Unfortunately for 3D games of this type, the visual polish is usually the last step, when placeholder textures are replaced, shadow, bump, and reflection maps are added, and lighting is tweaked.
 
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Well, a plus for an underground game is that you probably don't need to worry as much about distance rendering (LoD) and a changing environment (day/night cycles and weather). You likely have a lot fewer stand-alone structures to build as well—no extensive surface towns, for example; just a bunch of doors in the rocky walls. There's also less vegetation; no trees, bushes, or stands of grass. All-in-all, hopefully a lower development cost.

I'm not sure if they are planning to implement schedule-driven behavior, but eliminating that would also reduce work.
 
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Well, they've made $3000 dollars today, so it's at 544 of 600 thousand.
 
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Even better use the Skyrim engine, and make it as an expansions (like Fallout New Vegas)!

I think that they will make their campaign and get kickstarted, but I don't know how far can they go with $600k?
 
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They're focusing heavily on systems and advanced gameplay, which you can learn about in their videos. They're using Unity because it's an efficient engine for iteration and experimentation, which makes sense to me.

I would prefer they developed their own engine, obviously, because I'm not impressed by Unity. But that would be a HUGE amount of work - and it would take much longer. Unity has integrated physics and other simulation aspects in place - as it's more of a complete game engine.

It's one of the reasons they already have a lot of the custom simulation aspects in place, and they admitted it was probably not the smartest way to demonstrate the concept - as they've spent almost no time making it look good. Just like Looking Glass back in the day, they're focusing on making all the systems work before they start working on aesthetics.

Unreal is a great engine for shooters and relatively simple RPGs - but it's not a good match for an elaborate simulation - as you'd have to code everything from scratch, and you can't iterate and adapt as quickly, as it's primarily a graphics engine.

Unity 5 is supposed to be a relatively big step up from the previous version - but I doubt it'll be super slick or anything.

But I'd much rather have evolution with so-so performance than a slick game held back by a rigid engine unsuited for the vision.

Remember, they want to evolve the genre - not streamline and go with the safer choice. Unlike Bioshock, which was mostly a pure shooter, they actually want to go forward with all the non-combat elements.

If you want a combat-oriented crawler like Grimrock or MMX - this is probably not the game for you.
 
I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with Unity itself. It came in to compete mainly at the bottom end of the market, and so there's a lot of badly-coded cheap and nasty games made with it.
 
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The reason I'm not impressed with Unity is that I've yet to see a single "complex" or meaty game using it that didn't have subpar performance compared to what was going on, on screen.

I'm not saying such a game doesn't exist, just that I haven't personally seen it - and I've seen a LOT of them.

So, either they're all incompetent developers - or it's just not an engine that's well-suited for optimal performance.

More than likely, it's a fine engine - but it's had to make a lot of sacrifices to support multiple platforms with minimal work involved.

Stands to reason, really.
 
All the major engines emphasize cross-platform support, so I don't see that this should be considered a special difficulty for Unity.

Unity is also the official dev kit for Nintendo's Wii U, which would be a very odd choice for a lower-spec console, if Unity is inherently inefficient. They seem to have no trouble making high-performance triple A titles with it.

Pretty much everything I've seen developed on Unity (outside of Nintendo), has been relatively low-rent.
 
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Emphasis is not a concept with implicit degree or value, so it would most definitely qualify as a special difficulty if the emphasis is higher for Unity.

I can't say much about that, since I don't follow its development. All I know is that people say it's a big part of the appeal of Unity, which would be odd if the same is true for all popular engines.

In any case, I can't really accept it's an efficient engine when my eyes are set upon subpar performance in games written using it, time and time again.

It's very hard to accept that as incidental, especially contrasted with the performance in games written using Unreal engine.

That's hard to accept as incidental.

But it's hardly worth going on about in this thread.
 
Well, the Unity engine is being discussed in this thread as a reason to question backing the game, the funding of which is uncertain. I would say that discussing it is as worth "going on about" as anything else on this site.

If you can't accept that Unity can be a perfectly efficient engine, because of what "people say" and the selection of games you happen to have seen, that's fine and dandy. But I do think it is worth examining the question in this thread, as the conclusion is faulty, and I don't think it should discourage people from backing the game.
 
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Unity gets an unfair bad rep here....I think it depends on the team and what they can do with it.

For instance, shroud of the avatar is using unity and they just switched over tyo unity 5 which gives them a lot more options graphically and with physics. The game runs well as well.

PoE is using unity as well...endless legend, black guards 2, wastelands 2, torment: ToN.

http://unity3d.com/showcase/gallery
 
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