I hope everyone had a fantastic GDC! The goal of today's update is to get ya'll up to speed and give you all a bit more information about how we're moving forward with it.
First of all, we're looking to launch Our Ghosts of War Steam Early Access launch sometime in August. That should be far enough removed from the Steam Summer sale for players' wallets to have healed and early enough so that we don't get steamrolled by the Fall and Christmas releases.
We're aiming to launch with 78km2 of accurate Nazi-occupied Normandy, France. Every couple of months we will add to the terrain size of Our Ghosts of War and make the game bigger and bigger. A typical game like this in AAA would have a two year development cycle with a full budget and that would still be considered rushed. A three year development cycle is more reasonable and so how we will move forward through Early Access and to the final release of Our Ghosts of War is going to be based off of a three year development cycle. This 78km2 terrain is already in-engine and using the Road Editor Plugin (https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?100423-Road-Editor - This thing is fantastic. You should really pick it up!) we're going to be placing all the roads to accurately match the roads as they were in 1944 based off old maps.
So when we play Our Ghosts of War, not only would players experience 1944 Normandy, France as created from DEM Satellite Data, but the roads will be EXACTLY the same as they were back then. This IS going to be the most accurate depiction of Normandy, France in the history of videogames! I can't reiterate how important achieving this is to me but we're all on the verge of getting it exactly right. We're waiting on the 4.11 VXGI build from Nvidia to come out before we put the roads into the project but the roads should be taken care of in a week. We'll have screenshots for you as soon as they're in the project. Considering we're picking up Steam now it's best to keep everyone updated as much as we can.
Throughout the rest of this week I'll update you on the team, how the game is intended to work, and other points of discussion as it relates to the project. Here is this week's coding update.
Our Ghosts of War Change Log - Alpha 0.5.2.1366
- Work on UI framework 2.0 for Our Ghosts of War begun.
- Widget reworking on the main menu begun.
- Initial backend folder structure cleanup work complete.
- Custom widgets supporting GOW's horizontal, vertical, and menu bars created.
- Style's interfaces cleaned up for easier swapping of UI elements.
- Access to UI functionality extended into Blueprint for quicker prototyping and iteration.
- General bug fixes and performance improvements in prep for OT1.
- Implemented layered tiled UI
- Began laying out main menu based on designs
- UI framework improvements regarding tile clicking, animations, and placement.
- Implemented modular vertical content bars, currently used for selection menus.
- Psuedocode / planning for Faction Component (how AI will know if they should combat each other, players, be friendly, neutral, etc.)
- Psuedocode / planning for Aggro System (what makes an AI aggressive - a calculation of damage received from a specific source, current line-of-sight with an enemy source, and current distance to that enemy source (weapon types will affect this)
- Added way more information to the design docs
- Revised some class information
- Began to define player progression
- Researched a ton of AI resources around the UE4 community to try to save time in overall development. Cached documentation and videos for future reference and use.
- Began to define how to get AI to dynamically swap its EQS query context (who we're testing against). This allows for AI vs AI encounters and open the flood gates for new possible game modes.
- Updated the AI detection system (where AI can "see" other players / AI in their proximity and line-of-sight).
- Tweaked the patrol behavior (where the AI moves to a node, then spawns a new node within 5 meters, then moves there, repeat).
- The start of an "Enemy Aggro" system. The enemy will calculate damage taken, distance from each enemy, and if that enemy is within line-of-sight, then calculate these factors into a score. The higher the score, the more threatening the enemy.
- The AI is now aware of when it's been shot. It stores this to memory and begins to calculate a score of who is the most "threatening" to them.
Much of the team's time over the past few months has been spent debating the exact direction we wanted to take Our Ghosts of War in. Ultimately making a survival / military game isn't easy and it was important to us to avoid taking the typical survival game tropes and throwing a World War 2 skin over them, although that would have been easy to do. A subject matter like this deserves better and we couldn't allow ourselves to lazy it up.
Most survival games out today retail for no more than $34.99, and so we stopped to ask ourselves what a AAA $59.99 survival game release would look like. What kind of features would it have? How open and democratic would the game design be? How complex would the game systems be? How authentic would the game world be? How easy would it be to mod the game to incorporate additional features as generated by the community? How high quality would the graphical fidelity of such a survival game be?
Each of these questions, and many, many more will be answered in the following weeks. However, today we would like to address how we're planning on moving forward with the general development of the game, and we invite you to leave your feedback, advise, and experiences to help steer Our Ghosts of War in the correct direction.
As mentioned in our last post, we intend to launch Our Ghosts of War in August. From there we would support the game with free scheduled content for a period of three years with the money invested into the game by the community. As we develop more of Our Ghosts of War we'll find ourselves with what started out as an immersive survival game end up an addictive time-consuming military survival MMORTS.
The team currently consists of 14 individuals including myself. I'll add most of their portfolios to the thread very soon. Some of them unfortunately I won't be able to because of personal reasons. The team fully supports those individuals in that decision. We sealed the deal with a AAA character artist today and as soon as this messaged is uploaded I will returning the contract to them with my John Hancock and they will be officially on-board. They begin work on the 1st. To celebrate tomorrow I will update with the scope of their work, how we intend to handle characters moving forward, Nazi symbolism and the potential problems with their inclusion in European countries, and the possible additional of races to make the game inclusive and historically accurate.
I intended to do a follow-up post on 3/30/16, but unfortunately became bogged down by a number of job interviews that were required to expand the team. As such much of my time has been spent discussing the involvement of coders, artists, and photoscanners, and I wasn't able to get back to you until now. Nevertheless, my discussions and negotiations have borne fruit and I'm VERY excited to announce that we've come to terms with five talented individuals since our last update. You'll be happy to hear that these individuals have already started working on assets for Our Ghosts of War and there will even more regular updates here.
As I already mentioned in the last update, one of the most important things heading into development was my incessant desire to create a survival / military game that felt a AAA endeavor. A key component in accomplishing this would have been the addition of next-gen characters that bring a sense of high production value to the community to whom a project like Our Ghosts of War would appeal to. As such I'm proud to announce that the first talent that we've come to terms with over the last week is Bao Ngoc Vu, a character artist from YAGER (Spec Ops: The Line, Dreadnoughts). You can check out more of Bao's work here: https://www.artstation.com/artist/baovu and here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bao-ngoc-vu-b504807a.
Base Model WIP
The above is the first iteration of our base character model. Bao has constructed the base model over the past week and posted the updates in our team Slack for feedback. If anyone here has input or feedback on the base model please don't hesitate to share. We'd love to hear your thoughts. In the meantime I'd like to discuss what our goals are for our characters and exactly what we intend to launch with and how we intend to support it.
Our plan is to launch Our Ghosts of War with one character body, two character head presets, two sets of knickers (American soldier underwear, German soldier underwear), an American uniform for the soldier, and a German uniform for the soldier. As our project raises revenue through donations heading into Early Access (more on that in a future update), and through sales of the games itself, we plan to create new body types (fat, slim, etc.), significantly expand the head presets (many more faces and hair styles), add voices, and generate every single uniform used by the Allied and German soldiers during World War 2 (from the officers on down). Although we love to include more variety, our budget is limited and we feel that it would be better spent constructing the whole of Normandy to be as accurate as we can make it. We had to make the hard decision that we were going to push for quality instead of quantity for Early Access so that everyone keeping an eye on this project could see the level of detail our final product would intend to offer. This project is near and dear not only to my heart, and not only to the heart of this team, but to the people who have gotten in touch with us publicly and privately hoping that we nail this. As such we don't want to settle, and even with our limited budget, we fully intend to achieve AAA quality work in every aspect of this game's development. What you've seen so far proves it. What will you see from here on out will cement it.
When players join a server, and create a new character, they will first have to decide whether they will fight for the Americans or Germans. Once they make this decision, the game will move them into a character creator where they can adjust all other aspects of the character's build. Our current plan for characters is that we would launch initially with the same number of character models as Ark: Survival Evolved and allow players to similarly use character customization to configure the look of the character. Once we have additional funding we would quickly begun to add new face presets and body types for players to configure in order to provide players with more of a choice in the character they wage war with. We will have a future update dealing specifically with the character creator so the community can see firsthand how we intend to make it work.
Clothing will be removable so if a player wants to take off his uniform and traverse through Normandy in his boots and a wife beater, who are we to tell them no? Furthermore you can steal uniforms if you wish, and clothing will be swappable between all character body types as in Xenoblade Chronciles. In addition to uniforms, we plan on adding other native French clothing in case players want to feel like they're resistance fighters warding off their Nazi invaders. Further, players will be able to mix and match different articles of clothing although wearing full clothing sets and uniforms would offer stat bonuses. However we don’t want to go too much in the gameplay side of things and spoil what we have planned for you.
Furthermore, although we intend to launch the game with Caucasian character models, in order to be as historically accurate as possible, and bring some light to an aspect of World War 2 that most people don't know about, once we have the funding necessary to facilitate it, work would be done on adding African, African-American, Chinese, Turkish, Native American, and female character models. The honest truth is that World War 2 was truly a global affair and every man, women, and child, was pulled into its grasp regardless of race or creed. There is plenty of historical evidence showing people of different ethnicities battling it out on both sides and we want no one to be left out. These updates will given be free of charge to everyone already owns the game. Since the game will launch in Early Access, as we add more content to it, the asking price for Our Ghosts of War would increase. As such we're proud to say Our Ghosts of War will be the FIRST open-world World War 2 game ever made to not only allow players to pick their ethnicity when creating their character but depict the true breadth of the peoples pulled into the global fighting. Eventually we plan on doing expansions that would reincorporate these additional ethnicities for a North Africa expansion or a Second Sino-Japanese War expansion.
Anyway that's all for now guys. I'm sure there is plenty for you to digest and offer feedback on. I should have another update in a day or two from Bao so keep your eyes peeled. The team is leaving him their feedback. Please leave him yours. We legitimately want to make this the best World War 2 game ever made. Thanks for your time.
Holy Crap !! this is some good stuff. I totally didn't know there were Non-Caucasian Nazi soldiers, that's weird, man. But hey, I'm really excited to see more of this. The foliage is dope, man.
- Added base class for a single character save on a server.
- Added character leveling data table. Used to store leveling of player and future modding.
- Integrated the leveling data table into the existing character leveling system.
- Modified data table with initial 25 levels and scaling for XP.
- XP leveling system now used data table properly.
- Added generic conversion function sets for general purpose use.
- Created player experience RPCs
- Minor bug fixes and stability improvements
-Set up five spawn points for the player to test random spawning / respawning. If the player spawns at the start of the game, or dies and needs to respawn, it randomly chooses between these five points and spawns the player at one of them.
-First version of a fast-travel teleporting system has been created. Player can collide with the fast-travel object and it will transport the player to another pre-determined location.
-Continued some work on my AICharacter. Cleaned up an error that was occurring in the script.
-Started on the Footprint System. Nothing tangible to demonstrate, yet. This will be my focus into next week.
-Initial setup for modular equipment supporting a small list of preview skinned equipment pieces.
-Started implementign non-deformable and material-only modular pieces such as jewelry and tattoos as well as the full list of equipment slots.
Looking really good, I actually thought the first shots were concept man!!
I don't know where you guys live, but if you want to get good references I'd recommend you to go straight to Normandy yourself! Bunkers are still there! It's worth the trip that area of France is full of amazing landscapes (and rain..)
-Footprint System is nearly complete. Submitted 120 files to the depot, between BPs, table files, materials, etc.
-Footprint Component can be placed on any player, enemy AI, or animal we'll have in the game. It's set up so modular that we can quickly swap in human footprints, animal footprints, or any other creative use we can think of.
-Footprint Actor with various settings, including footprint duration and what materials the player's steps react with.
-This isn't working perfectly yet, but I'm going to get back on this as soon as I get home from work tomorrow (Monday) and plan on having this cleaned up and fully submitted to Daniel for his networking pass. There's just a bit of work left to do on the Player Character BP.
-This can be further used to do things like leave "fresh tracks", or other "events" that might be designed for the Open World-ness of the player experience.
-Modular Equipment Component
--Implementation of static mesh equipment pieces
--Implementation of texture-only equipment pieces
--Adjusting the prototype code to support these two new types of equipment pieces
--Addition of all 30 equipment slots and assigning them to their respective components
Great thread, curious to see how this stuff turns out in Unreal, I'm working on a ww2 paratrooper atm and would love to throw him into Unreal, will be watching
Started stitching together aerial spy shot references for the roads and buildings inside Unreal Engine 4. This is 3km. This is also going to take some time to finish.
I've begun laying down roads across Normandy. The road plugin we're using is pretty sweet. It more or less makes placing roads as simple as pointing and clicking ((the roads follow the white dots you see in the image)). The creator of the plug-in was busy with school so he wasn't able to update it to Unreal Engine 4.12 until yesterday. The scale of the road meshes that came with the plug-in was also way too big and so we've had to shrink them down. I'll try getting that working tomorrow.
My workflow involves comparing shots of old aerial spy shots and current Google satellite imagery. Neither are perfect. The spy shots are authentic but warped. The Google Maps are more accurate in regards to scale but plenty has changed in the last 75 years. I have to balance both and decide whether which I want to follow in any given area. Either way I'm happy with the results and will continue tomorrow. I'll keep you guys updated.
Aleksa finally wrapped up his M12 Trench Gun for Our Ghosts of War. How's it look? It's been in development for the past three weeks and I'm personally very happy with the results. The MG42 and a Panzer IV tank turret were also finished up this week and I'll have renders of those soon.
I've been doing a lot of planning for the future of our firearms and I think in our final build (when we come out of Early Access) I want to have something like 128 firearms made (doesn't include things like grenades, mines, etc.). Typically it takes a good artist 40-60 hours to finish one firearm. The M12 Trench Gun was worked on part-time which is why it took as long as it did. If Aleksa was working full time it'd been finished sooner.
My plan is that after Early Access we'd hire one weapons artist full-time (full 160 hours per month) and a second weapons artist part-time (80 hours per month). Together they'd deliver 3-4 weapons per month. These weapons would be rigged and animated as soon as possible and added to our Early Access build on the 10th of every month (along with all other updates).
I intend to support Our Ghosts of War for a period of three years after we release on Early Access. The logic behind this is that it takes more or less any developer that long to turn out something great with enough content to justify a game's existence. After those three years have passed we would come out of Early Access with our final game.
In that time span we can realistically create a minimum of three firearms per month. 3 firearms per month x 12 months = 36 firearms per year. 36 firearms per year x 3 years = 108 firearms over three years. 108 firearms + the 20 firearms we intend to launch with = 128 firearms total. I'll discuss how we intend to go about weapon balancing in our next update.
Anyway, so I wonder; what's the actual goal of a match in this game? Are you actually invading? Having to capture points or defend them?
There's some debate in the team about this. Ultimately I will have final say however. The coding team wants to make Our Ghosts of War a straight up survival game with no end goal. Just perpetually online like Rust or Ark. The reasoning behind their argument is that because we're making a survival game, and survival games don't have an end goal, we should follow suit. Otherwise we're not making a survival game.
I'm not convinced that's the right path. I think appeal of traditional survival games is waning and we'll have to do something new and fresh if we're going to maintain an audience for the next three years. I've been studying games like Xenoblade Chronicles X and Grand Theft Auto Online, among others, and thinking about how we can create something unique. I'm still sorting out the final details but generally I have a pretty fleshed out outline of what I want Our Ghosts of War to be. I'll announce more as soon I'm ready to.
Seeing as it's a Rust/ARK-esque thing, would take a long time to accomplish so your character is persistent with a single game taking weeks perhaps?
Yes. Your character is persistent so a single game could take weeks. Your character is saved on the server you make them on and you would have to reconnect to the server to access that character. It's the nearly the same system as Ark. There will be character save data associated with your character on the server and there will be player data associated with your player account. Even if you die you will never lose the player data associated with your player account.
So how exactly will characters be persistent?
Like in most survival games if a player quits out of a server their character will remain in the game world. If an enemy player comes across them they're liable to be killed and have their items stolen from them. I've designed things so this is less likely to happen at the start of the game meaning players will be able to get their bearings better than in other survival games. This also means that having your character killed later on will probably be more painful as you're likely to lose more progress and better items.
I can't fathom this being truly Rust-like in that you'll see some soldiers randomly building a hut somewhere, trolling about. Those games are often popular for their freedom, but being in an army really restricts that freedom.
It won't be truly Rust-like. Generally most, but not all, current survival games are more or less The Purge simulators. This is intended to be a new take on the survival genre. I'm way more interested in doing something that focuses more on community, your friends, and your companions. You can go hungry. You can craft. Those aspects will be similar. And by all means be a troll. But if you kill a member of your army there will be ramifications for those actions. The game will react.
But I'm guessing players won't spawn in naked like in Rust & ARK, right?
They won't be naked but they won't spawn with weapons or equipment either. Limited bullets as well. They'll have to score all that stuff themselves from crafting, air drops, etc.
I think it looks good, but out of curiosity why did the M12 take 3 weeks? One artist producing 1 weapon just shy of a month seems incredibly slow?
That was because of limited budget. They had to take on other work as well.
Replies
Can't wait to get my hands on it. Goodluck
I don't know where you guys live, but if you want to get good references I'd recommend you to go straight to Normandy yourself!
Bunkers are still there!
It's worth the trip that area of France is full of amazing landscapes (and rain..)
- Made a new Twitter account for the project: https://twitter.com/ourghostsofwar
M12 Trench Gun WIP
Show a wireframe of the model. I think around 1 or 2 maybe even 3k max for a prop like that.
Can you post some wireframes?
Some Q&A about our game.
Anyway, so I wonder; what's the actual goal of a match in this game? Are you actually invading? Having to capture points or defend them?
There's some debate in the team about this. Ultimately I will have final say however. The coding team wants to make Our Ghosts of War a straight up survival game with no end goal. Just perpetually online like Rust or Ark. The reasoning behind their argument is that because we're making a survival game, and survival games don't have an end goal, we should follow suit. Otherwise we're not making a survival game.
I'm not convinced that's the right path. I think appeal of traditional survival games is waning and we'll have to do something new and fresh if we're going to maintain an audience for the next three years. I've been studying games like Xenoblade Chronicles X and Grand Theft Auto Online, among others, and thinking about how we can create something unique. I'm still sorting out the final details but generally I have a pretty fleshed out outline of what I want Our Ghosts of War to be. I'll announce more as soon I'm ready to.
Seeing as it's a Rust/ARK-esque thing, would take a long time to accomplish so your character is persistent with a single game taking weeks perhaps?
Yes. Your character is persistent so a single game could take weeks. Your character is saved on the server you make them on and you would have to reconnect to the server to access that character. It's the nearly the same system as Ark. There will be character save data associated with your character on the server and there will be player data associated with your player account. Even if you die you will never lose the player data associated with your player account.
So how exactly will characters be persistent?
Like in most survival games if a player quits out of a server their character will remain in the game world. If an enemy player comes across them they're liable to be killed and have their items stolen from them. I've designed things so this is less likely to happen at the start of the game meaning players will be able to get their bearings better than in other survival games. This also means that having your character killed later on will probably be more painful as you're likely to lose more progress and better items.
I can't fathom this being truly Rust-like in that you'll see some soldiers randomly building a hut somewhere, trolling about. Those games are often popular for their freedom, but being in an army really restricts that freedom.
It won't be truly Rust-like. Generally most, but not all, current survival games are more or less The Purge simulators. This is intended to be a new take on the survival genre. I'm way more interested in doing something that focuses more on community, your friends, and your companions. You can go hungry. You can craft. Those aspects will be similar. And by all means be a troll. But if you kill a member of your army there will be ramifications for those actions. The game will react.
But I'm guessing players won't spawn in naked like in Rust & ARK, right?
They won't be naked but they won't spawn with weapons or equipment either. Limited bullets as well. They'll have to score all that stuff themselves from crafting, air drops, etc.
I think it looks good, but out of curiosity why did the M12 take 3 weeks? One artist producing 1 weapon just shy of a month seems incredibly slow?
That was because of limited budget. They had to take on other work as well.