The Starry Expanse Project

The team is finally home, back in the land of stable internet connections. While we do not yet have access to the footage of our actual presentation, we’ve gone ahead and recorded a walkthrough of the area we demonstrated on Saturday, so you all can get a nice, high-resolution view of what was shown there until the actual presentation can be posted.

Also important to note is the fact that this area is still a work in progress. Many textures and objects are placeholders, or missing altogether. That said, work has progressed since Saturday, and there’s actually one or two assets that have been added to the area since then!

Enjoy:

We’ll post the official video of our presentation as soon as we get access to it. Until then, you can watch a capture of the justin.tv stream here!

We here at 59 Volts are feverishly working day and night to put the finishing touches on our demo for Mysterium next week. Our presentation will be on Saturday, August 2nd, at Cyan Headquarters in Spokane, WA. We’re currently scheduled to start at 1:30 PM, Pacific time.

If you’ll be attending the convention in person, great! We can’t wait to meet you! Our plan is to set up our demo in the con room after our presentation, so that those who make the trek out to Spokane can play around with it a bit.

If you cannot attend Mysterium in person, there will also be a live video stream of our presentation. We’ll post more information about how to access that when we get closer to the day of the presentation.

There’ll be an unprecedented percentage of the team present at this Mysterium (nearly half of us!), and we can’t wait to show you guys what we’ve put together. See you there!

Back when we first announced that we would be switching to Unreal Engine, the first asset we showed you guys was a hut from the Jungle Island village. In the intervening time, we have completed much more of the village. In fact, all of the huts are now detailed and textured, and the walkways connecting them are also coming along nicely.

Here’s a peek at what the village looks like running in Unreal:

These shots only show the village and beginnings of the walkways, with terrain and other assets stripped away. You’ll have to check out our Mysterium presentation on August 2nd to see the complete scene!

Mysterium is being held during the first weekend of August, at Cyan’s offices in Spokane, WA. We hope to see you there!

No new assets to show off this week, but we do have a couple of updates to show you guys. Specifically, a few of our older models are now sporting some beautiful textures!

First up, the submarine exterior has been kitted out with a beautiful battered copper material. We’re still working on perfecting the details, but it is already up and running in Unreal 4. Unreal’s new physically-based material engine is absolutely perfect for surfaces like this, and we’re taking full advantage of it.

Secondly, the awesome wahrk skulls that we posted last time are now made of bone, instead of the shiny gray default material. We think they look much better like this.

As we get closer to Mysterium, we’ll be working hard on fine-tuning our demo. Expect more updates like this in the next few weeks!

Earlier this year, we announced that our development would be shifting to the Unreal Development Kit. We did move to UDK very briefly, but it turns out the story doesn’t end there. Shortly after we made the transition to UDK, Epic announced the release of Unreal Engine 4, which would outdate and replace the engine we had just switched to. We didn’t want to commit to UE4 until we were absolutely certain that it would suit our needs, but after more than a month of testing, we are confident enough to announce that we will definitely be using Unreal Engine 4 from now on.

Unreal Engine 4 is better than UDK in almost every way, and yet they work almost the same. Thus, upgrading has been a breeze. It’s so pretty, it makes UDK’s graphics look like Uru. And what’s more, it has far more platform support than UDK did – as of today, we are finally able to officially announce the addition of Linux support to our platform roster, as well as SteamOS.

We’ve been working on putting together a demo of what the engine is capable of (and we actually showed you an in-engine screenshot from UE4 a month ago, without mentioning it!), so here’s a demo of interaction with the Jungle Island submarine, running in Unreal Engine 4. Please note that the sub is still untextured, and the animations/GUI/interactions are not final in any way. This is more of a programming test, to learn the ins and outs of Unreal 4.

We’ll keep you updated on our Unreal 4 development as it progresses!

It’s back-to-school season here at the Starry Expanse Project! Do you remember the rules of Gehn? If not, pull up a bench and we’ll teach you a thing or two.

First, our lord and master Gehn will address the class, via his special holograph pedestal.

Next, we’ll learn to count in the manner of our lord Gehn.

Feeling hungry? Maybe it’s time for a lunch break.

We don’t know about you, but we sure learned a lot today.

It’s worth mentioning that clearly, the village schoolhouse is a work in progress. These are screenshots taken from within Maya (not Unreal), and are in no way representative of final graphics. We’re pretty excited about how it’s coming along, though!

Yesterday, on April 1st, we announced that we would be switching to the magnificent DOOM engine, to take advantage of its gorgeous graphics and advanced features like sprite support. Unfortunately, since publishing that announcement, we have discovered some pretty major roadblocks standing in the way of that switch, and it is with heavy hearts that we must retract that announcement. Effective immediately, we leave behind our dreams of a DOOM-based realRiven, and return to the (admittedly lower quality) Unreal Engine.

As a consolation for this heartbreaking news, here is another development shot of an area we’ve been working on, running in the Unreal Engine.

We acknowledge that this in no way can make up for our departure from the beauty of the DOOM engine, but we think that with a lot of hard work, we will someday get Unreal to approach that level of quality.

Recently, we announced that we would be switching our game engine. Rather than continuing development in Unity, we would instead make use of the beautiful Unreal Engine 3. However, last week, Epic Games (the makers of Unreal Engine) announced the release of Unreal Engine 4, immediately making our brand new engine obsolete.

It’s fair to say that we here at 59 Volts are tired of this constant upgrading and engine switching. To that end, we have some big news to announce – one final engine switch, to end all engine switches. And rather than move to yet another unstable, constantly changing engine like Unity or Unreal, we have decided to make the move to something with a bit more longevity. Something with a strong, well-established developer community. An engine that John Carmack, CTO of Oculus VR, has proudly supported in the past.

That’s right: our game is, even as I type these words, being moved over to the DOOM engine. We’re happy to report that this move has not set us back at all; the assets we’ve been showing off for the last couple of months (and indeed, everything we produced before the move to Unreal) are being put to use in the new engine. In fact, we’re chugging along so well, we feel confident to finally show off a bit of footage of the village basin area that we’ve been putting together:

Now, obviously we’re only in the first stages of development, so please keep in mind that the above video is a work-in-progress. That said, we are actually really happy with the accuracy of DOOM’s sky and water shaders, and we are not planning on modifying them beyond this point.

In addition to the village basin, we have begun work on a few other key areas of the game, too:

We’re so happy with the beautiful graphics provided by Doom, we’re even ready to show you guys what you’ve all been waiting for – the first public reveal of Tay, in all its realtime 3D glory!

Magnificent.

Yes, the Doom engine certainly is spectacular. It’s really allowed us to accelerate our development, and we expect to be ready to release the game by the summer of 1995. Keep an eye out for it wherever computer games (or iPods, oscilloscopes, and/or pianos) are sold!

As work steadily progresses on the Jungle Island village, we thought we’d share a very pretty shot of the area.

Keeping the Jungle Island content train rolling along, here’s the next area we’re ready to show off – the prison catwalk.

This is the pathway that leads to and from the prison cell in the Jungle Island village, right next to the gallows. Here’s a couple of views of the model overlaid on top of the original images it was based on.

Meanwhile, another artist has been working on the doorway and interior of the prison itself. While we won’t have the two pieces put together until they’re both complete, we can show you a work-in-progress demonstration of the door opening.

 
We’ll keep you updated as this area progresses.