Kokiri Forest - Update 2

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

It's now been 1 week since I released the demo. The reception has seemed good and positive, for the most part! But there's no "buzz" around it at all which is very disappointing.

My worries about the thunder of my project being stolen seem founded. Numerous times in the past week when I've seen a Kokiri Forest demo mentioned, linked to, or played without direct relation to my Oculus forum thread, it's been about the other project. I even had one redditer say mine was the same after reviewing the other one and giving it a 4/5. Maybe it was because he was drunk, lol. He was trying to compliment it. But saying it's the same after all the work put into it was hard to not see as insulting. (The following has been edited because some found my original statements to be too harsh, despite my best efforts to preface it.) I don't want to be insulting myself, but I have to be honest. The other version had very little effort put into it. I'm not sure how, but some textures were even made worse then they should be if left un-fixed. After playing the 2, anyone should be able to see a clear difference.

Moving on. So what have I been up to on the project? Well, I attempted to provoke some feedback on what to work on with it before my Unity Pro trial is up. But that didn't really produce any results. So I've been working on what I can, and what interests me. There's a ton I would want to do, but figuring out whats best with a looming deadline has been tricky. I've been dabbling in something to get an idea of how smoothly/quickly adding it would go, and moving on a lot.

I've fixed 2 things. The mustache of the Deku tree. I forgot to/didn't know to color it. And I forgot to set the climbable vines to a transparent shader.

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Kokiri Forest - Release

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Here it is! My re-creation of the Kokiri Forest from "The Legend of Zelda, The Ocarina of Time", in Unity 4.2.2, and built specifically for the Oculus Rift!

This re-creation aimed for attention to detail, and should be quite a complete visual experience. It's not a game. There's no interaction at all. Nor are there NPCs or story. It's just a walk around demo.

I've created builds for Windows x86, Windows x64, Mac OSX x86, and Linux x86 + x64. But I can only account for the Windows versions as working and looking as intended.

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Kokiri Forest - Update 1

Saturday, January 18, 2014

I'm happy to say that after a brief time of questioning my continuation on this little project, I resumed work on it.

I now have it at a point where only polish work is left to be done. Compared to my old screenshots, what are the major differences?

All the objects are now in. Bushes, signs, rocks, truth stones, and even some Hearts and Rupees.

Fences now are visible from both sides and have proper colliders, meaning you can't walk through them, and can stand on top of them.

The ladder to Link's house, and the vines leading to the Lost Woods can now be climbed. My ladder code isn't great, but it's all I could come up with right now and gets the job done.

The Sky looks more true to how it looks in the real game.

The waterfall and river now animates and very closely resembles how it looks in the real game.

The worn away paths are now in and look close to how they do in the real game. I'd like to work on these more though.

The ground texture looks closer to how it does in the real game.

There's been a lot of misc tweaking of texture alignment/tiling. Rave's version showed what the scene looks like with little work fixing that stuff up, and my old screenshots showed vast improvements over that. But there was still more fine tuning to be done.

The cameras size/height has been set to around Young Links size. I went with this rather than Adult Link as this is a recreation of the Kokiri Forest of the past. And a child's size should help you get lost in the experience. Also, think about it, its a village of little Elves. It's designed for people of that height. The height of the signs are a good example.

The Hearts and Rupees now spin, and do so in a way close to the real game.

I added a particle effect system for the area. The particles are very similar to the real game, but not as exact as other things are. I think most would agree they're close enough.

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Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen

Monday, January 13, 2014

It seems the father of MMOs is at it again!

Just when I had thrown in the towel, and given up ever again seeing a MMO I could enjoy – thanks to SOE's huge disappointment with EverQuestNotNext. Along comes Brad McQuaid. Fresh off a layoff from SOE after a unexpected return to the EverQuest 1 team. Deciding that enough time had passed since his failure of the spiritual sequel to EQ1, Vanguard, he's now ready to renter the MMO scene once again in a leadership role in development of a brand new game. That game is:

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Zelda's Kokiri Village in Unity

Saturday, January 11, 2014

This is a project I've been working on, off and on for the past week. I was going to wait and post about it later. But it seems someone had the exact same idea and beat me to the punch over on the Oculus reddit/Dev forums.

As stated in the title, that was my goal. To make a Kokiri Forest experience demo for the Oculus Rift. It was to be my first Rift project.

Here are some screenshots of my work so far.

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